Retail growth and consumer changes in a declining urban economy: Antwerp (1650–1750)

Drawing on a study of historical national accounts and statistics, this article shows that a growing supply of mass-consumption textiles and clothing in Sweden during industrialization did not fully meet increasing demand. As a result, high demand for second-hand items remained even at the turn of the twentieth century. Records from a local auction house from 1830 to 1900 show that, even in the 1880s, more affluent urban consumers were still active on the second-hand market. Thereafter, they turned to the market for new goods, while potential demand from labourers and servants continued to be provided for by the second-hand market. Mechanization meant that more items entered this market. It changed the range and quality of objects available, consequently affecting the attractiveness of second-hand textiles and clothing. After the 1870s, falling and converging prices can be discerned, while more durable fabrics largely retained their value. We conclude that the consumer revolution (in a broader sense) had by this stage gained a foothold among ordinary Swedish urban households. The auction trade was part of a democratization of consumption. The general lesson is that understanding mass consumption requires research not only into second-hand consumption, but also into different regional settings.B efore low-cost cotton textiles and industrial production of ready-made clothes paved the way for mass consumption, textiles and clothes accounted for a large part of household budgets. 1 Making textiles and clothes and taking care of them were time-consuming and often trying tasks for households. These objects were also expensive to acquire on the market. As a consequence, objects were passed on, altered, or remade, and, when threadbare, turned into rags and recycled as paper, blankets, or rag rugs. 2 This meant that textiles and clothing had second-hand value.Mechanization of production, together with expanding distribution networks and marketplaces, resulted in falling prices. This made textiles and clothing more affordable and easier to buy for a majority of the population. Over time, home * Authors' Affiliations: Kristina Lilja, Uppsala University; Pernilla Jonsson, Stockholm University. † We are grateful to the editors, three anonymous referees, Dan Bäcklund, and Ylva Sjöstrand for excellent comments. The article was written as part of the project 'Savings in the wardrobe-changes in the value and life cycle of clothes, 1790-1910' (P2014-0034) financed by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.

“…For example, Lemire, Business , pp. 85–97; Fontaine, Moral economy , p. 147; Blondé and van Damme, ‘Retail growth’, pp. 654–6.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…See, for example, Charpy, ‘Scope’; Blondé and van Damme, ‘Retail growth’; van Damme and Vermoesen, ‘Second‐hand consumption’; Ulväng and Lilja, ‘Säljarna’; Ulväng, ‘Varorna’.…”

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confidence: 99%

Inadequate supply and increasing demand for textiles and clothing: second‐hand trade at auctions as an alternative source of consumer goods in Sweden, 1830–1900

Lilja

Jönsson

2019

“…76–115; Stobart and Hann, ‘Retailing revolution’; Stobart, Hann, and Morgan, Spaces of consumption , pp. 123–32; van Aert and van Damme, ‘Retail dynamics’; Blondé and van Damme, ‘Retail growth’; Furnée and Lesger, eds., Landscape of consumption .…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Jefferys, Retail trading ; Corrigan, Sociology of consumption , pp. 51–5; Stobart and Hann, ‘Retailing revolution’; Blondé and van Damme, ‘Retail growth’; Furnée and Lesger, eds., Landscape of consumption .…”

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confidence: 99%

Retail revolution and the village shop, c. 1660–1860

Stobart

Bailey

2017

Village shops have been largely overlooked in the recent literature on British retailing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which has sought to redefine the parameters and timing of retail transformation. While urban shops have been explored in detail, often in ways that highlight their role in a parallel transformation in consumption patterns, little attempt has been made to look inside village shops or examine the character and practices of rural retailers. This article addresses this lacuna and offers fresh insights into the shifting position of village shops in these broader economic, business, and social changes. Taking a long view of the period c. 1660-1860, it draws on a wide range of sources to examine the stock sold and the degree of specialization exhibited by village shops, and the changing trading practices of village shopkeepers, including the provision of credit, the pricing of goods, and marketing activities. In doing so, the article highlights both long-term continuities and important innovations of the type that also characterize urban shops, and argues that village shops, while central to rural social and economic networks, were also intimately bound into broader retail systems.

“…47 47 Cox, Complete tradesman , pp. 135–9; Stobart et al, Spaces of consumption , p. 156; Berry, ‘Prudent luxury’; Blondé and van Damme, ‘Retail growth and consumer changes’. …”

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confidence: 99%

Gentlemen and shopkeepers: supplying the country house in eighteenth-century England

Stobart

2010

The country house is well recognized as a site of elite patronage, an important vehicle of social and political ambition, and a statement of power and taste. Yet we know relatively little about the networks of supply and purchasing patterns of rural elites, or about how their practices related to broader changes in material culture. Drawing on a large sample of bills and receipts of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, this article recreates the processes through which the material culture of the family home was constructed. These reveal London as the source for many highquality goods, although the pattern of supply was not a simple dichotomy of localeveryday and metropolitan-luxury purchases. They also show the large number of shopkeepers patronized as the Leighs spread their purchases through choice, convenience, and expediency. Relating this to wider conceptions of consumption, the Leighs emerge as engaging in layered and sometimes conflicting consumer cultures. They were concerned with fashion as novelty and a marker of rank; but they also valued traditional markers of status. Social distinction was achieved through a continued emphasis on title and lineage as much as fashion or taste-value systems that were unavailable to the middling sorts.e hr_562 885..904 I n recent years, consumption has emerged as a meta-narrative of historical enquiry, especially for the eighteenth century where it has eclipsed production and industrialization as the dominant explanatory framework for social, cultural, and economic transformation. 2 Part of this growing domination comes from the broad and malleable nature of consumption as a concept and process. It has been variously portrayed as the ownership and meaning of goods, the use of leisure time, and the means by which goods were acquired and ideas about goods were formed. 3 Yet all of these interpretations link consumption with the construction of material culture, defined broadly to encompass both the built environment and material artefacts.Within this growing corpus of research, relatively little attention has been paid to the aristocracy as consumers or the country house as a site of consumption. Of course, an enormous amount has been written about the country house. One well-established line of enquiry has taken an economic-based view, focusing on the management of the estate, the balance sheet of income and expenditure, and the 1 This research is linked to the project 'Consumption and the Country House', funded by the AHRC (AH/H008365/1). I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.