In the last five years, as American and European views of the world have diverged more and more acrimoniously, there has been a flood of books seeking to explain the fracture. Usually such studies approach the question in geopolitical and characterological terms, sometimes fusing the two – as in Robert Kagan’s influential “Of Paradise and Power,” where a feminized, Kantian Europe (“from Venus”) is opposed to a masculine, Hobbesian America (“from Mars”). In “Irresistible Empire” (Harvard University Press, 576 pages, $29.95), however, Victoria de Grazia avoids that kind of op-ed-friendly generalization. Instead, she demonstrates, through the most painstaking kind of archival research, how the cultural and economic fates of the Old and New Worlds were entwined throughout the 20th century. The result is a major work of scholarship, 20 years in the making, that uses the tools of economics, history, and cultural studies to lay bare the mechanisms that created the American Century.

For if the postwar American dominance of Europe – call it a benevolent Pax Americana or a suffocating hegemony – was made possible on the battlefields of World War II, it was consolidated in much humbler locales, in supermarkets and trade-fairs and movie theaters. In all these places and more, Ms. de Grazia shows, 20th-century Europeans were confronted with the tantalizing and frustrating spectacle of American abundance, made possible by modern consumer capitalism. “The most confounding feature” of American power – what Ms. de Grazia intermittently calls its “Market Empire” – was its peaceableness. Born as an alternative to European militarism, it progressed as a model of governing the good life in a century beset by successive decades of total war … [its] winning weapons came from the arsenal of a super-rich consumer culture.” Or, as one supermarket executive quoted by Ms. de Grazia more pithily put it: “A supermarket can outweigh a lot of isms.”

So far, this is a familiar story: One of the emblematic scenes of the Cold War was the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, in which a model American “kitchen of the future” was both a setting and a trump card. But, oddly enough, the triumph of American capitalism is a phenomenon so massive it remains less conspicuous in the readerly imagination than the many protests against it, launched by intellectuals of all stripes on both sides of the Atlantic. The honor roll of critics of American consumerism includes just about every philosopher and sociologist you can think of, from Heidegger to Marcuse and from Riesman to Lasch. It is far easier to read an argument against the one-dimensional man, or a diagnosis of the lonely crowd, than a description of a Leipzig trade fair or a Milan supermarket – the actual sites where the Americanization of Europe took place.

That is why Ms. de Grazia’s dense, detailed study is so eye-opening. In each of her nine chapters, she moves from the details of one institution or industry to a wider cultural argument: thus a chapter on the Rotarian movement teaches “How Bourgeois Men Made Peace With Babbittry,” while a section on women’s magazines shows “How Mass Commodities Settled Into Hearth and Home.” The labor that went into each of these economic justso stories is self-evidently tremendous, and far from glamorous: I imagine Ms. de Grazia, a professor of history at Columbia, trawling through old minutes from meetings of the Dresden Rotary Club, or the files of J. Walter Thompson’s Paris office. What she finds there is not usually entertaining reading, but it is always illuminating.

Take, for instance, the European travails of the Rotary movement, which began in Chicago in 1907 and preached a distinctly American ethic, in which community service and business networking went hand in hand. The key to Rotary, which is still going strong today, is that each club must contain no more than one representative of each profession – both to avoid competition and to secure each club’s local dominance. As Ms. de Grazia shows, however, adapting the forthright Midwestern principles of Rotary to Europe between the wars was not easy.

The Germans took eagerly to the club’s intricate rules and bylaws, but hoped to elevate the tone, putting more emphasis on Bildung than business: “The goal of Rotary in Germany,” Ms. de Grazia writes, “was to be an exemplary organization rather than one open to emulation; its qualities were its compactness and deep passion, its inner life, as it were.” (Thomas Mann, she notes incredulously, was a Rotarian.) At the same time, the German clubs had to negotiate intricate Old World claims of rank and status: The Dresden Rotary asked the home office if it wouldn’t be possible to consider baritones and tenors as separate professions, so as not to have to exclude either of the stars of the opera. If this earnestness and punctilio seems typically German, so, alas, does the fate of Rotary in the Nazi period, when it was purged of Jews and finally forced to disband.

Ms. de Grazia brings this same kind of fine-grained analysis to much larger subjects. She shows how Edward Filene, the chain-store magnate, taught Europeans a new retailing model, using low prices and convenience to unseat the old hautbourgeois department stores; how American advertising agencies replaced standard European wall posters (some of which were low-art masterpieces) with insipid, text heavy print ads; how the Marshall Plan enabled postwar Europe to learn the magic of buying appliances on credit; how the ancient provincial cultures of France were flattened into uniformity with the help of figures like “Madame from Angouleme,” the fictional everywoman of French Elle, who “was ingenuous but intrepid, a restless Madame Bovary in her consumer desires.”

Throughout “Irresistible Empire,” Ms. de Grazia seems to struggle with her own intellectual and emotional response to the transformation she describes. On the one hand, she sympathizes with the ordinary human desire for abundance, and writes penetratingly about the socialist puritanism that viewed actual improvements in workers’ lives as morally suspect. But her disdain for consumerism and her affection for European traditions sometimes lead her to a too-easy equation of Americanism with philistinism and Europeanness with spiritual integrity – as in her discussion of advertising posters, where European graphic design is somehow equated with “the craft world, poor, but mindful of the individual and the deep meaning of Art.” “Irresistible Empire” is at its best when Ms. de Grazia avoids such conventional dichotomies and allows the long symbiosis of America and Europe to appear in all its complexity.