Itinerant traders: elusive subjects moving at the intersection of historical fields

ABSTRACT

This special issue on itinerant trade includes new research on a range of non-fixed traders who engaged in both transnational and smaller-scale moves when trading. Itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial and consumption history, but also as a history of migration and labour, or of the underbelly economy and deviance. More recently, this topic has interested historians of material culture, emotions and folklore. The contributions to this special issue highlight these new directions and important trends in research into itinerant trade. The five contributions explore moving traders in the early modern and modern periods in Britain, the Nordics and across the wider European continent. The articles investigate: the space, temporality and material culture of the saloop stall in early-modern London; female rural petty trading in early twentieth-century Finland; the British Liberal authorities' approach to regulating itinerant trade in late-modern Britain; the geographic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and networks of itinerant traders in the late-nineteenth century Nordics; and the transnational networks of early-modern peddling in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Itinerant trade
• mobile trade
• pedlars
• hawkers
• street trading
• petty trade

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Léa Leboissetier. “A system of licencing vagrancy? The Pedlars Acts and the monitoring of commercial mobility in late nineteenth-century Britain”. Paper presented at the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution seminar series, February 23, 2021; Eliza McKee. “The cantman and packman: non-fixed clothing retailers and the distribution of cast-off clothing in post-Famine Ulster, c. 1850-1914”. Paper presented at the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution seminar series, April 27, 2021.

2 Bruno Blondé and Natacha Coquery. “Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe ; Marchands et Consommateurs: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries les Mutations de l’Europe moderne Angleterre, France, Italie, Pays-Bas.” In Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe, 259. Collection Perspectives historiques 14. Athènes, Le Pirée: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2005; Harald Deceulaer. “Dealing With Diversity: Pedlars in the Southern Netherlands in the Eighteenth Century.” In Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Ilja Van Damme, and Evelyne Welch, 171–98. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006; Laurence Fontaine. History of Pedlars in Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996; Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme. Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700-1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; DanielleVan Den Heuvel, and Elise Van Nederveen Meerkerk. “Households, Work and Consumer Changes. The Case of Tea and Coffee Sellers in 18th-Century Leiden.” MEMS Working Papers, 2014; Merry Wiesner Wood. “Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 12, no. 2 (1981): 3–13.

3 On the role of pedlars in the spread of clothing and textiles see: Margaret Spufford. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. London: Hambledon Press, 1984; Alison Toplis. The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800-1850. London: Routledge, 2015; Margot Finn. “Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts.” Past & Present 161 (1998): 116–54; Margot C. Finn. “Scotch Drapers and the Politics of Modernity: Gender, Class and National Identity in the Victorian Tally Trade.” In The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, edited by M. J. Daunton and Matthew Hilton, 89–107, Oxford: Berg, 2001. On the popular press see: Jeroen Salman. Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600-1850. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013.

4 D. R. Green. “Street Trading in London: A Case Study of Casual Labour, 1830-60.” In The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities, edited by C. Pooley and J. Johnson, 129–51, Croom Helm. Londres, 1982; Victoria Kelley. Cheap Street: London's Street Markets and the Culture of Informality, 1850-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019; Roger Scola. Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770-1870. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992; Charlie Taverner. Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

5 John Benson. The Penny Capitalists: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Entrepreneurs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983; Anne Winter. “‘Vagrancy’ as an Adaptive Strategy: The Duchy of Brabant, 1767-1776.” International Review of Social History 49, no. 2 (2004): 249-77.

6 Peter T. A. Jones. “Redressing Reform Narratives: Victorian London's Street Markets and the Informal Supply Lines of Urban Modernity.” The London Journal 41, no. 1 (2016): 60–81; Stephen Jankiewicz. “A Dangerous Class: the Street Sellers of Nineteenth-Century London.” Journal of Social History 46, no. 2 (2012): 391–415.

7 Laurence Fontaine. Le Voyage et la Mémoire : Colporteurs de l’Oisans au XIXe Siècle. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1984.

8 Victoria Kelley. “The Streets for the People: London's Street Markets 1850-1939.” Urban History 43, no. 4 (2016): 391-411; Victoria Kelley, Cheap Street, op cit.

9 Johanna Wassholm and Anna Sundelin. “Gendered Encounters in Mobile Trade: Human Hair as a Commodity in the Nordics, 1870-1914.” History of Retailing and Consumption 6, no. 3 (2020): 118-36.

10 Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden. Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labor History. Berghahn Books, 2002.

11 Leo Lucassen, Annemarie Cottaar, and Willem Hendrik Willems. Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: a Socio-Historical Approach. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998; Danielle Van Den Heuvel. “Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe.” Working on Labor 9 (2012): 123–51; Johanna Wassholm. ““Threatening Livelihoods”: Nordic-Enemy Images of Peddlers from the Russian Empire.” In Forgotten Livelihoods. Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820-1960, edited by Jutta Ahlbeck, Eija Stark and Ann-Catrin Östman, 221–49, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022; Johanna Wassholm and Anna Sundelin. “Rag Collectors: Mobility and Barter in a Circular Flow of Goods.” In Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820-1960: Forgotten Livelihoods, edited by Jutta Ahlbeck, Eija Stark and Ann-Catrin Östman, 69-94, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

12 Todd M. Endelman. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; David Feldman. Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994; Betty Naggar. Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers, 1740-1940. Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1992.

13 David Holland. “Toffee Men, Travelling Drapers and Black-Market Perfumers – South Asian Networks of Petty Trade in Early Twentieth Century Britain.” Twentieth Century British History 30, no. 2 (2019): 145–73; Laura Tabili. “‘To Keep My Living for Time Being’: Strategies of Makeshift in Interwar Britain.” Seminar paper presented at the Séminaire Franco-Britannique, Sorbonne Université, May 17, 2016; Rozina Visram. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

14 Pauline Carminati. “Du Colportage au Musée du Louvre. Les Mouleurs Italiens en France au Tournant du XIXe Siècle.” Diasporas. Circulations, Migrations, Histoire 32 (2018): 113–24; Léa Leboissetier. “‘Johnny Onions!’: Seasonal Pedlars from Brittany and Their Good Reputation in Great Britain (1870s – 1970s).” Journal of Migration History 7, no. 2 (2021): 85–110.

15 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen. eds. Migration, Migration History, History : Old Paradigms and New Perpectives. Bern: P. Lang, 1997; Leslie Page Moch. The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012; Leslie Page Moch. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe Since 1650. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

16 Henry Mayhew. London Labour and the London Poor. Edited by Rosemary O’Day and David Englander. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2008 (first ed. 1851).

17 Fontaine. Le voyage et la mémoire, op cit.

18 Johanna Wassholm and Anna Sundelin. “Emotions, Trading Practices and Communication in Transnational Itinerant Trade: Encounters Between ‘Rucksack Russians’ and Their Customers in the Late Nineteenth – and Early Twentieth-Century Finland.” Scandinavian Economic History Review 66, no. 2 (2018): 132–52; Eliza McKee. “Travelling Tailors and Shoemakers and the Making of Everyday Clothing in Rural Ireland, c. 1850-1914.” In Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600, edited by Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza, Forthcoming with Bloomsbury Fashion; Eliza McKee. “‘The Tailors Generally Went From House to House in Those Days’: Travelling Tailors and the Making of Apparel in the Rural Irish Dwelling, 1850-1900” In Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Heather Laird and Jay Roszman, Forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliza McKee

Eliza McKee is a historian of dress, consumption and material culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. She specialises in the clothing of the lower classes, the acquisition of dress, the material culture of poverty, folklore and vernacular culture.

Léa Leboissetier

Léa Leboissetier is a PhD candidate at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and teaching fellow in contemporary history at Sciences Po Paris. She studies itinerant traders in late-modern Britain through the lens of labour, migration and commercial history.