ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses in particular upon some of the research on retailing history in the modern era, and predominantly after 1850. A established theme within the literature is that earlier studies of the retail industry often inadequately reflected and addressed the extent and modern characteristics of the retail system in the period before 1850. As has been widely commented upon, J. B. Jefferys’s Retail Trading in Britain 1850–1950 has had a significant impact upon the subsequent study of the history of retailing, and helps to explain much of the focus on large-scale institutional types such as the multiple, co-operative and department store retailer. The growth in consumption of a widening range of consumer durables towards the end of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, and the stimulus that this provided to the retailing of such goods, has been the subject of another body of research that contributes to understanding.
