ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two consumer (r)evolutions and specifically their impact on retailing and shopping. This will be done for two periods of almost axiomatic importance in the history of North-Western Europe – The Enlightenment (c.1670–1830) and the Fin-de-Siècle World (c.1870–1914). Both of these periods are crucial in historiographical debates which assign freedom and liberation to consumer choice. From debates about the eighteenth-century ‘consumer revolution’ to those of the emerging, nineteenth-century ‘mass-markets’, it has often been stated how demand-side changes played a crucial role in transforming present-day nations like England, Belgium and The Netherlands. While not radically deconstructing these claims, this chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of the active role of the demand side in retail history. By stressing deep-historical lines of continuity and downplaying triumphant Western modernisation theses, it is argued how the “retail revolution” was first and foremost a cultural revolution – albeit in the first place one for the well-to-do and bourgeois.
