Watching the hordes of people spilling out of Amsterdam Central Station into the city's shopping streets on a Saturday or Sunday, it is hard to imagine that just a few decades ago these same streets were beset by a lack of occupancy and decline. The affected streets included not only Kalverstraat and Nieuwendijk, the city's best-known shopping streets, but also streets in old working-class areas such as the Jordaan. In the 1960s, one shop after another closed. Some retailers packed up and left for the new districts that had been built on the city's periphery after the Second World War. Others abandoned entrepreneurship for wage employment, singing the praises of fixed working hours and holiday pay, whilst older shopkeepers muddled through until a redevelopment grant or old-age pension allowed them to shut up shop for good. In that same period, the sun shone on the freshly painted apartment blocks in new districts, and the shops there enjoyed a brisk trade. Nowadays, the situation is very different. Particularly on the edges of what are no longer such new districts, shops have almost disappeared altogether, the vacant retail spaces filled by offices, physiotherapy practices and other service providers. By contrast, today the shoppers are back in force in Kalverstraat and Nieuwendijk, and these streets have the highest rents in the Netherlands. As a result of gentrification, even streets in what were once run-down working-class neighbourhoods are now experiencing a thriving retail trade and the high shop rents that come with this.

It was recent changes in the retail landscape such as these that initially fuelled my interest in the early modern history of shops and shopping. Shops—and retail trade in general—have played a much more important role in our towns and cities than the relatively small amount of attention paid to this phenomenon by Dutch historians would suggest. In a strictly economic sense, shops and markets are the final link in the chain connecting producers to consumers. They are where people purchase the things that they are unable or unwilling to produce themselves, thereby profiting from the expertise, skills and also, in many cases, lower wages of producers located both near and far.