Retailing and Distribution

Since 1998, the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD), has been co-ordinating our own projects and providing an international hub for researchers working on various aspects of retailing, distribution and consumption history.

Under the leadership of Professor Laura Ugolini, CHORD’s events continues to be the major international forum for scholarly exchange in the field, alongside a regular series of online workshops, ‘taster’ events and a retail history blog.

CHORD researchers work on different aspects of retailing, distribution and consumption history:

• Emeritus Professor John Benson has published widely on various aspects of modern British and Canadian history, including the rise of consumer culture.
• Dr Simon Constantine has researched the itinerant trading of the Sinti and Roma, and its regulation, as part of the marginalisation of travelling communities in Germany.
• Dr Karin Dannehl works on the history and material culture of retailing and trade in early modern England.
• Dr George Gosling is currently researching the related histories of charity retail and blind shopkeepers.
• Nick Gray is working towards a PhD on ‘Consumer credit in the clothing and textile retail trade: A study of two English provincial retailers, 1878-1914’.
• Dr Richard Hawkins works on the history of brand development and entrepreneurship, including in the Hawaiian pineapple canning industry.
• Dr David Hussey and Dr Margaret Ponsonby have published on the English homemaker as consumer in the long eighteenth century.
• Dr Grace Millar has researched the role of retailers in supporting communities through prolonged industrial action in Britain and New Zealand.
• Dr Ian Mitchell has published widely on British retailing traditions and innovations since the eighteenth century.
• Dr Alison Toplis previously worked as a dress and textiles specialist at Christie’s Auctioneers and now researches the history of everyday and working clothes.
• Professor Laura Ugolini works on gender and masculinity in modern Britain, including the history of menswear and military uniforms during the First World War.

Click here to find out more about CHORD

• Richard Hawkins, A Pacific Industry: The History of Pineapple Canning in Hawaii, (2020)
• Simon Constantine, ‘Denying the Right to Work: German Trade Regulation and Anti-Gypsy Policy 1871-1914’, History of Retailing and Consumption, (2021)
• David Hussey (with Margaret Ponsonby), Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, (2017)
• Laura Ugolini and John Benson (eds.), Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700, (2018)
• Laura Ugolini’ ‘The Recruiting Muddle: Married Men, Conscription and Masculinity in First World War England’, First World War Studies, (2018)

In 2007, Dr Nancy Cox and Dr Karin Dannehl published an open access digital dictionary of nearly 4,000 terms found used in documents relating to trade and retail in early modern Britain.

The dictionary and the larger dataset produced by the project were part of a significant contribution to the study of early modern retailing and consumption. Dr Cox’s key publications included The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550-1820 (2000), Retailing and the Language of Goods, 1550-1820 (2015) and with Dr Dannehl Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England (2007).

Click here to access the Online Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, 1550-1820

Dress and gender are central themes in the work of a number of our researchers, including past and present doctoral researchers.

Dr Alison Toplis won the 2022 Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year award for her book on The Hidden History of the Smock Frock. She traces the garment’s history from utilitarian rural workwear, through its emotional association to traditions of ‘peasant’ craft in an age of urbanisation, to its more recent reinvention in fashion collections in the twenty-first century.

Prof Laura Ugolini has used changes in the retailing and consumption of menswear, including military uniforms, to illuminate wider histories of masculinity. This work was published in her 2007 book Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880-1939 and chapters in later books including 2021’s Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c.1870-1920, as well as a series of journal articles in the journals Textile History, Fashion Theory, War & Society and the Journal of Design History.

The latest book to come out of the ongoing CHORD workshop series is Retail & Community: Business, Charity and Global Britain in the Long Twentieth Century, which will be published open access in early 2024 by Bristol University Press.

For the first time, the collection brings together the histories of commercial and co-operative retailing with the under-researched history of charity retail, exploring the community connections and social embeddedness of these different types of retail in an era more usually defined as one of modernisation and depersonalisation.

CHORD researchers have contributed chapters on the various meanings of different store credit arrangements, the educational and social projects linked to co-op stores, the formation of the traditional model of the British charity shop, and social support role of retailers during prolonged industrial action in Britain and New Zealand.

Other chapters, most of which began as papers at CHORD workshops, focus on the racial politics of John Lewis employment practices, representations of Japan at late-Victorian charity bazaars, the retailing activities of the Salvation Army, selling womenswear in the Black Country, the postcolonial meanings of the British Asian corner shop and failed attempts to export the British model of the charity shop to South Africa.

Click here to find out more

The history of charity shops is a largely overlooked topic, though this is something a small number of historians and other researchers are beginning to change. One of them is Dr George Gosling, who has been using charity archives to uncover a history of British charities running shops as far back as the late eighteenth century.

These shops have not always resembled the charity shop as we know it. For some the objective was the selling cheap of food or household goods to those struggling to make ends meet, rather than fundraising for another charitable project. The earliest case found of a bricks-and-mortar fundraising shop did not sell second-hand donated items but was a flower shop. Where disability and international aid charities were supporting the production of craft items in their projects, shops and mail order operations have both been a major part of finding a market for them. These traditions are all distinct from, but have fed into, the charity shop so familiar on British high streets today.

Click here to find out more about Dr Gosling’s charity shop history research, which has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking.

Selected books

• George Campbell Gosling, Alix R. Green and Grace Millar (eds), Retail and Community: Business, Charity and Global Britain in the Long Twentieth Century (forthcoming 2024)
• Alison Toplis, The Hidden History of the Smock Frock (2022) – Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year 2022
• Laura Ugolini, Fathers and Sons in the English Middle-Class (2021)
• Richard A. Hawkins, A Pacific Industry: The History of Pineapple Canning in Hawaii (2020)
• Laura Ugolini and John Benson (eds), Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700 (2018)
• David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby (eds), Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (2017)
• Ian Mitchell, Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing, 1700 to 1850 (2014)
• David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby, The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (2012)
• Alison Toplis, The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800-1850 (2011)
• Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl, Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England (2007)
• Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880-1939 (2007)
• John Benson and Laura Ugolini (eds), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Retailing in Britain, 1550-2000 (2002)
• John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980 (1994)

Selected articles and chapters in collections

• Nick Gray, ‘Credit relations between Hall and Spindler of Leamington Spa and their customers, 1878-1896’ in Gosling et al. (eds), Retail and Community (forthcoming 2024)
• George Campbell Gosling, ‘Community and the limits of commercialism in the British charity shop, 1940s-1970s’ in Gosling et al. (eds), Retail and Community (forthcoming 2024)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Shopkeeper and educator: aspects of the co - operative movement in England, 1870-1914’ in Gosling et al. (eds), Retail and Community (forthcoming 2024)
• Grace Millar et al., ‘‘The grocer carried me for three months’: understanding shop credit during extended strikes and lockouts in England and New Zealand’ in Gosling et al. (eds), Retail and Community (forthcoming 2024)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘Digitised historic newspapers as a primary source for marketing historians’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2022)
• Simon Constantine, ‘Denying the Right to Work: German Trade Regulation and Anti-Gypsy Policy, 1871-1914’, History of Retailing and Consumption (2021)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘High street/main street’ in Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard (eds), The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing (2018)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Retail markets in northern and midland England, 1870–1914: civic icon, municipal white elephant, or consumer paradise?’, Economic History Review (2018)
• Alison Toplis, ‘The Smock Frock: The Journey from Fieldwork to the Pages of Vogue’, Textile History (2018)
• Alison Toplis, ‘Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical? Political interpretations of one garment in nineteenth-century England’ in Kevin A. Morrison (ed.), Political and Sartorial Styles: Britain and its Colonies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2018)
• Karin Dannehl, ‘‘To Families Furnishing Kitchens’: Domestic Utensils and their Use in the Eighteenth-Century Home’ in Hussey and Ponsonby (eds), Buying for the Home (2017)
• David Hussey, ‘Guns, Horses and Stylish Waistcoats? Male Consumer Activity and Domestic Shopping in Late-Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century England’ in Hussey and Ponsonby (eds), Buying for the Home (2017)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘The origins of marketing practice in Britain: from the ancient to the early twentieth century’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2017)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘Paprika Schlesinger: The development of a luxury retail shoe brand in Belle Époque, Vienna’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2017)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘Marketing history in Britain: From the ancient to the internet eras’ in D.G. Brian Jones and Mark Tadajewski (eds), The Routledge Companion to Marketing History (2016)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘The Victorian provincial department store: a category too many?’, History of Retailing and Consumption (2015)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Ethical shopping in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2015)
• David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby, ‘Single People and the Material Culture of the English Urban Home in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in Groot, Devos and Schmidt (eds), Single Life and the City, 1200-1900 (2015)
• Alison Toplis, ‘[No] spot in the whole world offers the advantages to the capitalist which these colonies do’: Setting up a draper’s shop in Van Diemen’s Land during the 1830s’, Family and Community History (2013)
• Laura Ugolini, ‘The illicit consumption of military uniforms in Britain, 1914-1918’, Journal of Design History (2011)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Supplying the masses: retailing and town governance in Macclesfield, Stockport and Birkenhead, 1780–1860’, Urban History (2011)
• John Benson and Laura Ugolini, ‘Beyond the shop: problems and possibilities’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2010)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Innovation in non-food retailing in the early nineteenth century: The curious case of the bazaar’, Business History (2010)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘Retailing Innovation and Urban Markets, c.1800-1850’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2010)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘‘Old books — New Bound’? Selling Second-Hand Books in England, c. 1680–1850’ in Jon Stobart and Ilja Damme (eds), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700-1900 (2010)
• Alison Toplis, ‘A Stolen Garment or a Reasonable Purchase? The Male Consumer and the Illicit Second-Hand Clothing Market in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’ in Stobart and Damme (eds), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade (2010)
• Alison Toplis, ‘The illicit trade in clothing, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, 1800‐1850’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (2010)
• Laura Ugolini, ‘Consumers to combatants? British uniforms and identities, 1914-18’, Fashion Theory (2010)
• Laura Ugolini, ‘Autobiographies and menswear consumption in Britain, c.1880-1939’, Textile History (2009)
• Alison Toplis, ‘The Manufacture and Provision of Rural Garments, 1800–1850: A Case Study of Herefordshire and Worcestershire’, Textile History (2009)
• Alison Toplis, ‘Ready-Made Clothing Advertisements in Two Provincial Newspapers, 1800-1850’, International Journal of Regional and Local Studies (2009)
• Karin Dannehl, ‘Object biographies: From production to consumption’ in Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (2009)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘Advertising and the Hawaiian Pineapple Canning Industry, 1929-39’, Journal of Macromarketing (2009)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘The Influence of American Retailing Innovation in Britain: A Case Study of FW Woolworth & Co., 1909-1982’, Proceedings of the Conference on Historical Research and Analysis in Marketing (2009)
• Ian Mitchell, ‘The changing role of fairs in the long eighteenth century: evidence from the north midlands’, Economic History Review (2007)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘The Cooperative Marketing of Hawaiian Canned Pineapple, 1908-39’, Proceedings of the Conference on Historical Research and Analysis in Marketing (2007)
• Laura Ugolini, ‘Ready-to-wear or Made-to-measure? Consumer Choice in the British Menswear Trade, 1900-1939’, Textile History (2003)
• Laura Ugolini, ‘Men, Masculinities, and Menswear Advertising, c. 1890-1914’ in Benson and Ugolini (eds), A Nation of Shopkeepers (2002)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘Lynchburg’s Swabian Jewish Entrepreneurs in War and Peace’, Southern Jewish History (2000)
• Gareth Shaw, Andrew Alexander, John Benson and Deborah Hodson, ‘The Evolving Culture of Retailer Regulation and the Failure of the ‘Balfour Bill’ in Interwar Britain’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (2000)
• Andrew Alexander, John Benson and Gareth Shaw, ‘Action and reaction: competition and the multiple retailer in 1930s Britain’, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research (1999)
• Gareth Shaw, Andrew Alexander, John Benson and John Jones, ‘Structural and Spatial Trends in British Retailing: The Importance of Firm-Level Studies’, Business History (1998)
• John Benson, ‘Working-Class Consumption, Saving, and Investment in England and Wales, 1851–1911’, Journal of Design History (1996)
• Richard A. Hawkins, ‘The Pineapple Canning Industry During the World Depression of the 1930s’, Business History (1989)
• John Benson, ‘Hawking and Peddling in Canada, 1867-1914’, Histoire Sociale-Social History (1985)