Local and National Identities in the Politics of Consumption: The Anti-Chain Store Movement Reconsidered

Abstract

Using the anti-chain store movement as a case study, this article explores the relationship between the local and the national in the twentieth-century politics of consumption. It shows that independent merchants in the 1920s and 1930s articulated a potent form of localist politics. They believed that this politics was crucial both to the nation and to national well-being. Historians who work on the relationship between the state and consumption, it argues, have not paid sufficient attention to this mode of localist politcs, in which the local was embedded in the national. Localist attachments, identities and movements are too often ignored, or treated as if they are not related to national level developments. This tendency can at least in part be explained by the surprising persistence in current historiography of a cosmopolitan form of liberalism deeply (and perhaps unduly) suspicious of ‘the local’.