ABSTRACT
This Introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores what might be regarded as the world of traditional retailing including markets; urban retailers and producer-retailers and the more dispersed and marginal retailers such as hawkers and village shopkeepers. It focuses on some of the key developments in ideas and practices that were a disruptive influence on this broadly traditional world. These included changing attitudes to material goods the growing importance of fashion, novelty and shopping for pleasure as well as for necessities and the way in which some of the more extreme manifestations of consumption, including obsessive collecting, heralded a new emphasis on individuality. The book tells the story of English provincial retailing in the period immediately up to the retail revolution of the later nineteenth century and the contemporaneous appearance of the first real mass consumer society.
