Reviewed by: Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England James Jaffe (bio) Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England. By Nancy CoxKarin Dannehl. Aldershot Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xi+214. $99. Anthropologists long have been aware that the exchange process possesses multiple meanings. Familiar market-based exchanges, for example, exhibit not only fundamental economic features of a given society, such as systems of production and distribution; they also express less tangible cultural values such as wants, desires, and even dreams. Moreover, those cultural values inscribed in wants and desires never are created in vacuo. Instead, [End Page 1050] there is a continuous exchange of information between the factors of production and the desires of consumption. It is in this sense that anthropologists, sociologists, and historians speak of a society’s market culture. For historians dealing with past eras, it is a notoriously difficult task to identify, define, and analyze these elements of a market culture because there is a great risk of ascribing to previous generations our own assumptions, dreams, and fears. This is especially true when and where the historical evidence is vague, inchoate, or erratic. Nevertheless, this is the sizable task undertaken by Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl, the authors of this volume. As the title indicates, their goal is to explicate the ways in which early modern retailing and retailers were perceived by contemporaries, and they employ the term“ perception” both in the sense in which retailing was physically seen and in which retailing was understood and comprehended. As they show, both of these forms of perception were comprised of important cultural elements that served to illuminate aspects of early modern English society. One prominent theme is the pronounced distinction between rural and urban England. The authors argue that perceptions of retailing were molded, if not necessarily constituted, by cultural notions surrounding the value of landed society. This is especially apparent in the manner in which shops, shopkeepers, and itinerant tradesmen appear or, more accurately, do not appear in the literature and art of the era. More generally, the authors further argue that there was a great deal of ambivalence apparent in the responses to retailing and retailers. While their contributions to prosperity and consumption were often applauded, their potential threat to the traditional social order was far less welcomed. Somewhat less tangible than these physical manifestations of retailing is the cultural context of communication that permeated the exchange of information between retailers and producers. In this aspect of their research, the authors rely on the insights of modern work on communications and advertising, arguing, simply put, that early modern advertising was comprised of numerous signals intended both to relay specific information about individual products and to locate these products within a hierarchy of fashion and style. These signals necessarily were also products of contemporary culture. Unfortunately, this book suffers from the lack of either a strong narrative thread or a uniform authorial voice. Cox and Dannehl admit that their joint enterprise represents the merger of two distinct research projects rather than a unified effort. The result is that the book is best described as a collection of essays and, as such, exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. The chapters do not always fit together well, and there is an unnecessary amount of repetition as similar or identical information, especially concerning historiographic issues, appears and reappears in several different chapters. [End Page 1051] More serious, however, is the way in which the theoretical foundations of the book suffer from this same lack of focus, so much so that the theme of “perceptions” often becomes lost or marginalized. Consumption theory, communications theory, Marxisant social theory, cognitive theory, linguistics, and spatial theory all vie with one another for interpretive significance. Most problematic is that actual consumer perceptions of retailing are not very much in evidence here. By necessity, much of the evidence is taken from trade cards and other forms of advertisement. This leads to the question of whether the authors actually are dealing with “perceptions” of retailing or its “projections.” A significant portion of this book is based on a potentially valuable searchable database of historical terms used in trade that the...
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Jan 1, 2009
Kathleen Wolf 
