Reinterpreting shopping in the Enlightenment: retail practices, consumer experiences, governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This new special issue on consumption and shopping practices in the eighteenth-century, takes further steps in reinterpreting the Enlightenment period in north-western Europe. The five papers assembled here will take the reader in new and often exciting directions with a shared concern to uncover under-studied source material and a willingness to explore and thematize shopping and consumption from a fine-grained and detailed historical perspective. The commodity culture of the Enlightenment will be analyzed to discover how it was embodied, enacted and perceived in its own time and context. In what follows, the reader will be introduced to toy- and bookshops in Enlightenment England; the role of provincial fairs; the way illicit goods were instrumental in tying consumer and retailers together in late eighteenth century Sweden; and, finally, learn more about subsequent phases of regulation and deregulation of the Viennese food markets around 1800. The following articles make the important implicit claim that shopping cultures in the Enlightenment worked ‘differently’, according to other cultural value schemes, conventions and norms than our own. These often-hidden cultural contexts remain in dire need to be resuscitated by uncovering new sources, doing careful methodological analysis, and by creatively connecting new findings to already existing knowledge.