Ilja Van Damme

A strategy of seduction? The role of commercial advertisements in the eighteenth-century retailing business of Antwerp

This article aims to place the use of promotional advertising material in a long-term perspective. By analysing the functioning of eighteenth-century commercial notices in the retailing business of Antwerp, a provincial town in the southern Netherlands, we try to demonstrate how advertisements of this kind had no clear-cut persuasive meaning. Rather, they were used as a way of mediating information barriers between buyers and sellers and, thus, lowering transaction costs. A quantitative and semantic breakdown of the advertisements in a local newspaper, the Gazette van Antwerpen, will show the fallacies of presuming a direct manipulative force from these eighteenth-century commercial messages.

Second-hand consumption as a way of life: public auctions in the surroundings of Alost in the late eighteenth century

This article seeks to place second-hand consumption, or the reuse of older objects, into the expanding historical literature on early modern consumer practices. It claims that the study of second-hand consumption remains a much neglected topic of historical interest. Further empirical research of pre-industrial reuse habits is needed to examine essential problems and inconsistencies concerning consumers and their handling of older goods. On the basis of rarely used sources relating to public auctions in the countryside of the southern Netherlands, key questions regarding the current debate will be addressed. These questions concern the products that were handled, the actors involved, and how reuse was (or was not) affected by broader changes in society. Why would people consume second-hand products? This simple question unlocks a complex and dazzling area of research in which economic and social structures meet culturally biased material consumption. Oddly enough, the reuse of old and discarded objects in the past has received only minor attention from consumer historians. Studies of consumption connect to mainstream historical understanding, but they tend to analyse predominantly the acquisition of new goods (such as the use of imported cotton and porcelain) and the rise of novel consumption patterns (such as tea-drinking and tobacco-smoking). Thus far, historians have studied second-hand consumption mainly as an aspect of developments in the production of textiles. Not surprisingly, the widespread use of secondhand clothing in the past has made these practices all the more visible * Both of the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp. Continuity and Change 24 (2), 2009, 275–305. f Cambridge University Press 2009 doi:10.1017/S0268416009007188 Printed in the United Kingdom

Second-Hand Trade and Respectability: Mediating Consumer Trust in Old Textiles and Used Clothing (Low Countries, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

This chapter focuses on the mediating procedures that were employed to guarantee consumer trust and loyalty in the second-hand textile and clothing markets of the Low Countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines how dealings in second-hand textiles and clothing were fundamentally embedded in spatial and performative ‘conventions’: underlying agreements regarding trustworthiness of exchange and quality of handled stock that helped to solve the lack of transparency in second-hand markets.

Antwerp Goes Shopping

How did various retail outlets dominate urban space? Considering such a question from an historical perspective entails the deconstruction of the urban fabric in different ‘commercial spaces’ (market squares, shopping streets, shop premises, arcades, department stores, etc.) and the analysis of how they evolved and existed alongside each other in the long term. Retail historiography abounds with suggestions of significant ruptures or ‘revolutions’ regarding the uses of commercial space, all making neat juxtapositions between ‘established’ and ‘new’ ways of retailing, and between a ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ mode of selling consumables. Such discussions are usually set within a linear, almost teleological framework in which a succession of different retail forms eventually yields or is eclipsed by supposedly more efficient and sophisticated ones.1 Yet, such distinctions can be misleading and should be employed carefully. More often than not, commercial space fulfils long-term contingent needs and desires, without necessarily being less flexible or less responsive to more recent challenges.

‘According to the Latest and Most Elegant Fashion’: Retailing Textiles and Changes in Supply and Demand in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Antwerp

Although much is already known about the textile industries in early modern Antwerp, less research has been done on consumption and retailing of textiles and clothing.1 In his exemplary study of the tailoring business in the Southern Netherlands, Harald Deceulaer accumulated a great deal of valuable evidence, yet we are still short of a comprehensive overview of textile retailing in general.2 Moreover, a long-term study of changes in the material culture of Antwerp still awaits publication. Therefore, the major goals of this chapter are three. In the absence of sufficient preparatory studies, we will first try to map the changes in the types of textiles being retailed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antwerp. This will be done by taking into account both structural supply-side and demand-side changes in textile production and consumption, and by linking these to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century retail practices. Indeed, as a city renowned for producing different sort of textiles, the retailing landscape for textiles in Antwerp cannot be fully understood without taking supply side changes into account. Similarly, alterations in consumer preferences and practices profoundly affected the size, incomes and business strategies of textile retailers. However, the precise relationship between economies of shop-keeping and consumers’ actions still needs further exploration. Hence, the second aim of this chapter is to map the complex interplay between production, consumption and distribution in an era that witnessed rapid and interrelated supply-side and demand-side transformations.