With few exceptions, historians have argued that in the nineteenth century women were excluded from most retail activities. In Europe women became increasingly concentrated in small-scale, undercapitalized, and short-lived stores. The “separate sphere” ideology in its different guises underlay this evolution. In North America, on the other hand, women capitalized on this ideology to carve a niche for themselves in trade and retailing. Women were not marginalized or segregated everywhere in Europe, however. In northern France the expansion of retail trade and overall improvements in standards of living provided women, especially married ones, with opportunities they were not reluctant to grasp. Though the activities of married women remained subordinated to the needs of their families, female retailers were neither particularly impoverished nor segregated in sectors deemed appropriate for persons of their sex.

Early twentieth-century advertising discourses on the archetypal boy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of consumption that broke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven female shopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prized technological innovation and influenced parents and peers. While touting boys' ample consumer appetites, promoters of the boy consumer also depicted boys' interest in advertised goods as worthy of entrepreneurial-minded self-improvers. The ideal of the boy consumer thus harmonized the potentially hedonistic ethos of consumerism with older ideals of productivity and industriousness. New ideologies of manhood that valorized enthusiasm, loyalty, and salesmanship confirmed the boy consumer's manly vitality.

Traditional kinship relations denied African women access to property and cash income. As they moved out of the traditional sector to urban centers, women created opportunities for independent earnings, and they displayed remarkable entrepreneurial spirit in undertaking informal economic activities. One of their tactics was the utilization of a type of rotating credit and savings organization (ROSCA), the stokvel, to mobilize savings outside the formal financial structure. This article brings together scattered research on stokvels, traces their past and present uses by African women, and concludes with an exploration of the reasons for the persistence of these forms despite the development of sophisticated financial structures in modern South Africa.

Because most histories of military-industrial relations have rested on the examples of arms production and shipbuilding, balanced accounts of military procurement and technologies during the nineteenth century are difficult to find. In fact, weapons and ships accounted for a relatively small fraction of all the goods and services consumed by nineteenth-century armed forces. This article, which describes the tent industry in the United States during the Civil War, suggests that many military enterprises of the period were characterized by an industrial dynamic that was relatively extensive rather than intensive. In the U.S. tent industry, the leading military contractors were mercantile firms, which stood at the center of disintegrated production and distribution networks. Featuring relatively low-capital production arrangements, large numbers of women workers, and powerful mercantile intermediaries who linked manufacturers and army purchasing agents, the Civil War tent business is an example that challenges traditional accounts of the economic foundations of nineteenth-century military capability.

Unlike most nineteenth-century makers of traditional musical instruments, who did not aim at mass markets, German harmonica manufacturers were able to develop a large and worldwide market for their product. Located in regions outside Germany's industrial core districts, they epitomized successful specialty production. From the beginning, they relied on exports, especially to North America, a trade that was initially assisted by transatlantic emigrants who helped test market potential and tap into commercial networks. Hohner, the most successful harmonica manufacturer, created a well-known brand and extensively applied strategies of market segmentation and product differentiation from the 1890s onward, in part to satisfy customers' demand for myriad product variations. Sales channels and marketing methods also were far from homogeneous, being most effective when adapted to local conditions and cultures. For harmonica makers, diversity rather than uniformity was the key to global marketing success.