A Nation of Shopkeepers explores the unstoppable rise of the petite-bourgeoisie, one of the most powerful, but underexplored, classes in modern society. The petite-bourgeoisie — the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie — is hugely significant within global politics. Yet it remains something of a mystery. Initially identified as a powerful political force by theorists like Marx and Poulantzas, the petit-bourgeoisie was expected to decline, as small businesses and small property were gradually swallowed up by monopoly capitalism. Yet, far from disappearing, structural changes to the global economy under neoliberalism have instead grown the petite-bourgeoisie, and the individualist values associated with it have been popularized by a society which fetishizes "aspiration", home ownership and entrepreneurship. So why has this happened? A Nation of Shopkeepers sheds a light on this mysterious class, exploring the class structure of contemporary Britain and the growth of the petite-bourgeoisie following Thatcherism. It shows how the rise of home ownership, small landlordism and radical changes to the world of work have increasingly inculcated values of petite-bourgeois individualism; how popular culture has promoted and reproduced values of aspiration and conspicuous consumption that militate against socialist organizing; and, most importantly, what the unstoppable rise of the petit-bourgeoisie means for the left.

This history of retailing in Britain looks at the development of retail forms, the nature of consumerism and the consumer revolution, the connection between property ownership and retail development, and the complex relations between retailer identities and representations of the trade.

The John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library is one of the world's most important collections of printed ephemera. This exhibition catalog focuses on just one of the many subject areas of the Collection—trades and shops. Richly illustrated with trade cards, bill headings, prints, and games—many of which have not been previously reproduced—these miniature works of art depict shops, products, tradesmen, and trades through the ages, giving us fascinating insights into the wealth of goods available and the people who bought and sold them.

A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.