Recommendation und Reklame

Abstract

Summary Recommendation and Promotion.German Fire-Engine Makers and Early Modern Practicesof Advertising This paper sets out to analyse early modern practices of advertising beyond traditional modernization narratives. Combining a case-study, the marketing of fire engines in the 18th-century Lower Rhine region, with theoretical considerations, it argues that studying practices of advertising can contribute to historicizing the ‚economic‘ in a broader perspective. The paper examines the interplay between different forms of advertising, e. g. printed advertisements, public demonstrations, and recommendation letters. It identifies various strategies used to display expertise and diversify the groups of potential customers. These strategies are mapped against the particular profile of the engine-makers who moved between the border-crossing milieu of artisan-inventors and the patronage of regional administrative elites. Finally, the paper traces the different ways engine-makers competed with each other in the regional „Intelligenzblatt“ as opposed to in the marketplace, thereby linking the historicization of advertising to current debates in market sociology.