‘History of department stores: introduction’

When I was working on my history of the American department store industry, I wished for a book-length global study of department stores that united all the stories of retail development and their diverse historical contexts around the world. I am still waiting. Most historical research and analysis of the subject takes place within a single national framework. Given the intricacies of law and policy that shape the direction of retail development in different countries, as well as the important role of culture in all things commercial, national studies make sense. The practicalities of research also favour national studies. Transnational projects require broader training and sometimes additional language skills, as well as international access to archives. While we are still waiting, this special issue of History of Retailing and Consumption takes us closer. As I hope readers will agree, it demonstrates the rich and diverse path of mass retailing around the globe, covering Eastern Europe, the Americas, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Each article focuses on a single country, but together they contribute to our understanding of the international history of this important social institution. The special issue documents cross-cultural influences in retailing, highlighting the influence of the United States across the world, but moving beyond the more wellknown Anglo-American networks. Many similarities are evident across national borders, but vastly different political and economic contexts resulted in unique retail environments, shaping labour and consumption in divergent ways. In the Western context, department stores originated in the nineteenth century. The term ‘department store’ became current in the 1890s in both Britain and the United States, though it was more narrowly applied in Victorian Britain than it was across the Atlantic. One provincial English department store, Browns of Chester, even objected to the term. While historians have documented early opposition to the new retail mode on both sides of the Atlantic, customers embraced it. Perhaps sooner and to a greater extent in the United States than in Britain, department stores expanded the contours of consumer culture. As has been well documented in North America, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century these department stores made mass consumption possible through their low prices and wide variety of goods under one roof. They also spread a consumer ethos through mass advertising and branding, new merchandising and sales methods, lavish interiors and attractive amenities. Nineteenth-century American department stores were harbingers of the rise of a national commercial society and