Retailing History as Economic and Cultural History: Strategies of Survival by Specialist Tobacconists in the Mass Market

Matthew Hilton

Business History, 1998, vol. 40, issue 4, 115-137

Abstract: This article stresses how the history of retailing can be seen as both economic and cultural history. It does so by using a case study of the history of the specialist tobacconist from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. These independent retailers moved from a position of skilled artisan traders in which they not only sold commodities but played a major role in the direction of consumption to one in which they merely formed the intermediary between the two greater cultural forces of the producer and mass of consumers. Despite various efforts to re-install agency into their trading role, their history mirrors that of many other institutions in a society which became increasingly polarised between the perceived masses and the emerging economic and cultural elities.

Date: 1998
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DOI: 10.1080/00076799800000341

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