Nation of shopkeepers facts for kids
The phrase "a nation of shopkeepers" is an expression commonly used to refer to England or the United Kingdom. It is often attributed to Napoleon, though this claim is disputed and earlier occurrences exist.
Historical context
Napoleon would have been correct in seeing the United Kingdom as essentially a commercial and naval rather than a land based power, but during his lifetime it was fast being transformed from a mercantile to an industrial nation, a process which laid the basis for a century of British hegemony after the Battle of Waterloo. Although the UK had half the population of France during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a higher per capita income and, consequently, a greater tax base, necessary to conduct a prolonged war of attrition. The United Kingdom's economy and its ability to finance the war against Napoleon also benefitted from the Bank of England's issuance of inconvertible banknotes, a "temporary" measure which remained from the 1790s until 1821.
Origin of phrase
The phrase may have been part of standard 18th-century economic dialogue. It has been suggested that Napoleon may have heard it during a meeting of the French Convention on 11 June 1794, when Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac quoted Smith's phrase. But this presupposes that Napoleon himself, as opposed to Barère alone, used the phrase.
In any case the phrase did not originate with Napoleon, or even Barère. It first appears in a non-pejorative sense in The Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith, who wrote:
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Smith is also quoted as saying that Britain was "a nation that is governed by shopkeepers", which is how he put it in the first (1776) edition. It is unlikely that either Adam Smith or Napoleon used the phrase to describe that class of small retailers who would not even have had the franchise.
The phrase has also been attributed to Samuel Adams, but this is disputed; Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, produced a slightly different phrase in 1766:
And what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
Benjamin Franklin used a similar idea about Holland in a letter to Charles W. F. Dumas on 6 August 1781:
Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper.
Reappropriation
Though the original supposed usage by Napoleon was meant to be disparaging, the term has since been used positively in the British press. Margaret Thatcher used the phrase in an interview to the press on 18 February 1975:
We used to be famous for two things—as a nation of shopkeepers and as the workshop of the world. One is trade, the other is industry. We must get back our reputation.
William Makepeace Thackeray turned the phrase back onto the continent in his classic Vanity Fair (novel), first published in serial form in Punch (magazine) in 1847-8, albeit satirizing the Belgians rather than the French. In the Chapter XXVIII, in which the Duke of Wellington's army lands in Ostend in the lead up to the Battle of Waterloo, Thackeray states that
it may be said as a rule, that every Englishman in the Duke of Wellington's army paid his way. The remembrance of such a fact surely becomes a nation of shopkeepers.
