ABSTRACT
The preoccupation with modernity and the divide between the 'traditional' and the 'modern' permeates all scholarship on retailing and shopping. Different historians, from different backgrounds and with different research agendas, have held widely divergent views about nineteenth-century retailing and shopping. The shopping landscape is the environment that connected all retail circuits and in which all shopkeepers, market vendors, peddlers, auctioneers and other retailers competed for customers. The iconic shopping sites of the nineteenth century, the arcades, market halls, auction houses and department stores, shared, borrowed, compressed, enlarged and reworked spatial traits that already circulated in the shopping landscape. Distancing ourselves from the teleological perspective of modernity does not entail negating the novelty of certain shopping sites any more than it requires a pertinent focus on more traditional or less pronounced retail forms. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
