Global Perspectives on Changing Secondhand Economies

Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her publications include Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (1989), African Encounters with Domesticity (1992), Keeping House in Lusaka (1997), and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (2000). Jennifer Le Zotte is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, specializing in gender, race, capitalism, and material culture, especially dress. Her publications include From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (2017).

• Introduction: Changing Secondhand Economies 1. Domestic textiles and country house sales in Georgian England 2. ‘Fence-ing lessons’: child junkers and the commodification of scrap in the long nineteenth century 3. Jews, second-hand trade and upward economic mobility: Introducing the ready-to-wear business in industrializing Helsinki, 1880–1930 4. Shylocks to superheroes: Jewish scrap dealers in Anglo-American popular culture 5. The mass consumption of refashioned clothes: Re-dyed kimono in post war Japan 6. The work of shopping: Resellers and the informal economy at the goodwill bins 7. Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store 8. History as business: Changing dynamics of retailing in Gothenburg’s second-hand market 9. Second-hand vehicle markets in West Africa: A source of regional disintegration, trade informality and welfare losses 10. Urban prototypes: Growing local circular cloth economies