By the third quarter of the 18th century tea, sugar and tobacco were central to the lives of a wide range of people. Significantly for Stobart then, although not ‘modern’ the grocery trade in this period ably incorporated new goods into their stock.Ĭhapter two explores the new goods of the early modern period – sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea and chocolate. Prior to 1650, Stobart asserts, the grocery trade was a vibrant and widespread entity, which supplied imported goods to customers well before Jan de Vries classic ‘industrious revolution’ period. Sugar, tobacco, spices and dried fruit became items of central importance to the grocery trade. During the 16th and 17th century, specialized London grocers were increasingly able to supply their provincial counterparts with new, non-perishable goods. Even in the 15th century large provincial grocers could supply their customers with a range of spices. Significant to Stobart’s investigation, however, is the way in which grocers obtained supplies of imported foodstuffs. Yet the existence of such Guilds and Companies alludes to a greater degree of definition than grocers could claim in the late middle ages and early modern period. Generally selling in gross, by 1373 such sellers had formed a new guild – the Company of Grossers. In its early history, the Pepperers’ Guild (chartered in 1180) controlled and managed vendors who sold a range of spices and confectionary. In his first chapter Stobart outlines the development of the grocery trade prior to 1650. In his engaging analysis Stobart shows the multiple meanings that goods such as sugar and spice simultaneously claimed. By focusing on supply chains, selling practices and consumer behaviours, Stobart demonstrates how contemporary ideas of empire and trade complicated the categorization of ‘luxury’ goods. Secondly, and perhaps in reaction to the historiographical responsibility given to imported foodstuffs, Stobart asks: what were the everyday practicalities of selling, buying and consuming such goods? Less a business history, than a history of consumption, Stobart’s focus on processes allows him to reassess the usefulness of frameworks concerned with novelty, luxury and utility. In assessing these historiographical trends Stobart seeks to question whether groceries can bear such a heavy explanatory load. It also recognizes that historians have understood that the consumption of these goods transformed many aspects of British cultural and social life, from meal times to gender identity. First, it notes how historians have primarily linked the trade in novel food goods to the rise of Britain as a commercial and imperial power. Sugar and Spice focuses upon two main research questions. By focusing upon the particular in the global, Stobart convincingly reasserts the need for more studies which explore the localised processes that lie at the heart of global trade. Stobart tells a global story through a particular lens, in order to demonstrate how the supply of goods such as tobacco, tea, coffee and chocolate shaped the retail practices and spaces of early modern Britain. Rather than the diner or drinker, however, Stobart largely focuses on the people from which contemporaries purchased such goods – the grocers whose increasingly complicated supply networks allowed them to sell a range of imported goods to an ever-widening group of consumers. It is these ‘new’ imported products that form the primary focus of Jon Stobart’s Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650–1830. Women sipped tea in parlours and drawing rooms, while men walked out to coffee houses, taking snuff as they strode, before returning home later to enjoy a dinner of savoury dishes and sweet delicacies laced with sugar and spice. During the long 18th century imported foodstuffs came to play a central role in the everyday experiences of British people.
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