Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178813
Freya Purcell
ABSTRACT Walking in the early morning in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries you would have come across a new consumption space, the saloop stall. These stalls operated for only a few hours before being packed away. Yet in their time they offered to labouring Londoners, its watchmen and chimney sweeps, a warm respite. Taking a microhistorical approach, this paper provides the first critical examination of these spaces. It looks to establish the temporality of these stalls and how they were situated in the broader urban routines. It also analyses the role materiality played in establishing these spatialities. This paper looks to reframe the stall’s ceramic cups and hot tea urns, demonstrating how they were crucial to creating a space of labour and sociability, removed from the domestic context they have often been associated with. This research is approached via a wide range of sources such as contemporary literature, visual culture and court testimonies. Consideration is given to material and sensorial attributes; factors that inform the creation and use of this space at every turn. It hopes to provide an example of the value taking a material and sensory-based approach when researching itinerant street traders.
{"title":"Time and space in a dish: examining the relationship between materiality and space in the early modern saloop stall","authors":"Freya Purcell","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178813","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Walking in the early morning in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries you would have come across a new consumption space, the saloop stall. These stalls operated for only a few hours before being packed away. Yet in their time they offered to labouring Londoners, its watchmen and chimney sweeps, a warm respite. Taking a microhistorical approach, this paper provides the first critical examination of these spaces. It looks to establish the temporality of these stalls and how they were situated in the broader urban routines. It also analyses the role materiality played in establishing these spatialities. This paper looks to reframe the stall’s ceramic cups and hot tea urns, demonstrating how they were crucial to creating a space of labour and sociability, removed from the domestic context they have often been associated with. This research is approached via a wide range of sources such as contemporary literature, visual culture and court testimonies. Consideration is given to material and sensorial attributes; factors that inform the creation and use of this space at every turn. It hopes to provide an example of the value taking a material and sensory-based approach when researching itinerant street traders.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44467246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178812
Léa Leboissetier
ABSTRACT The last third of the nineteenth century was a turning point in terms of legislation surrounding itinerant trading in Britain. Liberal governments sought to adapt to what they perceived as the decline of peddling and encourage its transformation into a makeshift activity for humble labourers. This shift took place during the chancellorship and primeministership of William Gladstone. It reflected the popularity of self-help and the desire to improve the lot of the labouring poor in the late-nineteenth century. Encouraging peddling appeared to be an adequate tool to help poor labourers and subsidise working-class consumers, as itinerant traders supplied them with cheap goods. The period was thus marked by debates about the relevance of taxing hawkers: the Pedlars Act 1871 and Hawkers Act 1888 lowered the price of their certificates. Reformers and police constables, however, were also concerned by the ‘decline’ of peddling. They advocated for stricter control of the sellers, often likened pedlars to vagrants, and their salesmanship. The ‘self-help’ objective of the national legislation was furthermore debated and contested by local authorities, to which more powers were devolved in the late-nineteenth century. In some municipalities, it was mitigated by legislation related to urban planning, street cleanliness or shopkeepers’ interests.
{"title":"A tool to help the honest poor: itinerant trading in Great Britain through the lens of late-Victorian legislation (1860–1900s)","authors":"Léa Leboissetier","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178812","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The last third of the nineteenth century was a turning point in terms of legislation surrounding itinerant trading in Britain. Liberal governments sought to adapt to what they perceived as the decline of peddling and encourage its transformation into a makeshift activity for humble labourers. This shift took place during the chancellorship and primeministership of William Gladstone. It reflected the popularity of self-help and the desire to improve the lot of the labouring poor in the late-nineteenth century. Encouraging peddling appeared to be an adequate tool to help poor labourers and subsidise working-class consumers, as itinerant traders supplied them with cheap goods. The period was thus marked by debates about the relevance of taxing hawkers: the Pedlars Act 1871 and Hawkers Act 1888 lowered the price of their certificates. Reformers and police constables, however, were also concerned by the ‘decline’ of peddling. They advocated for stricter control of the sellers, often likened pedlars to vagrants, and their salesmanship. The ‘self-help’ objective of the national legislation was furthermore debated and contested by local authorities, to which more powers were devolved in the late-nineteenth century. In some municipalities, it was mitigated by legislation related to urban planning, street cleanliness or shopkeepers’ interests.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47694834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178809
A. Sundelin, Johanna Wassholm
ABSTRACT Peddlers of varying geographic, ethnic and cultural background played an important role for everyday consumption in late nineteenth century northern Europe. In the sparsely populated region, peddlers answered to a growing demand on consumer goods, spurred by industrialization and rising living standards. Many traders originated from outside the region, from Germany in the south to the multi-ethnic Russian Empire in the east. Their possibilities to succeed in the foreign environments largely depended on the networks that they established. This article examines the role that networks played for peddlers from the outside. First, we analyse the connections that traders from a certain region (Eastern Jews, Tatars, Russian Karelians, Germans) established between themselves to further their business in the Nordics. Second, we study the networks formed between peddlers from the outside and their local customers. And third, we examine the role of transnational, national and local networks for the acquisition and transport of goods over long distances. The article illuminates the various types of networks that characterized peddling in northern Europe as well as their functions. It also illustrates how the possibilities to study networks depend on the types of sources used and underlines the importance of analysing various types of sources to identify networks.
{"title":"Transnational networks in northern European mobile trade in the late 1800s","authors":"A. Sundelin, Johanna Wassholm","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178809","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Peddlers of varying geographic, ethnic and cultural background played an important role for everyday consumption in late nineteenth century northern Europe. In the sparsely populated region, peddlers answered to a growing demand on consumer goods, spurred by industrialization and rising living standards. Many traders originated from outside the region, from Germany in the south to the multi-ethnic Russian Empire in the east. Their possibilities to succeed in the foreign environments largely depended on the networks that they established. This article examines the role that networks played for peddlers from the outside. First, we analyse the connections that traders from a certain region (Eastern Jews, Tatars, Russian Karelians, Germans) established between themselves to further their business in the Nordics. Second, we study the networks formed between peddlers from the outside and their local customers. And third, we examine the role of transnational, national and local networks for the acquisition and transport of goods over long distances. The article illuminates the various types of networks that characterized peddling in northern Europe as well as their functions. It also illustrates how the possibilities to study networks depend on the types of sources used and underlines the importance of analysing various types of sources to identify networks.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41937163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178811
L. Fontaine
ABSTRACT In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure. Urban sources testify to the desire of the urban authorities and sedentary merchants to exclude them. A few bankruptcy files do, however, make it possible to document failures as well as to provide information on the tours and the credit necessary to exercise the trade. However, to overcome the purely urban viewpoint, one must leave the town behind and concentrate instead upon the home villages and its notarial archives in order to link individual departures to the social framework to which they belonged and to understand the organisation of these networks of migrants. However, the municipal archives on poverty, on markets, as well as the archives of the police, justice and guilds allow us to enter into certain economic practices of the most destitute. In the first part, the essay describes the organisation of migrant networks and their evolution between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part, it analyses urban peddling, which is the economic resource of the poorest people, particularly women, and the battles waged against them by the elites and established merchants in order to keep them off the streets.
{"title":"Itinerant merchants: between networks of migrants and survival strategy (16th–20th)","authors":"L. Fontaine","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178811","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure. Urban sources testify to the desire of the urban authorities and sedentary merchants to exclude them. A few bankruptcy files do, however, make it possible to document failures as well as to provide information on the tours and the credit necessary to exercise the trade. However, to overcome the purely urban viewpoint, one must leave the town behind and concentrate instead upon the home villages and its notarial archives in order to link individual departures to the social framework to which they belonged and to understand the organisation of these networks of migrants. However, the municipal archives on poverty, on markets, as well as the archives of the police, justice and guilds allow us to enter into certain economic practices of the most destitute. In the first part, the essay describes the organisation of migrant networks and their evolution between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part, it analyses urban peddling, which is the economic resource of the poorest people, particularly women, and the battles waged against them by the elites and established merchants in order to keep them off the streets.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46517065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178810
A. Östman
ABSTRACT By focusing on poor rural women, this paper offers an exploration of the practices of itinerant trading during an era marked by modernisation and proletarisation. There are few sources regarding small-scale trading practiced on the margins of society, informally or on the fringe of legality. There is also a very limited amount of archival material, such as fiscal and legal sources, concerning these small-scale, informal forms of exchange. In this paper, I examine ethnographic material collected in the 1960s, when the Finnish Heritage Agency circulated questionnaires to collect information about traditional forms of trade among country folk. Such questionnaires were sent to a panel of respondents who regularly participated in enquiries on diverse themes. In their responses to questions on the subject ‘travels for trade’, persons with a rural background depicted customary and local practices of trading. How are female itinerant traders depicted?.
{"title":"Women as mobile vendors: petty trade and rural poverty in early twentieth-century Finland","authors":"A. Östman","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2178810","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT By focusing on poor rural women, this paper offers an exploration of the practices of itinerant trading during an era marked by modernisation and proletarisation. There are few sources regarding small-scale trading practiced on the margins of society, informally or on the fringe of legality. There is also a very limited amount of archival material, such as fiscal and legal sources, concerning these small-scale, informal forms of exchange. In this paper, I examine ethnographic material collected in the 1960s, when the Finnish Heritage Agency circulated questionnaires to collect information about traditional forms of trade among country folk. Such questionnaires were sent to a panel of respondents who regularly participated in enquiries on diverse themes. In their responses to questions on the subject ‘travels for trade’, persons with a rural background depicted customary and local practices of trading. How are female itinerant traders depicted?.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46375440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2207317
E. McKee, Léa Leboissetier
ABSTRACT This special issue on itinerant trade includes new research on a range of non-fixed traders who engaged in both transnational and smaller-scale moves when trading. Itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial and consumption history, but also as a history of migration and labour, or of the underbelly economy and deviance. More recently, this topic has interested historians of material culture, emotions and folklore. The contributions to this special issue highlight these new directions and important trends in research into itinerant trade. The five contributions explore moving traders in the early modern and modern periods in Britain, the Nordics and across the wider European continent. The articles investigate: the space, temporality and material culture of the saloop stall in early-modern London; female rural petty trading in early twentieth-century Finland; the British Liberal authorities' approach to regulating itinerant trade in late-modern Britain; the geographic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and networks of itinerant traders in the late-nineteenth century Nordics; and the transnational networks of early-modern peddling in Europe.
{"title":"Itinerant traders: elusive subjects moving at the intersection of historical fields","authors":"E. McKee, Léa Leboissetier","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2207317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2207317","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This special issue on itinerant trade includes new research on a range of non-fixed traders who engaged in both transnational and smaller-scale moves when trading. Itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial and consumption history, but also as a history of migration and labour, or of the underbelly economy and deviance. More recently, this topic has interested historians of material culture, emotions and folklore. The contributions to this special issue highlight these new directions and important trends in research into itinerant trade. The five contributions explore moving traders in the early modern and modern periods in Britain, the Nordics and across the wider European continent. The articles investigate: the space, temporality and material culture of the saloop stall in early-modern London; female rural petty trading in early twentieth-century Finland; the British Liberal authorities' approach to regulating itinerant trade in late-modern Britain; the geographic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and networks of itinerant traders in the late-nineteenth century Nordics; and the transnational networks of early-modern peddling in Europe.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47894152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2172248
L. O’Hagan
ABSTRACT This paper offers the first case study of the Swedish soft drink Pommac, launched in 1919, and how the brand established itself as the ‘taste of summer’. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large dataset of Pommac advertisements, it traces the brand's development over its first forty years on the market (1920–1960), identifying the ways in which summer was depicted in advertisements, how this shifted over time in accordance with changes in Swedish society and how this worked in tandem with other secondary themes, such as luxury, sophistication and alcohol substitution. It finds that the concept of summer that Pommac initially promoted was highly idealised and oriented towards a middle-class public. In the 1940s, Pommac began to include working-class audiences in its advertisements for the first time, thereby creating a segmented market for the drink based around each group's supposed tastes, cultures and forms of socialisation. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how leisure has long been exploited by brands to engage with specific target audiences and enhances our understanding of class-based approaches to lifestyle marketing, while also showcasing some uniquely Swedish marketing characteristics that emerged in response to particular social, cultural and political developments in the country.
{"title":"Selling Swedish summer: the marketing of Pommac, 1920–1960","authors":"L. O’Hagan","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2172248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2172248","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper offers the first case study of the Swedish soft drink Pommac, launched in 1919, and how the brand established itself as the ‘taste of summer’. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large dataset of Pommac advertisements, it traces the brand's development over its first forty years on the market (1920–1960), identifying the ways in which summer was depicted in advertisements, how this shifted over time in accordance with changes in Swedish society and how this worked in tandem with other secondary themes, such as luxury, sophistication and alcohol substitution. It finds that the concept of summer that Pommac initially promoted was highly idealised and oriented towards a middle-class public. In the 1940s, Pommac began to include working-class audiences in its advertisements for the first time, thereby creating a segmented market for the drink based around each group's supposed tastes, cultures and forms of socialisation. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how leisure has long been exploited by brands to engage with specific target audiences and enhances our understanding of class-based approaches to lifestyle marketing, while also showcasing some uniquely Swedish marketing characteristics that emerged in response to particular social, cultural and political developments in the country.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49286415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2022.2129190
P. Lyon, E. Kautto
ABSTRACT The early years of twentieth-century Britain were a transitional period for the way that food was understood. Diet adequacy was now being increasingly thought of as not simply a matter of the quantity of food but the qualities that food needed to have to sustain optimum health. A number of ‘fad diet’ books were circulating and proposed what readers should eat or avoid, and even how to eat. Science, meanwhile, was making progress with the identification of vitamins and these were added to the discourse. Newspapers in the 1920s had an important communication role in the struggle to separate dietary fact from fiction and this study examines how they represented ideas to their readers. Rather than giving a voice to ‘fad diets’, press stories endorsed the ‘common sense’ of normal varied diets although these could be socially and economically variable. Using fad ridicule and other techniques, as well as the reported opinion from well-known medical figures, newspapers emerge as responsible intermediaries in the transition .
{"title":"A healthy diet: British newspaper narratives in the 1920s","authors":"P. Lyon, E. Kautto","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2022.2129190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2022.2129190","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The early years of twentieth-century Britain were a transitional period for the way that food was understood. Diet adequacy was now being increasingly thought of as not simply a matter of the quantity of food but the qualities that food needed to have to sustain optimum health. A number of ‘fad diet’ books were circulating and proposed what readers should eat or avoid, and even how to eat. Science, meanwhile, was making progress with the identification of vitamins and these were added to the discourse. Newspapers in the 1920s had an important communication role in the struggle to separate dietary fact from fiction and this study examines how they represented ideas to their readers. Rather than giving a voice to ‘fad diets’, press stories endorsed the ‘common sense’ of normal varied diets although these could be socially and economically variable. Using fad ridicule and other techniques, as well as the reported opinion from well-known medical figures, newspapers emerge as responsible intermediaries in the transition .","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45565059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/2373518x.2022.2146472
I. Mitchell
{"title":"Back to the shops: the high street in history and the future","authors":"I. Mitchell","doi":"10.1080/2373518x.2022.2146472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518x.2022.2146472","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48021008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/2373518X.2023.2168846
M. Cruz
ABSTRACT The end of early modern professional guilds is attributed to inherent inefficiencies (an incapacity to solve economic problems) or to state intervention. Governments became powerful enough to dispense the financial support of the guilds and put an end to their privileges and monopolies. This is the dominant view within Portuguese scholarship, especially in relation to craftsmen and artesans. This article focusses, however, on retailing guilds and their internal developments, arguing that the individual disruptive behavior of many Portuguese shopkeepers was as damaging to the corporative structure as was any sort of state policy. At the same time, it also argues that the corporative crisis did not extend to the economic sector itself. In fact, while the guild framework was crumbling, Portuguese retail businesses seemed to persist and prosper. Finally, the article argues that this prosperity was linked to broader changes in fashion and material culture taking place throughout Europe.
{"title":"Rotting from the inside: the decline of retail guilds in Portugal, 1755–1833","authors":"M. Cruz","doi":"10.1080/2373518X.2023.2168846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2373518X.2023.2168846","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The end of early modern professional guilds is attributed to inherent inefficiencies (an incapacity to solve economic problems) or to state intervention. Governments became powerful enough to dispense the financial support of the guilds and put an end to their privileges and monopolies. This is the dominant view within Portuguese scholarship, especially in relation to craftsmen and artesans. This article focusses, however, on retailing guilds and their internal developments, arguing that the individual disruptive behavior of many Portuguese shopkeepers was as damaging to the corporative structure as was any sort of state policy. At the same time, it also argues that the corporative crisis did not extend to the economic sector itself. In fact, while the guild framework was crumbling, Portuguese retail businesses seemed to persist and prosper. Finally, the article argues that this prosperity was linked to broader changes in fashion and material culture taking place throughout Europe.","PeriodicalId":36537,"journal":{"name":"History of Retailing and Consumption","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46077683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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