This volume of richly researched and crisply argued essays serves as a memorial to the life and work of Francesca Carnevali, whose insightful contributions to business and economic history steadily increased during the years immediately preceding her death in 2013. The book is not a festschrift, which usually celebrates the retirement of a distinguished, living scholar through essays by associated doctoral students and colleagues. Yet People, Places, and Business Cultures very much fulfills its classic purposes, as detailed decades ago: “Festschriften are not just retrospective, but prospective. That is to say the Festschrift is a Beruf, a call to further work, effort, and energy, a call to the improvement of learning, of a discipline, a science, an artistic vision, or an intellectual position.”^{Footnote 1} The editors sought to extend Francesca Carnevali’s “work and legacy…by presenting new perspectives on debates in economic, social and business history.”^{Footnote 2} And they have.

The opening chapter by Paoli DiMartino, Francesca’s husband and colleague, reviews her intellectually adventurous career, “moving from topic to topic…radically changing perspective and methodology.”^{Footnote 3} Critiquing the literature of British “declinism” and arguing for politics’ key role in building banking systems in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe led Francesca to investigating finance and production in Birmingham’s jewelry trades, then to exploring luxury enterprises, before a microhistorical leap into analyzing proprietors’ symbolic and ritual practices enacted through trade association parades and conventions. Subsequent essays resonate with her venturesome spirit and her methodological “quest,” as Andrew Popp puts it in his meticulous dissection of how nineteenth-century Liverpool cotton merchants “performed the market” through the custom of outdoor public trading (and in all weather!). Their coded shouts and signals both confirmed offers and deals inside the cotton fraternity and drew the boundary between it and observers, to whom this dance of commerce proved fascinating yet impenetrable. Market exchanges reinforced “the shared culture of brokers,” as did their “distinctive and rich modes of dress.”^{Footnote 4}

Alberto Rinaldi and Anna Spadavecchia deliver a meticulous reconstruction of postwar Italian political maneuvering in the process of creating subsidized tracks for loans to artisans and entrepreneurs, resonating with Francesca’s dual interests in banking and industrial districts. Political bargaining created a framework that protected smaller and local banks from price wars that would have wrecked them, thus preserving local credit access. “Nonetheless, competition among local banks and inside local economies was often ferocious.”^{Footnote 5} Les Hannah, who supervised Francesca’s London School of Economics dissertation, delivers a brisk and provocative comparison of pre-1914 U.S. and UK banking capacities for lending and risk-taking, then segues into a blunt critique of Broadberry and Crafts’s tale of “cartels, tariffs [and] nationalizations” that eroded the UK market economy during and after World War I, “from which Britain only broke free after 1979” (i.e., in the Thatcher years). Hannah then turns to dynamiting claims that prewar German innovation outpaced Britain’s, in a tour-de-force breathtaking fourteen-line runaway sentence that explains why so many leading German firms lagged UK competitors.^{Footnote 6} Remarkable.

Peter Scott and James Walker’s review of the interwar transformation of British retailing was an eye-opener for this American reader, as it underscores how deeply class was embedded in customary commercial transactions.^{Footnote 7} Middle- and higher-class stores were long hostile to working-class shoppers, not least in having no marked prices (if you have to ask, you cannot afford it). Their study also valuably supplants the Selfridge’s-as-democratizer account, showing the critical roles of Boots, Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, and British Woolworth’s in bringing about self-service, visible pricing of affordable goods, and welfare programs for staff. Five more essays fill out the set, but space restrictions here permit brief mention of just one of them: Lucy Newton’s extension of research begun with Francesca on piano making and marketing in Victorian Britain. The first fruit of that effort appeared in this journal in 2013 and won the Business History Conference’s Scranton Best Article Prize in 2015. Their project aimed to make up for the historiographical neglect of UK household goods manufacturing, focusing on pianos as middle-class status symbols and as batch-made products of skilled-labor-intensive companies within a London industrial district. Diving deep into the records, Newton finds hundreds of generally small (and not very durable) enterprises situated amid a network of parts providers, specialist retailers, and traditional crafts (forty individual trades). Increased scale hardly mattered as one of the largest makers “could only produce about seven pianos per workman per annum, little different from the productivity of a small firm.”^{Footnote 8} Andrew Popp, in an online obituary, retrospectively described Francesca Carnevali as “sharply intelligent, wickedly funny, and bracingly honest, with a finely-honed sense of justice.”^{Footnote 9} Just so. She would have delighted in these sharply drawn, truly memorable essays. You will too.