(click on icon for further information on Taylor & Francis journals, including The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research)

12.00 - 13.00 Lunch (dining room)

Chair: David Hussey, University of Wolverhampton

P. Maw, Manchester University,
The North ascendant: England's textile exports to America
Abstract

G. Riello, LSE,
Indian merchants, the East India Companies and the global trade in textiles in the early modern period
Abstract
 

Chair: Karin Dannehl, University of Wolverhampton

J. Hinks, Leicester University,
The book trade in England, 1700-1850: new evidence from the British Book Trade Index
Abstract

T. Davies, Leicester University, Proprietary medicines in nineteenth-century urban Britain
Abstract
 

Chair: Malcom Wanklyn, University of Wolverhampton

M. French, Glasgow University,
Mobility and domesticity: British commercial travellers and family life, 1890-1938
Asbtract

P. Edwards, Roehampton University,
Commercial and family ties: kinship and horse dealing in early modern England
Asbtract
 

Chair: Clare Rose, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London

D. Keene, Institute of Historical Research,
Don’t forget medieval shopping!
Abstract

N. Armstrong, York University,
Christmas consumerism in nineteenth-century England
Abstract

Chair: Margaret Ponsonby, University of Wolverhampton

J. Brown, Brighton University,
Selling Scandinavian design in Brighton, 1955-1974
Abstract

P. Edwards, University of Nottingham,
Reimagining the shopping mall: European invention of "American" consumer space
Abstract

L. Whitworth, Brighton University,
'Design Fair' and design fare: exhibiting British design excellence to the nation
Abstract
 

Chair: Jane Holt, London College of Fashion

A. Pott, Courtauld Inst. Of Art,
The evolution of the Virginian store form basic clothier to purveyor of fashion
Abstract

C. Horwood, Royal Holloway, 
The secret shopper: dress agencies in interwar  Britain
Abstract

C. Wildman, Manchester University,
Department stores as cross-class sites of consumption, 1918-1939
Abstract
 

Neil Ewins, University of Sunderland,
Staffordshire Ceramics in the United States: networks and distribution from a design perspective
Abstract

Stefan Schwarzkopf, Birkbeck College,
Nation vs corporation: branding and corporate design of British Petroleum in the United Kingdom and in Continental Europe, 1918-1939
Abstract

Chair: Judy Faraday, John Lewis Partnership and University of Wolverhampton

A. E. Randall, Santa Clara University, US,
The emergence of the Soviet citizen-consumer
Abstract

M. Hilton, Birmingham University,
Businessmen and consumers: allies or enemies?
Abstract
 

Chair: Matthew Hilton, Birmingham University

S. Brown, Birkbeck College,
Film sales versus film rental in early British cinema
Abstract

D. Holmes, University of Leicester,
Retail development in the boot and shoe industry
Abstract

Märit Beckeman, Lund University, Sweden,
“Edisons” behind innovations- The Swedish food sector after 1945
Abstract  

Chair: Richard Hawkins, University of Wolverhampton

H. Bjarnason, University of Iceland,
Barter in Iceland's trade in the 19th century
Abstract

L. Torra, Pampeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain,
The textile retail shops in Barcelona in the eighteenth-century
Abstract

P. Courtney,
Urbanism, trade and uneven development in early-modern Gwent
Abstract
 

Chair: John Benson, University of Wolverhampton

Anton Ehlers, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
“Rainbow medicine”:  people, passion and politics - ingredients of a post-apartheid company-turnaround in South Africa
Abstract

J. Vatnaland, University of Oslo, Norway, 
Resisting the chain store revolution: a comparative perspective on the US and Norway
Abstract

E. Van Nuland, Free University of Brussels, Belgium, 
Food retailing and class consumption. The Belgian retailer Delhaize, 1867-1970
Abstract
 

Chair: Barbara Caddick, University of Wolverhampton

I. Mitchell, 
Religious though and shopping cultures
Abstract

J. Faraday, John Lewis Partnership and Wolverhampton University,
The Welwyn Garden City department store (1920-1950) and the community
Abstract

D. Clampin, Aberystwyth University,
The British advertising industry at war, 1939-1945
Abstract
 

Mills are absent from present-day urban life. Bread is now readily available everywhere in the city, but turning the grain into flour is nowhere to be visible. And bakers’ shops may be about to disappear. Modern grocery stores began to provide varieties of nicely packaged breads that could make us almost forget about the original meaning of this food.However, this situation was the reverse for many dwellers of any city all over early modern Europe. In sixteenth-century Istanbul, we could expect to find all the activities involved in the chains of several types of bread production, from the arrival of grain in the ports of the city to the slices of bread at the table of Ottoman households. This paper examines the everyday practices of bread-making in early modern Istanbul through the analysis of various historical sources. It essentially focuses on the economic and social interdependence among public/private mills, bakers’ shops and private houses. I will argue that, unlike our present time, the responsibility of the supply of bread almost exclusively lied on with the millers and bakers. They were the two important links in the entire process, and thus they were established accordingly. For example, bakers were certainly dependent on millers for supplies of freshly ground flour. And probably for this reason, most of them built their own mills that were attached to the back of their shops. I will also discuss the role of the state, the guild and the regulations in the bread supply and how they affected the urban development in the early modern era.

This paper will examine the importance of food, goods and material culture to the emotional experience of Christmas before the First World War, and the interdependence of the relationship between the emotional and consumerist experiences of Christmas manifested in shopping cultures and advertising. 
I will highlight the debates that surrounded the use of Christmas boxes in the retail sector and examine how the Christmas celebration became increasingly dependent on Christmas fare and decorations. The expansion of the market for Christmas gifts will also be examined, reflecting the growth the mass market and the expansion of gift-giving relationships, inspired partly by the success of Christmas cards.
This will be placed in the context of the growth of a Christmas shopping culture in the late nineteenth century, highlighting the importance of lighting, spectacle and display and the creation of comfortable shopping environments, which in turn has important consequences for the studies of gender, childhood and modernity. I will also examine the increasingly sophisticated Christmas advertising that accompanied this shopping culture.
This paper will also recognise the pressures that Christmas consumerism placed upon shop assistants, and will examine the campaigns that shop assistants made for a longer Christmas holiday from the mid nineteenth century onwards.

Märit Beckeman, Lund University, Sweden,
“Edisons” behind innovations- The Swedish food sector after 1945
E-mail: marit.beckeman@plog.lth.se

Modern retailing started after the war in Sweden with the break-through of self-service stores and frozen food, which was only made possible by developing new packaging and distribution; in fact totally new supply chains had to be created. Both events, self-service and frozen food, are examples of innovations that happened in combination with other changes in society, the time was ripe. This paper describes the major innovations and changes taking place the food sector and society since 1945 and singles out the introduction of frozen food and the changing retailing and the entrepreneurs and “Edisons” behind, that made it possible. By “Edisons” are meant people feeling passionately about an idea and fighting for it and contributing from the inside or outside of the launching organisation, often without any direct monetary gains. These individuals are not taken into account in the literature of innovations and yet to introduce a new food technology is becoming even harder today. The introduction of frozen food, the lead company Findus, the supporting companies and the network that was created with the Frozen Food Institute as a spider in the net are described in the paper.The lesson learnt from frozen food at a time, admittedly when the attitude for changes was more positive and people were less individualistic, was that the entrepreneurs were very much dependent on motivated individuals, “Edisons”. Wanting to be part of something that would make a change for the better drove them. To find, motivate and involve such people from the very start of introducing a new food technology must be as important today as it was more than fifty years ago and this will be further discussed in this paper.

Truck and barter were standard practices in Iceland in 19th century, especially in foreign trade and partially in domestic trade. The causes for this were several and they will be discussed in the paper. 
Domestic and foreign trade in Iceland in 19th century were two wholly separate activities. The situation was very much shaped by the fact that imports lawfully could only be bought at special ports of trade, which were spread along the coast of Iceland. Hence, exports were transported from producers (farmers) in the countryside to the coast to exchange for imports. Oligopoly prevailed in foreign trade in the first half of the century and for decades thereafter. The oligopoly enabled merchants to dictate trading practices and one of them was to use bookkeeping barter, i.e., to credit their customers instead of paying for their balance in hard cash. Merchants had growing competition from Icelandic farmers’ co-ops in the 1880s onwards, offering better prices, etc., but the co-ops also used bookkeeping barter instead of hard cash. Merchants were the principal employers in the urban localities at the coast and they used truck system throughout the century when paying their day labourers.
Merchants in coastal localities did not engage in trade in Icelandic goods until the end of 19th century and domestic trade was, therefore, restricted to exchange in domestic goods. Since inland urban localities did not exist, domestic trade rested on seasonal travels of producers to buyers. This required inland farmers to travel on horses with their agricultural products to the seaside to barter with coastal people, mostly living off fishing and using their fish in exchange for farmers’ products.

This paper is a study of John Bowles, Brighton’s most significant retailer of modern design in the period 1955-’74, and its role in the promotion and consumption of Scandinavian design.  The concurrent enthusiastic reception for Nordic goods in the UK in this period makes the examination of the promotion and the environment in which they were sold worthy of investigation.  From the early 1950s John Bowles was closely involved with the Council of Industrial Design, and their efforts to improve the standard of design of goods presented to British consumers. That there was a close alliance between the modernist design aesthetic that the Council advocated and that of contemporary Scandinavia design helped fuel this promotion.  The John Bowles stores move and expansion in the late 1960s to new modern premises, matched contemporary retailing trends, with the simultaneous development of lifestyle emporiums, such as Habitat.  Financially conducive import tax regulations with the Scandinavian countries encouraged imports and a wave of UK Nordic themed exhibitions and promotion, both nationally and at John Bowles.  The result was the continuous high profile of Scandinavian design and the encouragement for it consumption through to the mid 1970s, far beyond the traditionally recognised time frame.

In Britain, for the first ten years of the cinema business, films were bought and sold like any other commodity. Showmen who exhibited films would buy a print outright with which they could do what they wished. But prints had a limited shelf life in two ways; they were only novel for so long, and they were subject to terrific abuse during projection and would soon become unwatchable. This left the showman with a product he could no longer use. Some would sell their old prints second hand, others would junk them. In 1898 London-based exhibitor Walturdaw devised a system of swapping prints with other showmen but, being so large, quickly found other showmen had nothing they needed. So they devised a system whereby they would rent films to others, effectively starting the business of film distribution. Walturdaw remained the only renters for seven years. In 1905 all that changed and by 1914 in London alone 102 firms dealt exclusively with film rental, and film sales was all but dead.
Using new evidence uncovered through the London Project, an AHRB funded project on the history of the film business in London before the First World War, this paper will chart the demise of film sales and the rise of film rental. It will examine the economic forces which gave rise to the rental firms, first in the regions, and then in the capital. The analysis will address problems with the sales methods of the early pioneers and with the distribution of film prints, and how the rise of rental and the boom in cinema building towards the end of the 1910s went hand in hand as manufacturers, renters and exhibitors vied for control of the product.
Film was and is a big international business, but is rarely examined as such. This paper will present a new retail perspective on the growth of the film industry in Britain.

The impact of total war in Britain between 1939 and 1945 represented a major challenge for the commercial advertising industry. In an environment in which supply and demand were strictly regulated their very raison d’être apparently ceased to exist.
This paper demonstrates how the advertising industry made great efforts to clearly define their role within this very different marketplace. Arguing that they served a useful function in informing and directing the people, sustaining morale and adding colour and variety to an otherwise drab existence.
However, central to their argument was the maintenance of consumer goodwill towards their client’s products, ensuring that they would be well positioned to resume normal trading on the cessation of hostilities. In this respect the immediate need for sacrifice and public-spiritedness took second place to the desire to maximise profits in a post-war world.
This paper explores these issues from within the advertising industry itself. It seeks to demonstrate the concerns, the fears, the sheer effort of all those involved to ensure the survival of an industry facing extinction. An exploration of this topic sheds a critical light on what the advertising industry believed their role in society to be, and the wider contribution that they could hope to make.

The paper (based on a forthcoming chapter in the Gweent County History) will examine the urban and marketing network of Gwent (Monmouthshire) in the early-modern period. It inherited a flat urban hierarchy reflecting the dispersed nature of power in its former medieval marcher lordships.
The urban pattern is examined in relation to the distribution of land and water trade routes and such features as market halls and trade tokens. In the early-modern period there was a marked shift of marketing and urban growth to the eastern periphery of the county. It is argued this was a reflection of the neo-colonial economy based on exporting raw materials and importing consumer goods. The implication of a possible shortage of consumer goods in the interior is explored. It is also shown that urban independence had little impact on economic success.

Proprietary medicines were big business during nineteenth century urban Britain. Men such as Francis Newbery and Thomas Holloway accumulated rich winnings from the public’s quest for better personal health. As towns and cities deteriorated into dens of disease and despair, pills and potions that would alleviate the suffering of the poor, and anxiety of the affluent, were bound to attract popularity. 
Framed in such a context of widespread poor health, this paper will explore the distribution of health-related products, with case studies based on material from Liverpool, Leicester and Reading in the period 1780-1860. Evidence will be based upon a systematic analysis of the language of newspaper advertisements for medicines, advice and health-related services. From this national sweep, reaching north west to south east, I will explore and describe similarities and differences between the quantity, validity, type and supposed purpose of such goods and services available in each of the three urban centres. 
The notorious levels of ill health in Liverpool, its transient population, as well as its council’s active role in the sanitary movement from 1840s onwards, make it an ideal starting point to analyse the success of personal health products between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. Equally, it offers an interesting comparison with both Leicester, a midland industrial town with a particularly inactive council, and Reading, a town shifting from an economy based upon agriculture to one more reliant on communications and commerce. The contrasts raise striking issues about how residents in different parts of the country responded to anxieties about health and the increased awareness and availability of health-related products. 

In 1956, the Victor Gruen designed Southdale Shopping Center opened in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota.Architectural Forum magazine acclaimed America’s first fully enclosed shopping mall as the answer to the problems of suburban living.Yet, Southdale Center proved a distinctly European answer to the challenges set by America’s emerging suburban communities. The Viennese born and educated architect Victor Gruen had witnessed over the previous decade the post-war boom that had shaped America into a nation of suburban sprawl, in which the all-consuming automobile was causing irrevocable damage to the social fabric of America. Building on his experiences of European shopping arcades, Gruen proposed to carve out a new social and retailing space for Americans, designed to have a “coalescing effect” on the alienating impact of suburban sprawl. Gruen wanted to create “meaningful urban oases in the desert-like spread of the city.” His European answer to this uniquely American spatial problem was the completely enclosed suburban shopping mall. If any one space has come to represent America, for Americans and foreigners alike, in the ensuing years it is the suburban mall. This paper will argue that the apparently “exceptional” space of the mall emerged out of a specific spatial and historical cultural crossing in the 1950s, informed by the confluence of European and American ideas about retailing, architecture, urban planning and design. In examining the career of Victor Gruen, stressing the European heritage and intellectual and spatial influences that he drew on in designing the first shopping mall, I will interrogate both European and American intellectual and cultural influences on the original design of the mall. By reading and analysing the built “texts” of Gruen, who saw his suburban shopping centres as utopian, idealised and (potentially) Americanised versions of European shopping arcades and central cities, I will challenge existing popular and academic conceptions of that seemingly most paradigmatically (post)modern of retailing sites as an “exceptionally” American social and cultural space.

Horse dealers, like their counterparts in other trades, often formed partnerships. If many of these joint ventures were poor, flimsy and temporary affairs, some of them, like the partnership between two Smithfield dealers, Harvey Connoway and John Styles, were much larger and longer lasting. Invariably, dealers associated themselves with people they knew and in this respect too their actions mirrored general practice. In an age of rapid commercial progress, existing marketing and financial institutions proved inadequate and inevitably the conduct of business involved risk. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that wherever possible dealers sought to minimize the danger by using members of the family, together with friends and neighbours. The tremendous amount of immigration into London, for instance, created numerous links with the provinces that could be used to provision the capital. Thus, Samuel Dabbs, a member of a leading Warwickshire family of horse dealers, lived on the Strand and, apart from serving his own ends, organized the London end of the business. 
These ties were strengthened by a family tradition of involvement in the same occupation. In many local communities certain families dominated specific crafts and trades over a long period. The advantage of a system based on the family lay in the degree of flexibility it gave, facilitating the transmission of skills and commercial know-how from one generation to another and enabling its members to act for one another. In horse dealing, family participation was so common that it was unusual for any of the regular traders to appear as isolated individuals in the toll books. Moreover, family groups often co-ordinated their activities with neighbouring dealers, even if they did not create more formal partnerships. United by a common purpose, they inevitably became friendly with each other and established kinship links. When Richard Stockton of Bobberhill, Malpas, died in 1583, for instance, the appraisers of his goods included John and Owen Griffiths, while his sons-in-law, Randle Stoke and Owen Wickstead, dealers all, acted as executors of his will.

Anton Ehlers, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

“Rainbow medicine”:  people, passion and politics - ingredients of a post-apartheid company-turnaround in South Africa

E-mail: aehl@sun.ac.za

Pep Stores was founded during the heyday of apartheid (1965) as a South African retail clothing company servicing the “cheap” (mainly coloured and black) market.  As such it became an example of a “dynamic non-mining and non-agricultural enterprise in the service sector that could build-up a profitable business in South Africa.”  Despite its history of continuous growth Pep Stores missed the financial boat in the nineties and did not achieve budgeted sales for five consecutive years in the middle nineties.  The paper describes and evaluates the Companies assessment of and reaction to this period of stagnation.  Despite applying all the retail textbook remedies management could not stop the sideways movement in the fortunes of the company.  In 1998 a new management team was appointed which succeeded in turning the company around in 2000.  The paper also attempts to explain the success of the one and the failure of the other. The paper suggests that the 2000 turnaround of the company was achieved by the new management team because their response was more sensitive to and aware of the way in which the period of democratic transition and the resulting introduction of a new social-economic and political dispensation in South Africa in 1994 influenced their traditional retail environment, and the consumption patterns, expectations and needs of their customers, staff, and suppliers.  The result was a reinvented Pep Stores with a more African sensitive image and symbolism, a management style in chime with the democratic spirit of the time, and a merchandise offering more compatible with the rising expectations of there newly emancipated customers.

As John Styles has already pointed out in Consumption and the World of Goods (1993), design historians have often not explored how information about changes in fashion and design were communicated back to the manufacturer. This was especially necessary if, as Styles argues, there was a geographical separation between the manufacturer and consumer. All too often authors appear to have taken it for granted that manufacturers knew what market requirements and preferences were.Staffordshire and its relationship with the United States is a useful case-study of a complex trade in ceramics. N. Buck suggested in The Development of the Organisation of the Anglo-American Trade 1800-1850 (1925, reprinted 1969) that there was a general transference of British manufacturers dealing through merchants, to manufacturers dealing directly with the United States in the post-1815 period. Applying this model to the ceramic trade explains how some manufacturers were able to cater for increasingly complex American tastes in the 19^th century. However, as it will be shown, not all Staffordshire manufacturers followed Buck’s model due to the economic realities of their situation. Therefore, we are left with the dilemma of explaining how factories remained aware of American socio-economic changes (crucial for producing saleable goods), without seemingly having their fingers on the pulse of the market? Who at the end of the day was making the design decisions?

Department stores are seen as indicators of consumption.  However, they do undertake a more complex role and may be used to demonstrate social trends outside the sphere of retailing.
In the early 1920s the Garden City movement was well established, with the first Garden City, Letchworth, established in 1903,  viewed by government as a success.  In 1919 moves were made to purchase land near the village of Welwyn with plans to construct a new city.
To provide the goods and services required by the new residents and workers a major department store was planned and in October 1921 the Welwyn Stores Ltd opened.  What made this store different from others was that it was owned and run by Welwyn Garden City Ltd and it was designed not merely as a shop but also as a focal point for the local community.  By 1937 the decision to rebuild the stores was undertaken and the new shop incorporated a sports club, 62 flats and a Masonic suite.  It was the largest building in Hertfordshire.
How the store developed and how it reflected the growth of the town has not been studied in detail.  The ownership and management structure of the shop provides a very useful comparison with other department stores at this time and it can be viewed as an indicator of social and welfare policy in the interwar period
Using the archive of the John Lewis Partnership, which acquired the store in 1983, and local sources including local newspapers, the dual role of the shop as supplier and community resource will demonstrate the diverse role the store undertook in the formative years of the development of Welwyn Garden City.

Analyses of middle-class cultures have emphasised the central importance of notions of respectability which centred, to a considerable extent, on domestic life and local reputation. Indeed Crossick and Haupt have emphasised these characteristics as central to petit-bourgeois society. Respectability had economic and social value, being important for social connections and as a means of maintaining credit and reputation. Of course ideals did not always correspond with practice. Travelling salesmen were an occupational group whose image and personality were important for their work, but whose mobility and absence from home had the potential to create tensions within the domestic life. It was a predominantly male occupation, involved regular absence from home and was popularly associated with immoral or unrespectable behaviour. This paper examines the different ways in which British commercial travellers related to the values of home and family during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It identifies an awareness of the constraints related to the nature of their work, but an emphasis on ways of satisfying ideals of respectability.

The modern, comparative-testing, consumer movement has always stressed that it is not anti-business. Indeed, in the UK, the Consumers' Association has arguably performed a useful marketing resource for businesses wishing to learn more about consumer preferences. In the US, the consumer movement has been said to have shied away from its more radical traditions and its links to the labour movement. In Germany, consumers have worked closely with producers in government institutions to participate in the development of new products. And in Japan consumer groups have been alleged to have subordinated questions of price to the greater goal of Japanese economic recovery and agricultural protection. Such aspects of the modern consumer movement have led many historians to conclude that consumer testing has ultimately served to bolster the capitalist economy rather than act as an alternative to it. If this is the case, it would be reasonable to expect few instances of consumer-producer hostility, especially since both broad sets of interests have claimed allegiance to a central aspect of competition theory - that of the virtues of the autonomous individual making informed choices in the marketplace which in turn force companies to become more efficient and competitive. Yet the modern consumer movement has been marked with as many conflicts with organised business as any that occurred in relation to either the anti-trust or the cooperative movements of the early twentieth century. This paper will examine just one such instance of conflict between businesses and modern consumerism - the attempt to establish a Consumer Protection Agency in the United States in the 1970s. This rather specific legislative event assumed a deeply symbolic importance, as organised big business interests rallied against the previous successes of the Ralph Nader-inspired public interest movement and the further efforts of consumer activists to extend the regulatory framework of government. Furthermore, it galvanised a business lobby community which then turned its attention to international affairs. Many of the same groups and individuals who worked against Nader in the US attacked the attempts by the international consumer movement to develop codes of practice in the United Nations overseeing consumer protection legislation and the activities of multinational corporations. Ultimately, as in the US case, consumer pressure for greater regulation of trade was defeated. This, however, enables a different perspective on the modern consumer movement to be made contrary to what has been assumed by existing accounts. Rather than arguing that the modern consumer movement has offered little of interest to contemporary forms of political engagement, it demonstrates instead that consumerism has continued to engage in political action: it has, however, lost the battle against business rather than avoided fighting it.

The study of the book trade – which played a key role in the dissemination of ideas – has become an important part of the History of the Book, a thriving interdisciplinary field of study. The British Book Trade Index (www.bbti.bham.ac.uk) is a powerful resource for book trade history, offering unprecedented scope for comparative research through its substantial database of outline biographical and trading information on booksellers, stationers, printers and a wide range of associated trades in England and Wales from the Middle Ages up to the 1851 census.
The proposed paper will discuss some of the findings of the research studies carried out within the BBTI project. This research – focusing mainly on bookselling and printing in English provincial towns and the networks which linked book-trade people in various parts of the country – has revealed a great deal of interesting new information about similarities and differences between the book trade in different types of town. It would be good to have an opportunity of discussing these results with those working in other areas of the history of retailing, to explore the extent to which the book trade was similar to other trades in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Note: The development of the BBTI website – and research studies carried out to evaluate it as a research tool – were supported by project funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board from April 2002 to March 2005.

In 1850 between 40 and 50 million pairs of boots and shoes were made in Great Britain entirely by hand.  Within the space of 50 years, the industry had become fully mechanised and developed its own method of distribution and retailing through a series of multiples, factors, wholesalers, co-operatives and private shops.  This paper details the development of the system and shows how a small number of manufacturers came to dominate the retail side through the establishment of multiple retail outlets, based predominantly in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.  The paper reviews the nature of tensions and conflicts that arose between the production and retail sides of companies, between outside producers and buyers, between the co-operative movement and the private sector and between the distributive and productive arms of the movement.  It goes on to examine in detail several examples and how they were resolved, taking into consideration both internal and external factors. The paper concludes that the competitive nature of the boot and shoe industry was largely responsible for dictating the way in which the retail side developed.

The 1920s and 1930s are often thought of as a boom time for retailing outlets particularly those which offered mass-produced women’s clothes.  It has been supposed that most women welcomed the increased fashion choices that department stores, chain stores and multiple shops gave them.  However, this was not always the case.  There was a sector of middle-class women who preferred to ‘keep up appearances’ by buying good-quality secondhand clothes rather than purchasing any of the growing quantity of mass-produced styles that were coming on to the market.  While these women would never have considered buying secondhand clothes from a market stall, there is evidence that they had no such qualms about buying such clothes through classified advertisements or one of the discreet mail-order dress agencies from the safety of their own homes. 
This paper will reveal evidence of this shadowy retailing experience and show that the anonymous nature of the contact between buyer and seller was one way of dealing with what otherwise might have been a socially awkward situation for the status-conscious middle classes.  It will also assess the strategic importance of dress agencies to the buying and selling of women’s clothes both before and after the interwar period.

In the major cities of northern Europe shopkeeping was an established profession by the early twelfth century. Textual and other sources from the following two hundred years provide a growing body of evidence for a culture of shopping and consumption that was appreciated in literary and philosophical discourse and in the visualization of commodities, and was apparent in the strategies adopted by shopkeepers to promote their business. The paper emphasizes the importance of retail trade in shops and bazaars, explores the physical arrangement and decoration of those premises, and examines the social practices and relationships associated with shopping transactions. It aims to remind historians of retailing in later periods that they would find much that was familiar about shopping before 1350 and in that way to contribute towards identifying the significance of later developments.

Drawing on a rich but neglected collection of American merchants’ business records, the proposed paper identifies the leading English firms exporting textiles to America from 1783-1800 and explicates the precise functions they performed, information not available from British sources for this period. My research highlights the remarkable success of Lancashire and Yorkshire firms in seizing the commercial initiative from the previously dominant centre of London after 1783. I emphasise two key factors. First, northern firms had a better knowledge of the types of goods demanded in America, an epistemological resource derived from new marketing strategies such as the deployment of US travellers. Second, north of England firms had stronger links to manufacturing and were thus able to supply the most appropriate goods at better prices. A substantial re-conceptualisation of Lancashire and Yorkshire’s marketing enterprise is required. Previous work suggests that factory manufacturers spearheaded the north’s control of textile marketing after 1783. However, before c. 1800, England’s exports to the US were not characterised by large consignments of undifferentiated products—the imperatives of the factory system—but by American merchants ordering a broad range of specialised and differentiated products, supplied by Lancashire and Yorkshire firms that had a close grasp of the demands of the market and who generated a series of flexible connections with production. Yorkshire and Lancashire’s success cannot be explained solely in relation to new production systems; to understand the industrialisation of England’s key manufacturing industries, further account must be taken of developments in marketing, and the diverse connections between markets and production.

Consumerism is fuelled not just by the satisfaction of needs, but also by the constant creation of new wants.  Consumers have to be kept permanently dissatisfied.  What is most desired is always just out of reach.  Some aspects of this can be traced back over several centuries.  Yet this way of looking at things sits uneasily with those moralities that emphasise the value of contentedness and simplicity.  Such moralities were pre-dominant in the early modern period, and have been influential at times ever since.  They provide a continuing critique of the dominant narrative of triumphant market capitalism and consumerism.
This papers explores some aspects of this ethical critique of consumerism – and hence of shopping for pleasure.  Starting from the seventeenth century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor, it traces this religious line of thought through the eighteenth century luxury debate and into nineteenth century evangelicalism.  It looks briefly at the contribution of Christian socialism to the critique of consumerism.  It then traces how some of this way of thinking kept re-surfacing in the twentieth century, for example in the "lifestyle" movement associated with some churches in the 1970s or in current attempts to promote a "Buy Nothing Day" each November.  Finally it speculates on how far these ethical critiques may influence alternative consumerism in the future.

Between 1650 and 1750, the methods and aims of dress-related retailing in Virginia underwent changes that mirrored Europe’s move from pre-industrial to consumer society.  Initially clothing and textile supplies in the colony were limited and demand was for utilitarian rather than fashionable items.  The development of a semi-urban capital town in 1700 and the growing reliability of shipping led to increased supply levels, allowing colonists to exercise choice when purchasing garments and accessories.  Goods were available throughout the year, rather than only after the fleet’s arrival, which allowed the consumer to make informed purchases (rather than buying anything that was available for fear the supplies would run out), which in turn forced retailers to adopt more sophisticated products and advertising.
In the 17th Century, Virginia stores carried modest goods for local people; fashionable items generally had to be purchased directly from England rather than via the Virginian suppliers.  By the mid-18th Century, however, regional "destination stores" were well-established, advertised in colonial newspapers and carried year-round stocks of fashionable goods.  Analysis of the changing types of goods found in store inventories and account books over the period shows that store goods and consumer purchasing patterns both underwent marked change during the period.  Using inventories and account books, as well as contemporary newspaper advertisements this paper will demonstrate the changing aims of Virginian dress retailing brought about in conjunction with the growth of the colonial consumer’s desire for fashionable dress.

In the 1930s, Communist leaders launched a campaign to remake the state-controlled system for the distribution of goods and to develop "Soviet trade": a non-capitalist, "cultured," and modern system of retailing.  At the same time they began to promote "socialist" consumption, even as scarcity persisted and the economy continued to prioritize heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods.  This paper considers a central component of the trade campaign: state sponsorship of public consumer criticism.  It examines how Soviet authorities promoted new forums for consumer feedback, and expanded already existing ones, to produce a new socialist consumer who would embrace a collectivist ethos and actively participate in state building.  Consumers, who had been marginalized in the Soviet polity in the 1920s, were explicitly recognized and deployed in the 1930s as Soviet citizens who had a civic obligation to contribute to trade reform. 
This paper argues that the 1930s mobilization of consumers served not only the regime’s interests but also customers’ interests.  Consumer participation in the forums for feedback and complaint served as an outlet for popular frustration and unrest, provided the state with useful information about retail conditions, and operated as a mechanism for social and political surveillance.  But it also provided consumers with an official stamp of legitimacy and new opportunities to shape local retail trade, make demands on the state, refashion identities, and become involved in public life.  This paper considers how groups who had largely remained outside the grasp of state and party institutions – e.g., women, particularly non-wage earning women, and peasants – made use of consumers’ new legitimacy and civic roles.

From the second half of the seventeenth century cotton goods – in particular those imported from India – participated in the shaping of new consumers’ choices and the construction of new concepts of desirability in Europe. Printed and painted cotton goods, such as calicoes and chintzes, occupy a familiar place in the construction of what is commonly defined as a ‘consumer revolution’. Issues of novelty, taste and imitation have been thoroughly examined in recent years by a booming historical literature surveying the place of consumers within the early modern British and European economies. 
This paper seek to contestualise the trade of textiles between Europe and Asia by analysing its quantitative, as well as the qualitative impact on the European economy. The records of the English, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Swedish East India companies provide precious information about the import of Asian textiles into Europe. The English and the Dutch followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a path already well trodden by the Portuguese chartered company, the Careira da India. Cotton textiles begun to be imported into Europe by sea from the late sixteenth century and by the mid seventeenth century they had grown to be one of the major commodities traded between India and Northern Europe. 
This paper shows how, contrary to what is suggested by most literature on the so-called English ‘calico craze’, cottons entering Britain were largely white and unprinted. Defoe’s notorious remark about the "persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets", is representative of the defensive action of the English woollen and silk interests, rather than of the quantitative significance of imported colourful Indian cottons. By contrast, more importance should be given to the European chartered companies and their intra-Asian and Indo-African textile trades. European traders managed to replace Guajarati merchants in the commerce of Indian textiles in south-east Asia and on the Red Sea routes. Whilst the home markets for cotton were influenced by intense mercantilist debates over the national balance of trades and the export of home products, the Asian markets represented a unique opportunity for European traders.

In the interwar years, the British Petroleum company struggled to create a unified corporate design which was to dominate BP outdoor and print advertising, its public relations and communication (printed letterheads and notebooks) as well as the painting of its pumps, tankers, road vehicles and railway tank wagons. Subsidiaries and partner companies of British Petroleum in the different European countries such as France, Switzerland, Germany and in Scandinavia had all developed their own colour schemes and graphic design for BP. These companies objected to efforts from British Petroleum in London to enforce the streamlining of the different lettering of “BP” into a singular, trans-nationally effective corporate design. By the early 1930s, most of the European BP partners had accepted the need for a unified corporate design for all BP services and products. With more and more motorists, air and rail passengers travelling within Europe, BP’s subsidiaries and partners realised that market shares directly depended on the recognition of “BP” as a modern, reliable and international, rather than “British” brand. At home, however, British Petroleum did not fail to employ a national rhetoric and presented BP as genuinely British petrol, the consumption of which could help keeping British workers employed and British trade independent of Dutch and American combines. Based on research conducted at the BP-Shell archive and the Public Record Office, this paper relates the case of branding and design of British Petroleum to wider debates about the rise of corporate brand cultures in the interwar era. British Petroleum realised that it could not fight its competitors on the base of price and so began to use design and advertising as a means of creating a differential advantage and to avoid cost leadership battles. I also argue that in the early 1920s marketing managers at British Petroleum were much more prepared to accept a lack of unity in corporate design and perceived this favourably as a form of national artistic expression which enabled BP to blend in with local consumer cultures.

The existence of textile retail shops was already characteristic of urban development in Barcelona in the Middle Ages, but the best known and studied is the spread of fabric shops in the eighteenth century, which were examined some decades ago by Pierre Vilar. He stated that the economic growth in Catalonia was sustained by a multiplicity of operations carried on by "elemental enterprises", located in Barcelona, and in the main cities and small towns all over the country.  More recently, other historians have explained that those firms were even much more important, due to the capital mobilised and its high number of transactions of trade, investments and credit operations. 
This study will analyse the most important changes inside the entrepreneurial structure, transactions of trade, investments and credit operations in textile retail shops in Barcelona during the eighteenth century related to: 
- The structural characteristics of these enterprises (number and social environment of the  partnerships, their rules and the organisation).
- The composition of capital stocks: for some partners, it was the contribution of money, assets, credit...., and for other partners it was work contribution.
- The rules and the duties of the manager and the capitalist partners. 
- The investments’ nature. Changes in the profit rates along the century.
- The structural characteristics of credit operations for customers and suppliers.

Food retailing and class consumption. Iconography and design of food products as markers of convergence and divergence. Case study: The Belgian retailer Delhaize 1867-1970.

E-mail: eva.van.nuland@vub.ac.be

 In my Ph.D. research I want to analyse the way foodstuffs have been promoted in Belgium from the 2^nd half of the 20^th century. This research is part of a broader investigation that aims at studying social, cultural and spatial convergence and divergence in Europe since about 1800. My first case study is Delhaize, an important retailer in Belgium between the 1860s and the 1970s, that introduced the multiple-store system in Belgium (own production, central distribution, dozens of identical stores in the country), as well as the supermarket in the 1950s. More particularly, attention is paid at advertising and the design of products by Delhaize. A discourse analysis of the advertisements and other sources will be conducted what will allow to get a grip on the social distinctions within food retailing. Also, the food products and their design and presentation will be approached as interactive forms of material culture, communicating a certain ‘being in the world’. By reading the language and the iconography of advertisements, the general tone of publicity and design of food products will be analysed. Delhaize has left abundant archives, among which are photographs, staff registers, tariff lists, advertisements, and various objects. I shall concentrate on promotional material (newspaper advertisements, posters, objects, brochures, tariff lists, wrapping paper etc.) to learn about the way the clientele was approached, attracted and seduced. I shall apply a critical analysis of the iconography of this promotional material.  My presentation will deal in particular with the analysis of the tariff lists (1867-1930). I will discuss the enormous increase and diversification of the supply of the Delhaize stores. This phenomenon will be placed in the context of the social, economic and cultural development of Belgium and of the Delhaize ambition to become the grocery store of the middle class. The main audience of the tariff lists were the local Delhaize representatives, although the clientele could also receive a copy. They serve as an inventory of the supply in the first place, rather than as publicity material. Quite a few details (the choice of brand products, details regarding the provenance of products, the use of brand names referring to the national cultural heritage, etc.) can reveal, however, how Delhaize tried to construct an image of quality and reliability.

A central feature of modern consumer societies is the large chain store corporation. In the work of Alfred D. Chandler the emergence of chains has been depicted as driven by the dynamics of three interrelated processes; transformations in technical and economic environments, innovative organizational responses and the assumption of historical efficiency. Although extremely powerful in analytical terms, the parsimony of the framework has come with some significant costs. One is what Joseph A. Schumpeter so clearly recognized; that any new "combination" representing a potential challenge to established interests would almost by default be resisted. This paper takes the conceptual interface between the perspectives of Chandler and Schumpeter as the starting point for an investigation of the emergence of chain stores in the US and Norway. Despite significant differences in historical context the two countries displayed striking similarities in the process of chain store evolution and opposition. The objective of the paper is to understand the dynamics of this opposition. Why were chain stores considered a threat, not only by established business interests, but also by local communities and political actors? What kind of action did this resistance result in? And why did the opposition eventually break down?

This paper will compare, contrast, and offer an explanation for the very different approaches embodied in these two initiatives to present examples of well-designed British manufactured products to the general public by the Council of Industrial Design (afterwards Design Council). 
'Design Fair' was a touring exhibition that followed in the wake of 'Britain Can Make It' in 1946 and was, in part, an attempt to maintain the momentum generated by the displays at the Victoria & Albert Museum, whilst also offering a vehicle through which the Council's message could be delivered effectively in locations beyond the capital city. 
The 'design fare' of the paper's title is a reference to a later exercise in dissemination, based around the index of well-designed products that grew out of the Council's contribution to the Festival of Britain in 1951.  This illustrated aid to selection incorporated product and design information, as well as detail on manufacturing, price and availability.  It was decided in the later 1960s that the index - which had up until that point only been available to personal visitors to the Haymarket Design Centre in London (opened 1956) - should be replicated and maintained at a number of different locations around the country.
The hopes invested in the national programme of which both schemes formed a part will provide the context for a consideration of these alternative routes to design and consumer education, often building on the spaces and specialisms of local retailers.
Separated by two decades in time, and by a wealth of Council experience in propagandising for design, these different models of display allow us to problematise the question of what was really being learnt and what obscured through these exhibitions.

During the interwar period, department stores in Liverpool and Manchester opened themselves up to a much wider customer base. Recent historiography has placed the department store at the centre of nineteenth century bourgeois consumer culture (Rappaport, Bowlby). The assumption that the department store became less important in twentieth century consumer experience and yet remained the domain of the bourgeois has so far persisted. However, through a range of sources including advertisements, material from the John Lewis Archive and Mass-Observation, this assumption is strongly challenged here. It is clear that the department store became a site of leisure for women from lower spending groups and by the late 1930s the stores appealed to women as a mass consumer group. However, women did not necessarily purchase their clothes in department stores. Rather, they came to see what clothes were fashionable, often making small purchases of items like stockings or gloves. Women imitated the fashionable clothes they saw, usually through home dressmaking.
This study is used to demonstrate the spectacularisation of the urban centres of Liverpool and Manchester more generally. There developed a performance aspect to the stores as women appeared in their finest clothes to see and be seen, this led to an increased pressure on women from all classes to "be fashionable". This had significant implications for social inclusion and exclusion.