ABSTRACT This paper explores the transformation of the retail sector in the Czech and Slovak Republics following the collapse of the centrally planned economy in 1989. It identifies three core stages of retail development – atomisation, internationalisation, and consolidation – and analyses their temporal and spatial dynamics in both countries. Drawing on extensive empirical data, the study highlights key differences in the space and structure of transformation, foreign retail chains’ entry and diffusion strategies, and the evolving consumer behaviour. The paper also reflects on broader socio-economic shifts and their dynamics and spatial reconfigurations driven by globalisation, including the emergence of new retail formats such as hypermarkets, discount stores, and shopping centres. The findings provide a comparative and interpretative insight into the retail modernisation process in two post-socialist states, illustrating the interplay between global influences and regional specificities in shaping contemporary retail geographies.

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing relationship between urban population growth and the size, composition, functions and ranking of shopping centres in South London during the nineteenth century. It addresses some of the methodological issues that arose in previous studies of nineteenth-century retailing in England and Wales. The fifteen largest shopping centres have been ranked using the mean of the respective scores of their eight functional variables. Regression analysis has been used to examine the changing relationship which existed between urban population and the size, composition, and functions of shopping in 1824, 1872 and 1901. This analysis suggests that the hierarchy of shopping centres in South London was a linear continuum rather than a stepped-liked structure. It shed light on significant changes in the number of retail and commercial properties in the shopping centres. Some 68 of these centres are classified as either metropolitan (4) major (16) central area zones (3) and district (45) in the 2021 London Plan.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the first decade of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the Swedish market (1929–1939), critically examining its national marketing campaign through van Leeuwen’s model of legitimation. It argues that scientific motherhood was a core aspect of Kellogg’s campaign, with advertisements emphasising three key themes: The Dutiful Mother and Wife; The Importance of Good Health; and The Embracing of Modernity. Through their advertisements, Kellogg’s urged mothers to break old breakfast habits and switch to Corn Flakes to ‘protect’ their children, emphasising the product’s health benefits. They also drew attention to the convenience and versatility of Corn Flakes, making it ideal for modern life. The campaign was highly effective, both shaping mothers’ understanding of cereal and turning it into a core part of Swedish breakfast habits. Central to this success was Kellogg’s careful balance between conveying expert knowledge and transmitting common sense grounded in established social practices. Treading this difficult tightrope served to give mothers a false sense of control over their lives as if they were the knowledge holders with agency to make their own decisions about their families, yet in reality they were being guided by the views of physicians, scientists, grocers and, ultimately, the food industry.

ABSTRACTThis new special issue on consumption and shopping practices in the eighteenth-century, takes further steps in reinterpreting the Enlightenment period in north-western Europe. The five papers assembled here will take the reader in new and often exciting directions with a shared concern to uncover under-studied source material and a willingness to explore and thematize shopping and consumption from a fine-grained and detailed historical perspective. The commodity culture of the Enlightenment will be analyzed to discover how it was embodied, enacted and perceived in its own time and context. In what follows, the reader will be introduced to toy- and bookshops in Enlightenment England; the role of provincial fairs; the way illicit goods were instrumental in tying consumer and retailers together in late eighteenth century Sweden; and, finally, learn more about subsequent phases of regulation and deregulation of the Viennese food markets around 1800. The following articles make the important implicit claim that shopping cultures in the Enlightenment worked ‘differently’, according to other cultural value schemes, conventions and norms than our own. These often-hidden cultural contexts remain in dire need to be resuscitated by uncovering new sources, doing careful methodological analysis, and by creatively connecting new findings to already existing knowledge.

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the advertising of the carriage trade in the United States during the Gilded Age. The trade’s changing products and its expanding markets helped define the advertising employed to reach diverse consumers. The article also gives a brief history of the Studebaker Brothers Company and its advertisements, as well as looking at some early automobile advertising from several companies. The carriage trade in the United States, through industrial manufacturing techniques, created a consumer product that needed to find its market. To secure a place for carriages in this new consumer society, manufacturers and distributors used advertising, as they would later for the automobiles that were to replace them. The article includes descriptions of carriage and automobile ads, representing a range of business, retail, and lifestyle publications and their customers.

ABSTRACTThe First World War was a complex moment in the history of dress and garment manufacture. Materials and textile production were diverted largely to war manufacturing, and the meanings of clothing became caught up in particular notions of loyalty and patriotism. One change in dress that has received little attention was the growth of the fur garment and trim industry in these years of fashion austerity. New Zealand provides a fascinating case study of the blossoming of the ‘new world’ fur trade and garment industry from 1914 because, despite its small size and remoteness from Britain and Europe, it became an important player in the international fur trade and the democratization of fur that occurred in these years. This article examines three facets of New Zealand’s fur trade that illuminate the complex forces of war, ecology, and the meanings of buying and wearing clothing in this particular trade at this particular time.

ABSTRACTQuestions of how best to feed the urban masses in an economy largely dependent on petroleum have permeated Venezuela’s domestic and international political spheres since World War II. A state-initiated project, run by American capitalists under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, developed Venezuela’s milk distribution system into one of the country’s most important agrifood industries by the late 1960s. The ways in which the firm navigated complicated questions of legitimacy and trust in public and private organizations provide an illustrative example of the inherently complicated relationship between state and business in the political economy of food distribution.

ABSTRACTThe introduction of electricity supply into urban colonial India in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with the emergence of an Indian middle class debating its own identity and autonomy, and the development of ‘modern’ and Westernised urban centres. This article examines how colonial plans for urban and domestic electrification were influenced by the class politics of the urban Indian middle class and its varied notions of nationalism, traditionalism and modernity. I investigate how the colonial government and promoters of electrical technologies responded to the opportunities and constraints of the urban Indian middle-class domestic sphere to refashion the language of electricity to be contiguous with the political and social exigencies of the emerging Indian middle class. Looking at the language of electrification that arose in the social, cultural and political contexts reveals how far class and identity politics were matters of importance in what has been termed ‘the uneven electrification of the British empire’. While this article concentrates on urban colonial India, it brings to light newer aspects of the place of electricity within processes of urban development and class politics, and vice versa, especially within the unsettled cultural and social backgrounds of colonial societies.

ABSTRACTThis article highlights the role recycling played in clothes culture as found in examples from Lady Märta Helena Reenstierna’s diary (1793–1839) and garments in Swedish museum collections. By using approaches from Textile Studies, clothes are seen in a lifecycle perspective rather than regarding fashion as luxury consumption focusing on the moment of purchase. Recycling as a concept allows central aspects of the relationship between clothes and fashion to be discussed, such as financial resources, social expectations, legislation and age. This approach deepens the cultural-historical understanding of the use of clothing over time and the wardrobe as everyday practice. It opens up interpretations of the economic, cultural and emotional value of the fashionable wardrobe and gives insights into the consumer’s attitudes, values, fashion knowledge, textile skills and creativity. The study shows how closely intertwined the production and consumption of clothing was. I argue that recycling was crucial to keep and maintain a fashionable wardrobe over time. This is discussed in terms of the wardrobe as process and capital. The study shows that an appropriate fashionable wardrobe among women in the Swedish manor house milieu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was the result of an active and well-considered strategy.