A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (review)

This volume comprises nine chapters of innovative research on diverse aspects of British retail history, together with a comprehensive summary of recent literature on British retailing by the editors to introduce the book. John Benson and Laura Ugolini have succeeded in bringing together a collection of uniformly high-quality scholarship. Although the chapters cross five centuries and consider different parts of the retail sector, the editors have knitted them into a coherent volume with a similar style of writing and organization in each chapter. This book confirms the vibrancy of research on British retailing, also demonstrated in recent years by authors such as Erika Rappaport and Christopher Hosgood, neither of whom contributed to the present volume.

The book is divided into three sections: "Representations and Self-Representations," which discusses attitudes toward retailing and consumption from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries; "Patterns and Processes," which examines where shops were located and who owned them; and "Property, Politics and Communities," which investigates the distribution of retail property ownership and the relationship between retail developments and the public sector. It does not detract from the individual contributions to note that these sections are not very evident from the table of contents. Five of the nine chapters deal wholly, and one chapter deals in part, with the period between 1870 and 1939. In these six chapters the reader gets a broad, if yet incomplete, picture of British retailing in these years. The book would be stronger yet if the editors had encouraged more of a conversation between chapters. Alternatively, they might have considered adding three smaller introductions to each section to make clearer connections between chapters.

Nancy Cox's chapter on attitudes toward retailing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries opens the volume, and shows that concern over the dangers of luxury and overseas trade balances contributed to a climate of elite opinion generally hostile to retailing. While Cox relies on elite writings, Claire Walsh shows in the next chapter that London shopping galleries were popular leisure destinations in the same time period, demonstrating that elite opinion was not congruent with upper-class behavior. Ugolini shrewdly uses menswear advertisements to show that late Victorian and Edwardian men were open to the pleasures of consumption, alongside traditional values ascribed to Victorian masculinity, such as moral and athletic rigor.

The second section of the book, which considers "Patterns and Processes," has the greatest thematic unity, because all the authors rely on city directories to study the retailing sector. Sheryllene Haggerty uses directories and parish burial registers to show that women in late eighteenth-century Liverpool operated many small stores, an opportunity open to them as up to two-fifths of Liverpool men were employed in maritime occupations that took them away from home for some period of time. Jon Stobart uses city directories to study the shifting location of retailing in Stoke-on-Trent from 1872-1932. Stobart argues that because the city was formed from several adjacent small towns that became one contiguous city, the city center was a weaker retail center than those in most British cities. Andrew Alexander, Gareth Shaw, and Deborah Hudson use directories from the Midlands, the Northeast, and the Southeast to show that the structure of multiple retailing (chain and branch stores) differed between these regions and was related to the industrial base of the surrounding area.

Michael Winstanley uses a national valuation survey from 1911-1914 to show that many small shopkeepers in England did not own their own stores and that there was great diversity in who owned retail property. Helle Bertramesen examines the development of a Manchester department store, arguing that the store's impressive building was forced on it by realignment of the road, and that the role of local governments in the...