This collection of high-standard essays, like other books already published in the Ashgate series on “The History of Retailing and Consumption,” is premised upon the assumption that there is more to the relationship between a buyer and a seller than the law of supply and demand. The focus of this contribution to a growing body of literature on the history of consumption is that the continuing moral ambivalence toward selling, and the contested nature of the commodity, of the customer, and of what makes a fair profit in retail, created the conditions for the development of various “cultures of selling” since 1700. These cultures are approached from three different perspectives.

The first section of the book concentrates on the cultural geography of consumption. This geography was not confined to the boundary of the shop but involved a tension between the concrete space of the shop and the imagined space found in newspaper advertisements, resulting in the production of larger consuming urban spaces. This approach is illustrated in Bronwen Edwards's study of “West End Shopping with Vogue,” in Victoria Morgan's study of retail advertising spaces in eighteenth-century provincial England, and in the essay by Gareth Shaw, Louise Hill Curth, and Andrew Alexander, which narrates the attempts of the Aerated Bread Company (ABC) to respond to competition by developing new eating places, particularly for women, and by producing their own imagined urban geography, notably through a London Blue Pocket Guide for tourists. The three essays of the second section are concerned with the legal and institutional context of buying and selling. In his study of London “bucket shops,” Dilwyn Porter discusses the difficulty of establishing a market of stocks and shares from the 1880s to the Prevention of Fraud (Investment) Act in 1939, at a time when outside brokers not necessarily connected with the stock exchange offered various financial services, often through the financial press. The two other essays in the section are concerned with the relation of credit to working-class consumption. Clive Edwards documents the role of credit in the emergence of the mass retail furniture business after 1850, and Avram Taylor concentrates on the place and varieties of credit in working-class strategies to access consumption. The third section, finally, explores the notion of “good salesmanship.” This is done by focusing on interactions between seller and buyer and by examining ideals of good salesmanship and fair dealing as formalized in selling manuals or as deployed in disputes, protests, and controversies. Joy Cushman shows that the postwar “campaign for courtesy” that transformed salesmanship in both Britain and America, and the rhetoric of service according to which “the customer is always right,” was not only an attempt to secure customer loyalty in a context of increased competition in the retailing sector but also a response to problems recruiting and retaining long-term personnel by turning what Cushman describes as a form of “emotional labour” into “sincerity” (206, 209). Elizabeth Rothenberg uses commercial handbooks to trace a shift, in 1680–1722, from a focus on Christian ethics to a system of relationships in which commerce was conceived as an end in itself. Christina Schröder focuses on “interactions of discontent” between sales assistants and customers in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, in a context in which “supply deficiencies and shortages were inherent to the political system” (263). She shows how tensions between customers and shop assistants came to reflect a growing discontent with the socialist state as the new leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, failed to improve consumption. Susan Lomax, finally, uses controversies surrounding “massed” or “open” display in order to highlight underlying conflicts of value among British and American retailers. Massed display was described as “genuine,” “unpretentious,” or “British” but could also appear “ordinary” and “old-fashioned.” Open display, by contrast, was regarded either an expression of expertise and creativity, or a means to “trickery” or “deceit.”

This book does not attempt to map a new area for historical research. It is a collection of case studies on well-established topics in the current historiography of consumption, including the study of printed advertisements, the making of consuming spaces, the role of narratives or pictures in shaping gender and class identities, the impact of consumption credit, the legal and institutional conditions of trust, and finally the role of available models of justice in the different forms of public critique and justification. It brings together these different strands of research under the single banner of “cultures of selling.” Save the altogether not unexpected institutionalist assumption that such “cultures of selling” are made by all that shapes and codifies the relationship between a buyer and a seller, this concept is still problematic after reading the book. If the commodification of goods is, as the editors emphasize, unstable and contested, then it must follow that retailing is only one segment of consumption. This raises questions about the relationship between “cultures of selling” and the broader cultures of consumption, both in terms of typology and of periodization. How, for example, did cultures of retail selling interact with cultures of wholesale selling and with the corporate consumption of large (public or private) retailers such as municipalities, the state, or department stores? Did competition and mutual criticism between these, but also with other parties involved in the relationship between customers and retailers, including religious organizations and various bodies claiming to represent the interests of consumers, affect the buying and selling relationship, and how did it change over time? Finally, how did individual buyers respond to the existence of different, sometimes conflicting, “cultures of selling,” and did they develop their own distinct cultures of buying? Such general questions cannot possibly do justice to a book that lets scholarship speak for itself and in which each individual chapter shows richly textured cultures of selling in action. This book should find many readers who are interested in consumption. They will find a rich source of information and analysis.