In 1926 the Fascist regime instituted a restrictive shop-licensing system which accounts for the continued prominence of small shopkeepers in Italy today. Retailers' interests were represented on the licensing panels by the Fascist Confederation for Commercial Traders in an apparently genuine grant of corporate authority. The confederation swiftly reconstituted itself after the fall of the regime and retained its power within the post-war licensing structure. This article will analyse the background to the introduction of the system as a way into debates about the relationship between the Fascist state and the petite bourgeoisie.

Historical research into the petite bourgeoisie in Belgium did not begin until quite a bit later than it did abroad. On closer inspection, that was no bad thing. Because of the late start by Belgian historians, they were more open-minded and less inclined towards the research into the roots of Fascism which was largely based on pre-war sociological theories. Beginning in 1980, pioneering research was carried out at the Université Libre de Bruxelles – for the most part on the period before the First World War. The research group under the direction of Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk systematically analysed several important series of sources and produced interesting detailed studies. In 1993 Serge Jaumain published a comprehensive study on Belgian retail trade in the period from 1880 to 1914.

When the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party came to power in 1932, Sweden experienced a turning point in its history. For the first time the role of the Social Democratic Party in the construction of the welfare state became significant. Until the end of the 1910s the Social Democrats had concentrated their primary efforts on the problems of trade union recognition and the struggle for parliamentary democracy. After 1920 the Social Democrats became the largest party, but did not gain political power except for a brief interlude. The concept of the ‘Swedish Model’ has often been used in Sweden and abroad to describe the unique development of Swedish society in the twentieth century. However, historians and social scientists have tended to analyse Swedish society without a clear definition of the very concept, the ‘Swedish Model’.

Some years ago, Edward Thompson famously scolded historians for their ‘enormous condescension’ towards working people of the past. His message and example struck a responsive chord, and over the past thirty years a lively historiography has rescued these and other ‘invisible’ figures from their former obscurity. However, while many among history's silent masses have thus received their ‘voices’, this has not been the case for that vast and mediocre mass, the middle classes.

On 10 July 1950, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer), its president Karl Schöppler announced: ‘Today industry is in no way the enemy of Handwerk. Handwerk is not the enemy of industry.…’ These words, which accurately reflected the predominant point of view of the post-war chamber membership, and certainly of its politically influential leadership, marked a new era in the social, economic and political history of German artisans and, it is not too much to say, in the history of class relations in (West) Germany in general. Schöppler's immediate frame of reference was the long-standing and extremely consequential antipathy on the part of artisans towards industrial capitalism, an antipathy of which his listeners were well aware.