I have said that economic anthropology provides a perspective that helps us to see familiar things in new ways. One example of this is the description of historical changes in production in an earlier chapter. People commonly see those changes in terms of technological advance and improved efficiency. Those things are real, but the anthropology encourages us to see how they are related to other areas of people's lives, particularly their social relations and understandings of their world.

Two aspects of that history are important. One is that the relations in which production took place increasingly were impersonal, as those who did the work became more alienated from their colleagues and from what they were doing. The other is that workers were less and less likely actually to make anything and so were less likely to know how things are made. The household that wove the cloth undertook most of the steps involved; the worker on a moving assembly line undertook only a small part of the production of an automobile. Not all production changed in this way, but enough did that it affected common understandings of production and of objects produced.

Such changes occurred as well in the way that people transacted objects in commercial circulation, buying and selling. This chapter complements that history of production, for here I trace changes in the nature of commercial circulation up to the point where the modern retail market became pervasive, which was in the first half of the twentieth century. These changes show that people bought more and more of what they needed rather than making it, and did so in settings that were increasingly impersonal. These changes appeared first in large cities. The one that I shall focus on is London, although similar changes appeared at about the same time in Amsterdam and Paris. Gradually they came to pervade buying and selling pretty much everywhere, and I shall describe changes elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in the United States. To understand the significance of these changes it is necessary to understand what went before, and I begin with how things were in England.