This chapter looks at two entrepreneurs who were particularly successful: Henry J. Kaiser in New Deal America and during World War II, and Friedrich Flick in National Socialist Germany. It reconstructs the public image constructed by the two men and their respective organizations. Although the two political systems were fundamentally different, Kaiser and Flick took both advantage of the opportunities for expansion that arose from the political struggle against the Great Depression and the preparation for war. Their “semantics of success” played down the extent of their economic power and distracted from profit opportunities offered by government politics. Instead, they highlighted anachronistic forms of a personal entrepreneurship that missed the practice in an age of bureaucratic capitalism.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

This chapter examines the marketing of consumer goods. Shops proliferated in the eighteenth century, as did the ranks of peddlers, smugglers, and street sellers. While most shops sold basic goods over rough-hewn counters or through open street-windows, many luxury and semiluxury shops adopted new strategies to lure well-off customers into their establishments. “Shopping,” a word coined in this period, became a leisure activity for women and men of the upper and middling classes. Retailers extended credit to customers to boost sales. New methods of advertising fueled demand. Marketing occurred mainly at the site of the shop, but printed trade cards and handbills, some of which were illustrated with exotic images, increasingly stimulated interest in goods. Advertisements also appeared in newspapers and fashion journals. Mediated by merchants and retailers, new channels of dialogue opened between producers and consumers, supporting a reciprocal relationship between supply and demand. Not only were more points of contact between retailers and customers established but more information flowed between them. The information exchanged in this dialogue created feedback loops between producers and consumers that often (though not always) stimulated supply and demand. Thus, demand was neither a direct emanation of primordial human needs nor an automatic response to commercial manipulation. It was a social and cultural force that developed through communication systems mediated by information brokers of all types.

The statistical records that have been collected, systematized and synthesized here provide a quantitative basis to challenge and shape existing narratives on African economic development from the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. However, the history of counting and registering people is as old as documented history – with taxation, it is a central part of a state’s effort to govern. The word “statistics” itself derives from “state” and statistical records are primarily the historical footprint of states. We see what the states knew about themselves, what they cared to find out, and their chosen projected image. In this chapter, we give an overview of the history of census taking in Africa, and further evaluate the basis of the architecture of knowledge that colonial and postcolonial states have left behind. It is particularly important to clarify what kind of questions the state records can answer, and where other evidence sources will have to be used, as this chapter sets the ground for the empirical analysis presented in the three following chapters. The chapter concludes with a view toward further research, in particular the use of other data sources, to expand “new economic history” beyond the colonial period and the use of the colonial records.