Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England by Nancy Cox Karin Dannehl

Author:Nancy Cox, Karin Dannehl [Nancy Cox, Karin Dannehl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, General, Business & Economics, Industries, Retailing, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780754637714
Google: _MXjWq2sLjoC
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2007-01-01T03:38:45+00:00

These complex messages promulgated by the tourists and the travel writers created round some industrial towns a baggage of mostly favourable images that would have been incomprehensible to later generations for whom the problems of massive growth, pollution, disease and crime far outweighed the benefits. In the eighteenth century, many of the big towns, even those that came to epitomize the bad face of industrialization, were still seen by most as places of culture and consumption, while their manufactures were desirable and the manufacturing processes awesome, even Picturesque. And the towns had the advantage of creating work for the poor, and at the same time teaching ‘the Value of an enterprizing and Œconomical Spirit’.44

The opinions, favourable no less than pejorative, entered the public domain, some through publications, and some through conversation and debate. What is striking is that those three industrial towns attracting the most interest from tourists and travel writers were the same three towns most used in tradepeople’s promotional literature. Their products were apparently seen as sufficiently distinct to give rise to terms such as Manchestry, Birmingham goods and Sheffield wares. No such equivalent terms have been noted for other industrial centres of the time such as Leeds, Norwich or the Potteries.45 In the Gloucester coastal port books, Manchester ware appeared going downriver as early as 1612, Birmingham ware from early in the next century. The former term was so well established that it was applied to goods coming upriver, as opposed to coming out of Manchester downwards, from the mid-1650s.46 This familiarity was reflected in the travelogues. Defoe commented, ‘The Manchester trade we all know’,47 and he defined it no further.

The use of these collective commodity terms like ‘ware’ and ‘goods’ attached to town descriptors raises a further issue for historians, particularly with reference to Manchester and Birmingham. Whereas the term Sheffield wares would undoubtedly have been taken to denote cutlery and/or edge tools in early-modern Britain, as it still would today, Manchester and Birmingham are more challenging. Manchester ware in the sixteenth century probably consisted of cheap woollen fabrics that had undergone the process of cottoning, in which a nap was raised in a particular way.48 By the eighteenth century, as the town became a centre for the manufacture of cotton-mix and pure-cotton goods, the term Manchester ware changed its meaning to fit the new reality. Even this does not entirely resolve the problem of what was meant by the term, since Manchester manufactured a range of goods, of which some were items of haberdashery like tapes, filletings and inkles,49 while others were largely cotton/linen mixtures. The manufacture of textiles made solely of cotton only became a feature of Manchester manufacture after two technological problems were resolved: the spinning of a strong warp thread, and the discovery of a satisfactory dyeing process to give a colour-fast red.50 Thereafter, fashionable fabrics made wholly of cotton that rivalled Indian products became readily available in a range of prices to suit nearly all pockets.

‘Manchester’ as a descriptor became commonplace

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