Introduction

It is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis in retailing brought on by a global pandemic that I introduce to you this issue on nineteenth-century retailing. COVID-19 and the means to curtail its spread have all but eradicated the public culture of shopping as it emerged in the nineteenth century. Disrupted supply chains, hoarding, widespread unemployment and the closure of shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, concerts, sporting events and other sites of mass gathering have severely curtailed shopping and mass leisure. Small shopkeepers and proprietors have been particularly hard hit with many having to permanently shut up shop. While hardly the worst facet of this pandemic, such disruptions have revealed just how much shops and shopping are part of public life. This disease has not, in truth, eliminated all retailing but rather it is producing a new geography of buying and selling. Consumers with incomes have relied on online shopping, curbside pick-up and an army of delivery people to bring goods to their homes. This new era of private buying however echoes the eclectic nature of much nineteenth century retailing.

The articles in this issue reminds us that the public culture of shopping was not a natural development but one which required decades of work by large and small shopkeepers, while at the same time much shopping was done at home and delivery people and peddlers were a ubiquitous feature of the nineteenth-century marketplace. Itinerant traders who plied their goods in rural villages and the select few celebrity entrepreneurs who created fashion trends and shifted national tastes were both critical elements of nineteenth-century markets. Like today, consumers’ experiences were highly varied. In this issue, for example, we see extreme income gaps in which some cosmopolitan consumers were able to purchase extremely expensive foreign goods in luxurious shops, while others were forced to sell their own hair in order to purchase the bare necessities of existence. No age is without these disparities, but the scholarship on retailing in this period has entreated us to take such diversity seriously.¹

In the nineteenth-century older and newer methods of buying, selling, and consuming intermingled and shopping districts typically offered a mixture of local goods and global commodities in large, luxurious modern department stores and small-scale traditional specialty shops. People could also buy goods from street sellers, at open air and enclosed markets, and in a wide variety of specialty shops of all kinds. Shopping districts were often socially segregated into industries, classes, and genders but virtually all forms of shopping were hybrid experiences in which diverse people, goods, shops and selling techniques existed side-by-side.² In this volume then we have sought to recreate this diversity. We have an article on one of the most well-known shopkeepers of his day, Arthur Lasenby Liberty and the way he developed a unique style and brand. We have another on how numerous smaller shops in the North of England helped stimulate the desire for Japanese things, and in sense helped Liberty develop a mania for Japanese things in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Turning from England and fixed shops, we have a study of the rise and fall of the trans-European trade in human hair in Nordic Europe. Finally, we consider the racial logic that officials embedded in their desire to eliminate ‘gypsies’ and itinerant trade in a newly unified Germany.

Despite their different topics and methods, these four articles make an excellent comparison as they are all case studies focusing on Northern and Northwest Europe, specifically England, Germany and the Nordic Countries between the 1860s and the First World War. Of course, Scandinavian, German and English political economies and cultures were quite distinct but in all three places, the scholars of these articles focus on the specific people and institutions that worked with and against the liberalizing, industrializing and globalizing markets of the era. Nineteenth-century England was the most global, industrial and urban part of Europe with a truly international consumer culture.³ Two of the articles examine this global culture and demonstrate how retailers played an important role in incorporated foreign things into English culture and society. Germany and Scandinavia were far more rural and though they too participated in global trade, the articles on these regions reveal a profound anxiety about itinerant buyers and sellers, who were deemed to be outsiders. The themes of mobility, travel and globality are particularly salient in all four articles. Whether in urban England or rural Germany a desire for foreign goods and fear of foreign people shaped and were inspired by market transactions. Buying and selling in late-nineteenth-century Northern Europe invited populations to celebrate cosmopolitanism and imperialism, all the while producing hierarchical national, class, racial and gender identities.

Massimiliano Papini's article and that of Nicolas Alexander, Anne Marie Doherty and James Cronin reveal how Japanese material objects were sold, digested, and incorporated into English consumer culture. It is well known that Arthur Lasenby Liberty was a key figure in this effort but in these articles, we see new facets of this story. We learn more about Liberty's unique knowledge of and appreciation for Japanese material culture and how his close relationship Edward Burne-Jones and other artists in the Aesthetic Movement helped establish both a singular store and style, known for its cosmopolitan elements. At the same time, Liberty used Japan to contribute to debates about British design and manufacturing.⁴ The chief concern of the authors here though is how Liberty created a ‘transformational retail environment’ that produced a ‘distinct taste regime’, or ‘discursive system that connect[s] aesthetics to consumption practices’, facilitating a shared consumer lifestyle (page).

While Liberty's was a unique brand, Papini's article demonstrates the broader contexts that helped produce Liberty's style. By searching 21 digitized newspapers published in the north of England in the late nineteenth century, Papini discovered that over a hundred shops advertised Japanese articles and that one man, Alexander Corder, was in many ways quite similar to Liberty though he traded on a smaller scale. Corder's Mikado Bazaar in Sunderland initially specialized in textiles but expanded in the 1880s to sell ‘Japanese screens, pottery, fans, umbrellas, bronzes, kakemonos (hanging wall-pictures) … [and] picture books’ (page?). Corder advertised that he was Liberty's sole agent in the North East, and in doing so he helped brand Liberty's as the place to buy authentic Japanese goods. Corder's shop and the information we can glean about smaller shops nearby demonstrate the connections between London and the provinces, small and large shops, and metropole and empire. Widespread social networks and political, economic and cultural developments commodified Japan in Victorian England. While Japan was not strictly speaking part of the British Empire, the mania for its things was an example of how Western consumers came to desire and appropriate things from the ‘East’.⁵

The Mikado Bazaar and Liberty's of London were building on a long history of shops promoting a global and imperialistic worldview. Departments stores, large furniture shops, specialty shops, museums and exhibitions, not to mention advertising, magazines and other texts also taught the middle-classes to appreciate Japanese and other Asian fabrics, designs, and objects as beautiful and to see Asian fashions and home decor as part of an entire bourgeois lifestyle.⁶ This mania was in a sense part and parcel of the culture of popular imperialism that was especially strong in late nineteenth century Europe. Grocers, for example, were particularly identified with selling imperial goods, and since the eighteenth century at least they often advertised their goods and shops as imperial institutions.⁷ By the late nineteenth century, the trade as a whole recognized this imperial role. For example, in the opening issue of the new trade journal, The Grocer, this position was used to elevate the lowly status of this shopkeeper and justify the existence of a new publication in 1862. The grocer, the editor proposed

constitutes one of the most important branches of Commerce—one of most indispensable wheels of the great machinery of social life of civilized nations, and most particularly of the British Empire and its vast colonial dependencies … . Between the Merchant Prince who—true Lord of the Seas and Isles—brings, in a thousand bottoms, the produce of every country and every clime, to Great Britain and Ireland's shores, and the great body of consumers, the Grocer forms the connecting link—the indispensable channel of distribution.⁸

Department stores too also staged other places and peoples as spectacles readily available for shoppers’ consumption.⁹ Swedish novelist Siegfrid Siwertz captured this aspect of the stores well in his novel, The Great Department Store (1926). Anyone who enters the store either for a ‘fur coat or even a packet of needles’ will readily see, the narrator explains,

what a fantastic thing a large department store is. Wander the halls for just five minutes, and you will see silks from China, Japan and Lombardy, woven woolens from Australia and Argentina, furs from Siberia, Alaska, Australia, whalebone from the Arctic, paradise feathers from New Guinea and Borneo, rice from Malacca, ivory tusks from the Sudan, Diamonds from South Africa, tobacco from Cuba and Sumatra, not to mention the fruit and colonial goods from Sicily, Asia Minor, Tasmania, California, India, the Moluccas, Java and the West Indies.¹⁰

Not everyone was amused by this brand of commercial cosmopolitanism and many critics believed that it infected and degenerated the national political economy. For example, in Papini's article we see how male art critics were often dismayed by the British woman's desire to decorate her home with Japanese objects. This was ‘a very curious mania’, wrote William Bellars, author of The Fine Arts and their Uses (1877). Bellars thought it curious that consumers

decorate their rooms with appalling representations of ladies with their hair on skewers, and with abnormally elongated faces and almond-shaped eyes, painted in resplendent hues upon the background of an impossible landscape, all being accepted without question because they are Japanese. (quoted in Papini below page??)

Bellars managed to criticize Western women consumers’ ability to discern real art and the Japanese artists’ ability to produce the real thing. Yet, it is the male art critic who is confused and has had to resort to phrases such as ‘curious mania’ to describe a market trends and consumer tastes.

On a wider scale such confusion and anxieties gave rise to a surge of economic nationalism and anti-Semitism in the late-nineteenth century, key themes in the next two articles in this issue. Johanna Wassholm and Anna Sundelin's article on the trade in human hair and the article by Simon Constantine on German trade regulations as part of a broader policy against ‘gypsies’ and itinerant traders demonstrate the importance of trans-regional markets and the role of the state in regulating and defining legitimate traders in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm's article explores the realities and representations in Scandinavia of the ‘booming’ trans-European trade in human hair. Rather than luxurious showrooms, expensive advertising, or authoritative lectures and books from design professionals, the trade in human hair was fueled by ‘“notorious” hair buyers’, who were characterized in very negative terms as foreign (often German/Jewish) tricksters, who “inundated” rural regions’ (quoted in … page). As Sundelin and Wassholm explain, authorities repeatedly claimed that immoral outsiders persuaded innocent rural women to sell their prized possession to buy trinkets for themselves. Frivolous wealthy female consumers were also to blame since they had a passion for new hair fashions, particularly a chignon of soft, blond hair. Race and gender thus animate descriptions of this trade and the encounters between buyers and sellers.

Wassholm and Sundelin, like Papini, demonstrate how the combing of digitized newspapers can reveal a broader picture of buying and selling in the nineteenth century. In part, we have an over-abundance of studies of department stores and fixed shops because these institutions preserved their archives and because they garnered such a degree of attention from supporters and detractors. Small shops and itinerant traders are far more difficult to trace, particularly in sparsely populated rural regions. Yet records of these sellers were preserved in advertising and newspaper articles. These records are not perfect since, as Wassholm and Sundelin note, these sources often convey the pejorative views of authorities. However, through a careful reading of the language of these critiques, these authors open up new questions and are able to see the ways in which different ethnicities and nationalities were involved in this trade. They also reveal how gender, nationalism, and anti-Semitism worked to delegitimize certain buyers and sellers, especially those who wandered.

The drive to contain itinerant traders comes to the foreground in Simon Constantine's exploration of the underlying discriminatory logic of the German Trade Code's development and application in the newly unified German state. While not focused on retailing per se, this article shows that it was not simply economies of scale or other economic advantages that favored fixed shops over roaming peddlers. The state explicitly supported and legitimized sedentary trades as part of a broader effort to exclude and regulate mobile Roma and Sinti sellers. Through his study of official correspondence and other records, Constantine reveals how such traders were castigated as a ‘Gypsy plague’. Though a small number in reality, Roma and Sinti came to be regarded as a major threat to German communities. Constantine's careful reading of public policies and official documents demonstrates how the construction of national markets also invented notions of citizenship, race, and national borders. Thus, while fixed shops and large department stores may have been promoting themselves as cosmopolitan vendors of foreign goods, retailing in Germany was also a site in which foreigners were excluded and demonized. In Germany, such rhetoric came to have exceptionally violent consequences in the Weimar and Nazi eras when anti-Semitism targeted department stores and other Jewish-owned businesses as foreign and a danger to the entire ‘German’ nation. Much like the Jewish and German hair cutters who roamed rural Scandinavia, mobile buyers and sellers were denigrated as a serious menace to nationalizing markets.

Throughout this issue we see that ‘foreign’ is a relative term that could just as easily be applied to one's neighbour as someone living across an ocean. Travel and mobility added value in some contexts and could be deemed criminal and/or dangerous acts in others. By examining the global economy through a focused lens, these authors demonstrate how men and women created the meanings surrounding commodities, retail activities and national political economies. Moreover, in this issue we also see how the digitization of primary materials, especially of newspapers, has opened up for us new ways to study small shops and rural trade. By studying local newspapers, for example, we learn how Liberty became a household name, how a mania for Japanese things was spread in Victorian England, and how a very sophisticated and organized trade in human hair reached some of the most rural areas of Scandinavia. The question for scholars in the future is to consider the degree to which shops in other areas of the world similarly promoted their goods as foreign, ask why they did this and how the stores in other regions of the world – particularly Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South and Central America – did or did not promote themselves as global institutions, and if so, whether they shaped the worldview of the global bourgeoisie?¹¹

If, after this global pandemic subsides, stores and restaurants expect to win back customers, they would do well to study the early history of department stores which made coming to the store a unique, all-consuming experience. They also would do well to heed the example of the smaller shops that offered personalized service and a sense of community. We also need to be careful not to consider one form of retailing as more legitimate than another and to cherish the diversity of market experiences that inevitably shift to fit new geographies of work and leisure and incorporate diverse attitudes towards public life and the household. We also, however, have an opportunity to build a more environmentally sustainable and socially equitable culture of buying and selling in the post-pandemic world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Erika Rappaport is a professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in the history of gender, race and consumer culture in Britain and the British Empire.

Notes

1 There is now a huge literature on the subject, and much work has embedded work on shops and shopping into, for example, wider studies of politics, everyday life, formation of gender relations and class identities. See, for example, the diverse approaches taken in Trentmann, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption.

2 For a detailed study of 18th and 19th century England on this point, see Mitchell, Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing, 1700–1850.

3 Much of my work has focused on the ways in which shops and shopping were shaped by Britain's global reach, which included but was not restricted to its formal empire. See, for example, the chapter on the American entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge, in Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 142–77 and, more generally, Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire. The meaning of empire and foreign was always contested, however, even in the heart of the imperial metropolis. See, Rappaport, “Art, Commerce or Empire? The Rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880–1927,” 94–117.

4 Kriegel, Grand Designs.

5 de Groot, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections,” 166–190.

6 See, for example, Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes, esp. chapter 6 and Cohen, Household Gods, chapter 2. Such displays were part of a broader popular culture that promoted European and American tastes for Asian and other foreign things. See, for example, McKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture; Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display and Hoganson, The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. For an excellent study of how the desire for foreign things was central to French consumer culture, see the chapter on “Cashmere Fever” in Hiner, Accessories to Modernity.

7 Grocers’ colonial features began long began much before the nineteenth century. See, Stobart, Sugar and Spice. Eighteenth-century food advertising also promoted imperial and racial ideologies. Bickham, Eating the Empire.

8 The Grocer, vol. 1, no. 1 (4 January 1862): 8.

9 For an overview of the key elements of the European department store, however, see Crossick and Jaumin, Cathedrals of Consumption.

10 Quoted in Lerner, The Consuming Temple.

11 The most important work in retail history today is asking such questions. For an excellent example, see Murillo, Market Encounters. Recent work on the so-called global bourgeoisie, unfortunately does not take retail history as seriously as it should. See, for example, Dejung, Motadel, and Osterhammel, The Global Bourgeoisie. There is an excellent chapter by Utsa Ray on “Cosmopolitan Consumption: Domesticity, Cooking and the Middle Class in Colonial India”, in the volume, but it is in a section on colonialism and class, rather than capitalism; this implies that consumption is not part of capitalism, and inadvertently writes women and domesticity out of this story as well.