Getting a nation of shopkeepers in motion

A nation of shopkeepers and shoppers, image courtesy of Florian and Wikimedia Commons

The claim about Britain being a nation of shopkeepers goes back at least to Adam Smith, though Napoleon may have referred to it to dismissively in regard to his enemy’s ability to fight him. Thomas Friedman employed a variety of this notion with his Golden Arches Theory of War, the concept that has been challenged since first formulated, but that holds generally true in that two nations that share common notions of…