The initial spark for this study came from a different set of shopkeepers in a different city from that with which it deals. In the mid-1980s I spent a year studying in Bologna, a city well known for the profusion of small shops under the porticoes of its historic centre, and in which the suburbs still host a far greater number of shops, bars and restaurants than similar cities in Britain and America. The proprietors of these establishments were the first people I got to know in the city, and they good-humouredly assisted me in my struggle to learn Italian by engaging them in conversation whilst having my hair cut, buying my groceries or drinking my cappuccino. As an outsider I was very struck by the contrasts between the Italian small retailing sector and that in my own country, prompting a curiosity about the history of shopkeepers in Italy. To my surprise I found that no modern Italian scholar had investigated this stratum of society.

In retrospect this does not appear so unusual. Even after the explosion of interest in social history in the 1960s, historians throughout Europe regarded the lower middle classes with suspicion. Workers and peasants made more ideologically acceptable subjects for the practitioners of ‘history from below’ who tended to sneer at the petit-bourgeois values that theorists and psychohistorians suggested were indicative of inherently authoritarian, if not Fascist, tendencies.