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Behind the Counter: Shopkeepers in the Eye of Historians

The history of shopkeepers has long occupied a marginal place in economic and social historiography,which privileged the analysis of large-scale commerce, industrial capital, and wage labor, while the small trader situated awkwardly between bourgeois elites and the working classes was often overlooked or dismissed as a relic of a pre-industrial past. Beginning in the 1970s, however, historians and social scientists turned their attention to this neglected stratum, exploring its economic functions, social mobility, cultural identity, and political roles across different national contexts. The publication of pioneering works such as Abel Chatelain’s study of conflicts between peddlers and sedentary retailers in nineteenth-century France (1971), Frank Bechhofer and colleagues’ sociological investigation into the market situation of small shopkeepers in Britain (1971), and John C. Cairns’s conceptual exploration of the “nation of shopkeepers” stereotype (1974) marked the emergence of a field concerned with the everyday practices, vulnerabilities, and symbolic meanings of small-scale commerce.

Since then, the historiography of shopkeepers has diversified significantly. A series of doctoral dissertations in the 1980s and 1990s examined shopkeepers through the lenses of family enterprise, gender roles, and neighborhood sociability, situating their activities within broader transformations of urban society (Fitzsimmons 1983; Tananbaum 1986; Hosgood 1989). Other studies investigated their political mobilization, ranging from Philip Nord’s analysis of the mouvement des petits commerçants under the French Third Republic (1981) to Claire Daphne Coombs’s dissertation on the cycles of radicalization and demobilization of French shopkeepers in the twentieth century (1996). Parallel research in German, Italian, and Japanese contexts further underscored the ways in which shopkeepers were embedded in systems of corporatism, state regulation, and urban conflict (Morris 1989; Loberg 2006; Shorb 2005). More recently, the work of Claire Zalc on immigrant shopkeepers in France has added new dimensions, connecting the history of petit commerce with questions of migration, xenophobia, and state surveillance (Zalc 2010).

 

Figure 1. An Overview of Western Historiography

Source: Bibliography processed with Claude Sonnet 4.

This diverse even if limited body of scholarship has posed a series of recurring questions:

  1. How did shopkeepers sustain their livelihoods within the family economy, and what roles did gender and kinship play in their businesses?
  2. What patterns of social and geographic mobility characterized small shopkeepers, and how durable was their class position across generations?
  3. In what ways did shopkeepers mobilize politically, and why were they recurrently associated with right-wing populism and nationalism?
  4. How did corporatist arrangements and state institutions shape their position, simultaneously offering protection and imposing constraints?
  5. How did shopkeepers contribute to, and become embroiled in, conflicts over urban space, regulation, and legitimacy?
  6. What place did immigrant and foreign shopkeepers occupy in national economies and societies, and how were they represented or regulated?

This literature review will trace the development of these themes across dissertations and articles published since the 1970s. By situating shopkeepers at the intersection of family economy, mobility, politics, corporatism, urban life, and migration, historians have revealed them to be not merely peripheral actors but key intermediaries in modern economic and social transformations.

 

 

Foundations of Shopkeepers’ Studies (1970s–1980s)

The first wave of scholarship on shopkeepers emerged in the 1970s, laying down the research agendas that subsequent studies would refine and expand. These early works established the intellectual legitimacy of the subject by highlighting how small-scale commerce shaped national economies, social mobility, and political identities.

Abel Chatelain’s seminal article on the struggle between itinerant peddlers (colporteurs) and sedentary shopkeepers (boutiquiers) in early nineteenth-century France (1971) foregrounded the persistent conflicts at the heart of small-scale commerce. Using departmental archives, Chatelain reconstructed the world of migrant peddlers, many of whom originated from impoverished rural regions, and showed how they competed with urban shopkeepers for legitimacy and clientele. The article stressed how state regulation oscillated between supporting sedentary retailers under Napoleon and reaffirming commercial freedoms for itinerants during the Restoration. By identifying the petit commerce as an underexplored field, Chatelain set an agenda for integrating small traders into broader narratives of French social and economic history.

In the same year, Frank Bechhofer, Brian Elliott, and Monica Rushforth published a sociological study on the market situation of small shopkeepers in Scotland. Although contemporary in focus, their article underscored the precariousness and vulnerability of small retailers, themes that resonated with historical inquiry. Shortly after, John C. Cairns’s essay on the expression “a nation of shopkeepers” (1974) traced the genealogy of the phrase from Adam Smith to Napoleon and beyond, showing how it oscillated between insult and badge of national pride. This contribution framed the shopkeeper not just as an economic actor but also as a cultural and political stereotype, a symbolic figure through which national identity was contested.

The problem of shopkeepers’ social position and trajectories also attracted early attention. Jean LeYaouanq’s article on the social and geographic mobility of Parisian shopkeepers (1979) offered a quantitative and prosopographical approach to the nineteenth century. He showed that while individuals often achieved upward mobility by entering petty commerce, their children seldom reproduced this position, instead shifting into other professions. This instability reinforced the image of the petit commerce as a transitional and precarious stratum.

Finally, Philip Nord’s article on the movement of small shopkeepers under the French Third Republic (1981) reframed them as political actors, rather than passive victims of modernization. He demonstrated that petits commerçants organized protests against taxation and competition from large-scale commerce, articulating anti-statist and corporatist ideologies that fed into broader right-wing populist traditions. Nord’s study challenged the notion of shopkeepers as politically inert, instead emphasizing their capacity for collective mobilization and ideological coherence.

The initial works of the 1970s and early 1980s defined the foundational questions that would guide subsequent research: the economic vulnerability of shopkeepers, their contested legitimacy against rivals such as peddlers, their role as both social group and cultural symbol, their patterns of mobility and precarity, and their capacity for political mobilization.

Family, Gender, and Household Economy

From the 1980s onward, a central line of inquiry focused on the domestic foundations of shopkeeping. Rather than seeing shopkeepers primarily as economic units or political actors, historians emphasized the household as the organizing framework of small commerce. Studies in both French and British contexts highlighted the roles of kinship, marriage, and gender in sustaining petty retail, while also underlining the precariousness of these arrangements.

Michael Fitzsimmons’s dissertation on the Parisian petite bourgeoisie (1750–1850) argued for continuity across the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Restoration. He demonstrated that the family workshop and store remained the core of petty commerce, with marriage strategies, dowries, and inheritance practices ensuring intergenerational survival. Shopkeepers identified themselves as independent producers, neither proletarians nor capitalists, and sought civic legitimacy through neighborhood politics and guild-like associations. Fitzsimmons thus reframed the Revolution not as a rupture for small shopkeepers, but as a moment of adaptation, underscoring the resilience of the family economy.

A parallel study of mid-Victorian England by Susan Tananbaum situated shopkeeping households within the broader social and cultural world of industrial capitalism. She showed that shops were family enterprises in which women and children played indispensable roles, often managing both domestic and commercial labor. Respectability was central to shopkeepers’ self-image: thrift, religious participation, and civic engagement reinforced their claim to social legitimacy, even as they faced recurrent bankruptcy and competitive pressures. Shopkeepers occupied an ambiguous position between artisans and professionals, simultaneously aspiring to middle-class respectability while vulnerable to downward mobility.

Christopher Hosgood’s article on the “pigmies of commerce” in Victorian Manchester added another dimension by shifting attention to the commercial working class of hawkers, petty traders, and small shopkeepers. These figures were dismissed in contemporary discourse as inefficient and marginal, but Hosgood reconstructed their survival strategies such as cooperative arrangements, informal credit, and the mobilization of family labor. In doing so, he emphasized the economic rationality of these practices and the crucial role of women and children in sustaining small-scale retail.

In these studies revealed, shopkeeping is shown as an inherently domestic and gendered economy, dependent on kinship strategies and family labor. Far from being relics of pre-industrial society, shopkeepers emerged as adaptable actors whose survival hinged on household organization and cultural strategies of respectability. At the same time, their position was precarious: while families often sustained businesses for a generation, bankruptcy, instability, and fragile intergenerational transmission limited their long-term consolidation.

 

 

Mobility, Social Position, and Precarity

Another major theme in the historiography has been the analysis of shopkeepers’ social and geographic mobility, and the precariousness of their class position. Scholars have consistently underscored the instability of the petit commerce: while individuals often managed to establish themselves within the urban fabric, their businesses were rarely consolidated across generations, marking shopkeepers as a transitional stratum rather than a durable class.

Jean LeYaouanq’s article on the mobility of Parisian shopkeepers in the nineteenth century (1979) provided one of the most systematic treatments of the subject. Drawing on prosopographical and statistical data, he reconstructed hundreds of career trajectories between 1830 and 1870. The findings revealed that many shopkeepers were first-generation urbanites, often sons of artisans, farmers, or low-level employees. Success depended heavily on access to family capital, advantageous marriages, and the cultivation of neighborhood-specific clienteles. Yet the study also emphasized fragility: while individuals frequently achieved stability during their lifetimes, intergenerational continuity was rare, as children often shifted into administrative or white-collar occupations. LeYaouanq thus portrayed shopkeeping as a socially dynamic but structurally unstable occupation. Michael Fitzsimmons’s dissertation (1983) on the Parisian petite bourgeoisie also addressed questions of mobility across political regimes. He showed that despite revolutionary upheavals, family-based enterprises proved resilient, relying on kinship and neighborhood networks to sustain themselves. Yet here too, precarity was evident: liberalization and the abolition of guilds opened opportunities, but also exposed small entrepreneurs to intense competition, forcing them to recreate collective institutions for solidarity. Fitzsimmons highlighted the ambivalent position of the petite bourgeoisie as independent yet vulnerable, capable of adaptation but rarely assured of stability.

Similar patterns emerged in other contexts. Jonathan Morris’s dissertation on Milan (1989) examined shopkeepers between 1885 and 1905, emphasizing their exposure to the transformations of Italy’s urban economy. Like their French counterparts, Milanese shopkeepers relied on household strategies but faced mounting pressures from large-scale retail and industrial capitalism. In England, James L. Rogers’s dissertation (1995) on Lancashire and John Jones’s study of Wolverhampton (1991) traced the lives of small retailers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They highlighted both the embeddedness of shopkeepers in working-class communities and their vulnerability to bankruptcy and credit fluctuations. Christopher Hosgood’s article on Victorian Manchester (1989) complements this line of inquiry by exploring the economic fragility of the “commercial working class”. He demonstrated that survival often depended on flexible strategies—informal credit systems, cooperative practices, and household labor—rather than secure business models. The absence of intergenerational stability and the prevalence of bankruptcy underscored the precarious nature of shopkeeping as a livelihood.

Across these studies, the recurring pattern is one of mobility without consolidation. Shopkeepers occupied a liminal position, often rising from artisanal or rural backgrounds but rarely securing long-term reproduction of status. Their survival strategies reveal adaptability and resilience, but also underline their vulnerability to structural shifts in commerce, regulation, and urban economies. This duality—social dynamism on the one hand, structural fragility on the other—became a defining feature of the historiographical portrayal of petty commerce.

Politics and Radicalization

The political mobilization of shopkeepers has been one of the most intensively studied aspects of their history. From the late nineteenth century to the postwar era, historians have examined how economic insecurity, competition with big business, and resentment of state regulation fueled recurrent episodes of collective protest. Shopkeepers appear here as politically volatile actors, sometimes mobilized toward the left, but more frequently associated with corporatist, anti-statist, and right-wing populist movements.

Philip Nord’s landmark article (1981) situated the mouvement des petits commerçants at the heart of Third Republic politics. He argued that shopkeepers organized protests against taxation, regulation, and competition from department stores and chain retailers. Their mobilization consistently expressed anti-statist, corporatist, and anti-parliamentary ideologies, combining nostalgia for a moralized economy with suspicion of elites in politics and finance. Nord emphasized that shopkeepers were not politically inert: far from being a declining residue, they were capable of coherent and organized action. His work highlighted the petit commerce as a key node in the genealogy of French right-wing populism.

Claire Daphne Coombs extended this analysis into the twentieth century with her dissertation (1996). She examined episodes of shopkeeper protest from the interwar period to the 1980s, including the National Taxpayers’ Federation (1928–34), the Comité de Liaison of 1935, the Comité Central des Commerçants (1938), and the CID-UNATI movement of the 1970s. Coombs demonstrated a recurring pattern: rapid surges of radicalization, often infused with xenophobic rhetoric and anti-parliamentary populism, followed by equally swift demobilization and reintegration into republican interest-group politics. She concluded that French shopkeepers were “ephemeral, labile, and contradictory” political actors, more likely to oscillate between conservatism, apoliticism, and authoritarian nationalism than to consolidate into fascist movements.

Other studies linked shopkeeper politics to conflicts in urban space. Abel Chatelain’s work on the early nineteenth century (1971) showed how sedentary shopkeepers mobilized against itinerant peddlers, using petitions and xenophobic rhetoric to assert legitimacy. In Germany, Molly Jean Loberg’s dissertation on Berlin (2006) extended this perspective, showing how disputes over hawkers, advertising, and Jewish-owned businesses escalated into politicized conflicts that intersected with antisemitism and culminated in Kristallnacht.

Shopkeepers’ political mobilization was rooted in economic vulnerability and competition, but its outcomes were ideologically heterogeneous and unstable. While frequently aligned with right-wing populism, shopkeepers could also mobilize on the left, or retreat into corporatist apoliticism. Historians highlight their oscillation between radicalization and demobilization, and the ways in which leaders, interest groups, and the state channeled their grievances. The figure of the shopkeeper thus emerges as both a political actor and a cultural symbol, emblematic of the anxieties of the lower middle classes in modern Europe.

Corporatism and the State

Beyond family strategies and episodic mobilizations, a significant strand of scholarship has investigated the relationship between shopkeepers and the state, focusing on the corporatist frameworks through which small traders were simultaneously protected and controlled. These studies emphasize the institutional embedding of shopkeeping, showing how governments integrated petty commerce into systems of regulation, interest representation, and social management.

Colin P. Jones’s article on Vichy France (1982) explored how the regime reorganized commerce along corporatist lines. By elevating small and medium-sized merchants as the moral backbone of the national economy, Vichy institutionalized commercial chambers, professional training, and regulatory protections. Far from disappearing after 1944, many of these arrangements persisted, providing the foundations for a postwar merchant elite that retained influence under the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Jones’s analysis challenged interpretations of Vichy as a mere aberration, demonstrating instead how wartime reforms created lasting institutional structures for the petit commerce.

Claire Daphne Coombs reinforced this perspective by examining the organizational environment of French shopkeepers in the twentieth century. She showed that institutions such as the National Taxpayers’ Federation and later corporatist bodies offered channels for expressing grievances, while also limiting the scope of radicalization. Leaders often appropriated populist rhetoric against taxation and regulation but steered movements back into republican frameworks. For Coombs, the commercial state–interest-group nexus explained why French shopkeeper radicalism, despite periodic surges, failed to crystallize into sustained fascist movements.

Patrick Naoya Shorb’s dissertation on modern Japan (2005) provided a comparative case of corporatism in a non-European context. He argued that Japanese shopkeepers were incorporated into neighborhood associations (chōnaikai) and trade guilds (dôgyô kumiai), becoming agents of social order through practices of “spiritual registration.” In return, they gained access to low-interest finance, tax relief, and tolerated cartel practices. This corporatist bargain, brokered between the Home Ministry and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, granted shopkeepers limited political voice but curtailed independent mobilization. During wartime, these structures enabled the state to mobilize society for total war, while shopkeepers leveraged their legitimacy to blunt some of the harshest controls of the command economy.

These works highlight the ambivalent consequences of corporatism. Shopkeepers gained recognition, institutional protection, and channels for lobbying, but at the cost of autonomy and sustained political radicalism. In France and Japan alike, corporatist arrangements positioned shopkeepers as indispensable pillars of social and economic order, while also harnessing their organizations to state-led projects of modernization or mobilization. This body of research underscores how the petit commerce was not merely an oppositional force but also a participant in constructing the institutional architecture of modern states.

 

 

Urban Space, Commerce, and Conflict

The city has been a central arena in which shopkeepers have asserted their legitimacy, defended their interests, and confronted rivals. Historians have emphasized how urban space structured the opportunities and vulnerabilities of the petty commerce, while also providing the stage for conflicts over regulation, advertising, and the very visibility of small traders in the modern metropolis.

Abel Chatelain’s article already underscored the spatial dimension of shopkeepers’ struggles. Sedentary retailers invoked their rootedness in neighborhoods to assert superiority over itinerant peddlers, mobilizing petitions and lobbying municipal authorities to restrict hawkers. The shop itself became a symbol of permanence, legality, and civic responsibility, contrasted with the perceived disorder and illegitimacy of mobile commerce. These urban rivalries highlighted how questions of where commerce occurred were inseparable from questions of legitimacy and regulation.

Molly Jean Loberg’s dissertation on Berlin (2006) explored the politics of urban commerce in a German metropolis. She examined disputes over outdoor advertising, hawkers, and the visibility of Jewish-owned businesses in the early twentieth century. Shopkeepers were central to these conflicts, using the urban streetscape to claim legitimacy while simultaneously becoming targets of xenophobic and antisemitic campaigns. Loberg argued that these urban disputes were not trivial: they fed into wider political radicalization, culminating in the violent exclusion of Jewish shopkeepers during Kristallnacht. Urban space thus functioned as both a resource and a battlefield, where the symbolic and material presence of shopkeepers became politicized.

In Milan, Jonathan Morris (1989) highlighted the neighborhood-based nature of shopkeeping. Shops operated as nodes of sociability, providing credit, information, and social control within working-class districts. Yet their embeddedness also exposed them to vulnerability: shifts in urban planning, transport, or the rise of department stores could rapidly undermine local networks. In Britain, case studies by Hosgood and Jones revealed a similar pattern: shopkeepers were integral to working-class community life but also exposed to municipal regulations and competition from new forms of retail.

In Japan, Patrick Naoya Shorb (2005) emphasized how shopkeepers in Japanese cities were tied to neighborhood associations (chōnaikai). These organizations regulated the use of space, ensured participation in civic rituals, and integrated commerce into the management of urban order. Shopkeepers were thus both beneficiaries and enforcers of the spatial disciplining of the modern city, embodying the ambiguous intersection of community, commerce, and state authority.

Urban studies of shopkeepers reveal a dialectic between embeddedness and vulnerability. Shops anchored families and communities in urban space, providing continuity and legitimacy, yet their visibility exposed them to surveillance, regulation, and political hostility. Whether in Parisian neighborhoods, Berlin shopping streets, or Japanese chōnaikai, the shop was never merely an economic unit: it was a spatial marker of order, disorder, and contested legitimacy in the modern city.

In the most recent wave of scholarship, historians have examined shopkeeping through the lens of migration, identity, and xenophobia. By focusing on immigrant traders, this research expands the study of petty commerce beyond its role in class formation and political radicalization to encompass questions of ethnicity, integration, and state surveillance. Shopkeepers appear here as liminal figures: essential providers of goods and services, yet frequently stigmatized as outsiders or competitors.

Claire Zalc’s work on foreign shopkeepers in interwar France represents a major advance in this field (2010). Drawing on commercial registries, police files, and administrative archives, she reconstructed the trajectories of Jewish, Italian, and Armenian immigrants who established shops in French cities. Zalc highlighted the paradox of their position: while immigrant shopkeepers were crucial to urban economies and often deeply embedded in local neighborhoods, they faced recurrent suspicion from state authorities and nationalist movements. Commercial registries became tools of surveillance, marking foreigners as “suspect traders” subject to heightened scrutiny. Zalc also underscored the role of xenophobia in shaping public perceptions of petty commerce. Foreign shopkeepers were accused of unfair competition, cultural otherness, and disloyalty, themes that intersected with broader anxieties about immigration, national decline, and economic modernization. Her analysis thus connected the history of petty commerce to the history of nationalism and racism, demonstrating that the petit commerce could serve both as a vehicle of integration and as a target of exclusion.

Molly Jean Loberg’s dissertation on Berlin (2006) also treated the question of immigrant and minority shopkeepers, particularly Jewish retailers. She showed how disputes over shop signs, advertising, and outdoor markets became entangled with antisemitic campaigns that portrayed Jewish traders as illegitimate presences in the urban landscape. The politicization of commerce culminated in their violent exclusion during Kristallnacht, illustrating how small shopkeepers could move from integration to persecution within a single generation.

Beyond France and Germany, other case studies point to similar dynamics. Patrick Naoya Shorb’s study of Japan (2005) noted how Koreans and Chinese were incorporated into neighborhood commercial structures, but under regimes of surveillance and constrained citizenship. In Britain, historians such as Christopher Hosgood have noted the tensions surrounding Irish and Jewish petty traders in Victorian cities, who were simultaneously accepted as providers of cheap goods and stigmatized as interlopers.

This line of research reveals how shopkeepers embodied the ambivalence of migration: their economic embeddedness and neighborhood roles facilitated integration, yet their visibility as competitors and cultural outsiders rendered them vulnerable to xenophobia and exclusion. By foregrounding immigrant and minority shopkeepers, historians have connected the study of petty commerce to larger debates on nationalism, racism, and the politics of belonging in modern societies.

 

Primary Sources for the History of Shopkeepers

The historiography of shopkeepers demonstrates that no single type of source can capture the complexity of the petit commerce. Because shopkeepers straddled economic, social, cultural, and political domains, historians have mobilized a heterogeneous array of primary materials. These sources do more than document small traders; they shape the kinds of questions historians can ask about their lives, livelihoods, and representations.

National, municipal, and police archives form the backbone of much research on shopkeepers. In France, scholars such as Michael Fitzsimmons and Claire Coombs used Archives Nationales and Archives de la Seine to uncover the regulation of small trade, police surveillance, and administrative correspondence on tax protests and corporatist policies. Similar materials were central in Molly Loberg’s study of Berlin, which drew on the Landesarchiv Berlin and Bundesarchiv to reconstruct regulatory disputes over advertising and street use. In Japan, Patrick Shorb relied on bureaucratic records from the Ministries of Commerce and Interior, revealing how the state co-opted shopkeepers into corporatist systems of neighborhood governance. These archives foreground the state–shopkeeper relationship, emphasizing regulation, oversight, and institutional embedding.

Shopkeeping was often documented in legal instruments such as marriage contracts, inventories, successions, and bankruptcy proceedings. Fitzsimmons mined notarial archives to reconstruct the economic strategies of Parisian petty bourgeois families across the revolutionary divide. In Britain, Susan Tananbaum and Christopher Hosgood turned to bankruptcy records and parish documentation, sources that illuminate both the fragility of small enterprise and the importance of kinship and community ties.

Quantitative and prosopographical approaches have relied on registries and directories. Jean LeYaouanq used genealogical data to track mobility and intergenerational change, while Claire Zalc drew on the Trade Register of 1919 to analyze immigrant shopkeepers in interwar France. For Zalc, registries were not neutral administrative tools but instruments of surveillance, reflecting how the state classified and monitored foreign entrepreneurs. In Britain, trade directories offered similar opportunities for reconstructing networks of small commerce across towns and cities. These sources are crucial for tracing patterns of presence, mobility, and exclusion.

The records of guilds, chambers of commerce, corporatist institutions, and neighborhood associations open a window onto collective organization. In France, Colin Jones’s study of Vichy highlighted how corporatist reforms institutionalized merchant elites through chambers and syndicates, while Coombs analyzed the archives of shopkeepers’ federations and protest committees. In Japan, Shorb’s use of dôgyô kumiai (guilds) and chōnaikai (neighborhood associations) revealed the corporatist bargain that tied shopkeepers to the state. These sources illustrate how shopkeepers were embedded in collective structures that mediated between individuals and state power.

Press coverage has been indispensable for understanding the public representation and discourse around shopkeepers. Loberg examined Berlin dailies to show how antisemitic campaigns targeted Jewish traders; Zalc similarly drew on the French press to analyze xenophobic rhetoric. In Britain, Tananbaum and Hosgood turned to local newspapers to capture shopkeepers’ everyday roles in neighborhood life and civic politics. Trade-specific periodicals such as The Draper’s Record in Britain or Chûgai Shôgyô Shinpô in Japan documented commercial practices, professional identities, and self-representation. Newspapers and journals make visible the discursive construction of the shopkeeper as a symbol of virtue, disorder, or foreignness.

A final category of sources includes the ephemeral print culture of small commerce. Coombs and Nord noted the role of movement pamphlets in mobilizing petty commerce against taxation. Loberg innovatively drew on advertising journals, posters, and street signage to analyze how the commercial visibility of shopkeepers became a political flashpoint. These ephemeral sources reveal the symbolic and spatial dimensions of commerce, showing how shopkeepers used visual culture to assert legitimacy—or how opponents mobilized it to exclude them.

The diversity of sources mirrors the multi-sited existence of shopkeepers: as householders (captured in notarial and bankruptcy records), as subjects of regulation (in police and administrative archives), as members of collective bodies (in guild and corporatist records), as visible presences in the urban streetscape (in newspapers, advertising, and ephemera), and as foreigners under suspicion (in registries and surveillance files). Together, these materials allow for a rich and multidimensional reconstruction of the shopkeeper as an economic actor, social figure, and political symbol in modern history.

Table 1. Matrix Table of Primary Sources in Shopkeeper Studies

Author / Work
National Context
Archival Records (State / Municipal / Police)
Legal / Notarial Records
Commercial Registries / Directories
Trade Associations / Guilds / Chambers
Newspapers & Periodicals
Trade Journals / Pamphlets / Advertising
Ephemera (posters, signage, etc.)
Other
Michael Fitzsimmons (1983)
France
Archives Nationales, Archives de la Seine (municipal, police)
Marriage contracts, inventories, succession
Chambers of commerce, neighborhood associations
Revolutionary-era press
Pamphlets, trade-related publications
Susan Tananbaum (1986)
Britain
Local gov’t reports
Parish & bankruptcy records
Trade directories
Local newspapers
Draper’s Record (trade journal)
Christopher Hosgood (1989)
Britain
Municipal archives (Manchester)
Bankruptcy files
Trade directories
Local newspapers
Trade press on petty traders
Jean LeYaouanq (1979)
France
Municipal records
Statistical sources
Prosopographical data
Philip Nord (1981)
France
State archives on shopkeeper movements
Shopkeeper associations, corporatist groups
Political pamphlets
Claire D. Coombs (1996)
France
Ministry of Interior files; administrative records on protests
Interest-group archives (NTF, CCM, CID-UNATI)
Movement publications
Colin P. Jones (1982)
France (Vichy)
State archives on corporatist policies
Chambers of commerce, corporatist institutions
Vichy corporatist publications
Claire Zalc (2010)
France
Police & administrative archives
Commercial registries (immigrant shops)
Local newspapers
Surveillance files on foreigners
Jonathan Morris (1989)
Italy (Milan)
Municipal records
Guild archives, neighborhood associations
Local newspapers
John Jones / James Rogers (1990s)
Britain
Municipal and parish records
Bankruptcy proceedings
Trade directories
Local press
Molly J. Loberg (2006)
Germany (Berlin)
State archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Landesarchiv, Bundesarchiv); police regulatory files
Berlin newspapers
Das Plakat, Die Reklame (advertising journals)
Posters, signage, street advertising
Patrick N. Shorb (2005)
Japan
Ministry of Commerce & Interior documents
Dôgyô kumiai (guilds), neighborhood associations (chōnaikai)
Asahi Shinbun, Japan Times
Chûgai Shôgyô Shinpô (trade press)
Ritual practices, state registration data
Abel Chatelain (1971)
France
Municipal and departmental archives
Local press
Pamphlets on itinerant vs. sedentary traders
Petitions

 

Chinese shops on Nanking Road
https://www.virtualshanghai.net/Photos/Images?ID=197

Chinese Historiography

The historiography of shopkeepers in modern China is notably underdeveloped compared to the extensive body of research on European societies. Whereas European social and economic historians have devoted sustained attention to shopkeepers as a distinct social group, analyzing their cultural identities, political roles, and symbolic place in urban life, Chinese scholarship has approached them largely in a derivative fashion, often in relation to clerks, artisans, or broader commercial institutions. My search in the CNKI database for academic journals and dissertations yielded only two documents by Wan Fei (2012) and Yu Jinglian (2011), with only one dealing directly with one category of shopkeeper (barbers).

The Chinese studies emphasize shopkeepers’ roles as members and leaders of guilds and trade associations (公所、同业公会). Shopkeepers were often the financial backbone of such organizations, contributing resources, holding offices, and shaping governance. Legal frameworks such as the Industrial and Commercial Guild Law (工商同業公會條例reinforced their dominance, limiting the influence of clerks and apprentices. This institutional angle has been a recurring theme, but it tends to foreground organizational structures rather than everyday practices or cultural identities.

Historians have also examined shopkeepers as employers in frequent conflict with clerks and apprentices. Wage disputes, authority struggles, and resentment against shopkeepers’ paternalistic exercise of “家长权威” (patriarchal authority) feature prominently in accounts of labor relations. These conflicts shaped the emergence of clerks’ unions, positioning shopkeepers as the main counterpart in struggles for better pay and conditions. Yet here again, shopkeepers appear more as foils than as subjects of inquiry in their own right.

Republican-era political discourse often grouped shopkeepers and clerks together as “merchants” (商人), blurring the employer–employee divide. This official classification reflected both the social ambiguities of the commercial world and the Guomintang’s political project of integrating petty proprietors and employees within its “merchant sector” (商人部). As a result, historiography has tended to reproduce this ambiguity, treating shopkeepers less as a distinct social stratum and more as part of the wider petty-commercial class. Shopkeepers appear in discussions of political mobilization. Together with clerks and petty merchants, they were drawn into 商民 associations and even revolutionary movements, broadening the Guomintang’s social base. Yet in historical memory and discourse, shopkeepers were often framed as authoritarian figures, remembered more for conflict than for collaboration.

In terms of sources, the Chinese thesis have also relied on local archives. The study of barbers relied on multiple archival collections at the Shanghai Municipal Archives, related to labor disputes, guilds, and government directives affecting the barber trade between 1945–1949. The study on Shandong cities’ underprivileged is based on published collections of selected archives, as well as numerous yearbooks and statistical registers. Both studies also made an extensive use of newspapers, espacially the national-level dailes such as Shenbao and Dagongbao.

Overall, this very limited Chinese historiography of shopkeepers presents them as organizational leaders, employers in conflict, ambiguous “merchants,” and reluctant political participants. They emerge as active historical agents, but almost always in relation to clerks, apprentices, or the state.  Several factors help explain this neglect. First, Chinese economic historiography has overwhelmingly privileged “big business” narratives, focusing on merchant elites, guild leaders, compradors, and industrial entrepreneurs, figures who could be celebrated as agents of modernization or criticized for collaboration. Shopkeepers, by contrast, were regarded as too small-scale to illuminate “macro” processes of state-building, capitalism, or treaty-port integration. Second, the Marxist class framework that shaped historical writing in the PRC privileged binary categories—bourgeoisie versus proletariat, peasantry versus landlords. Shopkeepers, occupying an ambiguous petty-bourgeois position, proved difficult to classify and appeared politically marginal, neither a revolutionary subject nor a decisive obstacle. This blurred status discouraged scholars from pursuing them as a central object of research. Third, the problem of archival invisibility has further limited inquiry. Unlike guild leaders, bankers, or entrepreneurs who appear prominently in state and commercial archives, small shopkeepers left behind few systematic records. Their traces are scattered across various registering records, police files, or municipal surveys, sources that have only recently begun to be accessible or prioritized. Finally, post-1949 historiography tended to cast shopkeepers as symbols of tradition and “backwardness,” portraying them as remnants of pre-modern commerce destined to be swept aside by industrialization and socialist transformation. This teleological perspective reduced them to historical anachronisms rather than dynamic social actors, reinforcing their marginal place in Chinese scholarship.

Conclusion

Over the past five decades, historians have progressively reconstructed the world of shopkeepers, transforming what was once a neglected subject into a multifaceted field of inquiry. Early works in the 1970s framed the petit commerce as a precarious yet resilient social group, caught between modernization and marginalization. Subsequent research expanded this foundation, demonstrating how shopkeepers were embedded in family economies, neighborhood networks, political movements, corporatist institutions, urban conflicts, and migration regimes.

Several thematic insights emerge from this historiography:

  • Family and gender studies revealed that shopkeeping was not simply an individual occupation but a household enterprise, with women and children playing indispensable roles in sustaining businesses and projecting respectability.
  • Mobility and precarity analyses highlighted shopkeepers’ unstable class position: often a pathway for first-generation urbanites, but rarely consolidated across generations.
  • Political histories emphasized their recurrent capacity for mobilization, typically in response to economic vulnerability, producing cycles of radicalization and demobilization that intersected with corporatist and right-wing populist traditions.
  • Corporatist studies showed how states both empowered and constrained shopkeepers, integrating them into systems of regulation and social order that granted recognition while limiting autonomy.
  • Urban perspectives underscored the spatial dimensions of shopkeeping, from neighborhood embeddedness to highly politicized disputes over advertising, hawkers, and minority traders.
  • Migration-focused research has most recently extended the field, situating shopkeepers within histories of immigration, xenophobia, and nationalism, and revealing the ambivalent roles of foreigners and minorities in local economies.

This historiography, focused mostly on European societies, converge on a central insight: shopkeepers were neither relics of a pre-industrial past nor passive victims of modernization. Rather, they were adaptable actors whose household strategies, political mobilizations, and urban embeddedness made them key intermediaries in the transformations of modern societies. It has highlighted both their resilience and their vulnerability, revealing the contradictions of a group that was essential to everyday life yet persistently marginalized in narratives of economic and political modernity. The field remains dynamic. Recent works on migration, urban politics, and state surveillance suggest fruitful avenues for comparative and transnational approaches, extending beyond France and Britain to Germany, Italy, and Japan. By foregrounding the petit commerce, historians have illuminated the broader processes of class formation, state-building, urban modernization, and the politics of identity, offering a rich and nuanced perspective on the making of modern societies.

In the case of China, a full-fledged social history of shopkeepers—recovering their collective identity, cultural practices, and place in urban society—remains unwritten. I propose to begin from the press, treating newspapers as systematic recorders of everyday life in which shopkeepers figured with unusual density, visibility, and specificity. Methodologically, the study adopts a computational reading of large newspaper corpora (e.g., Shenbao, and English-languages dailies): embedding-expanded query and entity recognition for shopkeeper categories (店主/掌柜/铺户/行主, etc.); topic modeling and temporal burst detection to surface recurrent issues (credit, rent, licensing, guild disputes, apprenticeship, taxation, regulation); event extraction (petitions, strikes, inspections, prosecutions, charity campaigns. This pipeline creates a replicable evidentiary base that can later be triangulated with targeted archival documents (police and municipal files, guild records, court cases) when and where access is feasible.

As Armand (2022) has pointed out, the municipal archives of the foreign concessions contained registers of shops, since every boutique was obliged to register with the relevant authorities. These registers, though not yet systematically studied, could provide a rare prosopographical basis for reconstructing the world of shopkeepers. At the international level, consular and economic reports held at NARA sometimes included detailed wartime surveys of local commerce, with investigators visiting shops one by one, inventorying stocks, and commenting on proprietors. In addition, serials such as the Chinese Economic Bulletin / Monthly offered qualitative surveys, price indices, and contextual information on retail conditions that shaped shopkeepers’ everyday life. Armand also underscores that, in the absence of surviving registers, shop signs and advertising ephemera, many of which she has inventoried and mapped via digital tools on MADSpace, can themselves serve as a systematic source base. Mapping shop locations, disputes, and advertising practices allows for a spatial contextualization of the press discourse, anchoring textual representations in the concrete geography of urban commerce.

Historiographically, although there is little China-specific work on shopkeepers per se, the project aligns with and extends the literature that rehabilitates intermediate social formations, what Brett Sheehan (2022) has framed as “middling” elites, and with classic studies of middlemen in Chinese commerce. In this sense, shopkeepers are approached not as residuals of pre-modernity but as urban intermediaries who mediated flows of goods, cash, credit, information, and neighborhood governance. The study also speaks to the underused vein of Republican-era social surveys and urban sociology: where contemporary investigators tended to foreground the poor and the plutocratic, this work reconstructs the missing middle by leveraging newspapers as a archive of everyday transactions, conflicts, and civic participation.

Concretely, the analysis will (1) periodize shopkeeper visibility and role repertoires, (2) map the ecosystem of petit commerce (street markets, lanes, mixed-use shophouses), (3) recover associational life (guilds, chambers, charity federations, neighborhood committees) and employer–clerk dynamics, and (4) track moral economies and regulatory regimes (price controls, licensure, hygiene, advertising, Sunday closing, apprenticeship). By starting with press-scale computation and then drilling down to archives, the project overcomes archival invisibility while re-centering shopkeepers within China’s urban, economic, and social transformations as a distinctly middling formation rather than a footnote to big business or labor.

 

Statement on AI-Assisted Development

This literature review was prepared with support from the AI agent—GPT LitRev— that I developed based on OpenAI’s GPT-4. Its main functions are processing individual articles or dissertations to extract metadata, key research question(s), key findings and arguments, engagement with previous works, primary sources, and summary. ChatGPT further served to categorize the works in topical groups in preparation for manual reading. Claude Sonnet 4 (Anthropic) provided assistance in the development and visualization of the timelines.

References

Armand, Cécile. Madmen in Shanghai: A Social History of Advertising in Modern China (1914–1956). Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024.

Bechhofer, Frank, Brian Elliott, and Monica Rushforth. “The Market Situation of Small Shopkeepers.” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 18, no. 2 (1971): 161–80.

Cairns, John C. “A Nation of Shopkeepers in Search of a Suitable France, 1919–1940.” American Historical Review 79, no. 3 (1974): 710.

Chatelain, Abel. “Lutte entre colporteurs et boutiquiers en France pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle.” Revue d’Histoire Economique et Sociale 49, no. 3 (1971): 359–84.

Coombs, Claire Daphne. “Heroism and Xenophobia: French Shopkeeper Politics in the Twentieth Century.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1996.

Coquery, Natacha. “Melting Shops: A History of Foreign Shopkeepers in France.” Business History Review 86, no. 4 (2012): 839–41.

Crouch, Charles Patric. “The Petite Bourgeoisie of Paris, during the Bourbon Restoration, 1814-1830: A Prosopographical Inquiry into the Political and Economic Integration of the Parisian Lower Middle Class.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1991.

Hosgood, Christopher P. “The ‘Pigmies of Commerce’ and the Working-Class Community: Small Shopkeepers in England, 1870-1914.” Journal of Social History 22, no. 3 (1989).

Hosgood, Christopher Philip. “Shopkeepers and Society: Domestic and Principal Shopkeepers in Leicester, 1860-1914.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 48. no. 8. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Manitoba, 1987.

Johnson, Paul Edward. “A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837.” In ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1975.

Jones, John. “The Structure, Organisation and Location of Fixed-Shop Retailing in Wolverhampton, 1870-1914.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Wolverhampton Polytechnic, 1991.

Jones, Joseph. “Vichy France and Postwar Economic Modernization: The Case of the Shopkeepers.” French Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 541.

LeYaouanq, Jean. “La mobilité sociale dans le milieu boutiquier parisien au XIXe siècle.” Mouvement Social, no. 108 (July 1979): 89–112.

Loberg, Molly Jean. “Berlin Streets: Politics, Commerce and Crowds, 1918–1938.” Princeton University, 2006.

Morris, Jonathan. “The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan: 1885-1905.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1989.

Nord, Philip. “Le Mouvement Des Petits Commerçants Et La Politique En France De 1888 À 1914.” Mouvement Social, no. 114 (January 1981): 35–55.

Rogers, James L., II. “Domestic Shopkeepers in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: Middlemen and Women of the Working-Class Community.” Ph.D., The University of Tennessee, 1995.

Sheehan, Brett. “Middling Elites: Middle Managers and Bank Professionals at the Shanghai Bank of China on the Eve of the Communist Revolution.” In Cécile Armand, Christian Henriot, Sun Huei-lmin (eds.), Knowledge, Power, and Networks. Leiden: Brill, 2022, 83-112.

Shorb, Patrick Naoya. “Retailing Society, Retailing the State: Shopkeeper Politics in Modern Japan, 1868–1945.” Ph.D., Princeton University, 2005.

Wan Fei 万飞. “Minguo shiqi shanghai lifashi qunti yanji (1911–1949)” 民国期上海理发师群体研究 [A Study on the Barber Community in Republican Shanghai]. Master’s thesis, Shanghai Normal University 上海师范大学, 2012.

Weinstein, Benjamin. “Shopkeepers and Gentlemen: The Liberal Politics of Early-Victorian London.” Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2005.

Yu Jinglian 于景莲. ““Minguo shiqishandong chengshi xiaceng shehui wuzhi shenghuo zhuangkuang yanjiu (1912-1937)民国期山城市下社会物生活状况研究 [A Study of the Material Life of the Lower Urban Strata in Shandong during the Republican Period]. PhD dissertation, Shandong University 山东大学, 2011.

Zalc, Claire, Melting Shops. Une histoire des commerçants étrangers en France. (Paris : Perrin, 2010).


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Christian Henriot (September 13, 2025). Behind the Counter: Shopkeepers in the Eye of Historians. Blog Virtual Shanghai. Retrieved November 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14nml


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