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This article explores the sophisticated visual and textual language of one of the most common, yet overlooked, forms of early advertising – the trade card. Analysis is based on mid-seventeenth- to late eighteenth-century examples within two key collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. The rare examples of continental, particularly French, advertising in the latter collection provide the opportunity to compare the codes and conventions used by English and French retailers. The authors challenge the view that this form of advertising was either primitive or predominantly English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses questions of gender and class in consumer behavior in industrial England. Role of commodities and their significance to practices of middling consumers in the towns of Birmingham and Sheffield; Investigation of qualitative questions of social and emotional significance attached to the goods; Shift from elite consumption of foreign luxuries to demand for consumer novelties.

This article examines the diversity of the manufacturing structures and the small scale of the first factories in England during the eighteenth century. Recent research on manufacturing organisation has challenged both the ubiquity and the efficiency of the large-scale firm and mass-production methods. Learning from the computer revolution and Japanese manufacturing methods has brought alternatives to models based on mass production, batch production, flexible specialisation, just-in-time production complexes and network capitalism have integrated small-scale production into recent industrial success stories. Recognition of the advantages of creativity, flexible, skill-intensive technologies, product choices and external economies explain current trends to quasi-disintegration. Indeed these successes have made smoke-stack industry and assembly-line mass-production look dated. These analyses maintain a strong grip on our histories of industrial structures. Many of these histories are fundamentally teleologies, charting the emergence of the outstandingly large, wealthy or successful firms and entrepreneurs as the yardstick of industrialisation.