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

The idea of a special issue about itinerant trade and labour takes its origin in our meeting during the 2021 seminar series of the Centre for the History of Retaining and Distribution (CHORD, University of Wolverhampton). After our presentations we connected to discuss our mutual interest in new work on itinerant labour coming from fields as diverse as commercial history, migration/mobility studies, economic history, cultural history, material culture studies and folklore studies, and we decided to organise a ‘Moving Labour’ conference.¹ The conference took place in June 2021 and its major objective was to provide a forum for examining the different methodologies and approaches to the study of moving labour from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. It paid particular attention to the imbrication of the different scales and temporalities of labour mobility and the complex nature of the circulation of people and goods. Contributors discussed the resources that made labour mobility possible (be it in terms of networks, infrastructures or institutions), explored its different facets (notably the movement of industrial workers and itinerant traders), its regulation as well as the cultural history of labourers on the move, be it from a material or visual point of view. The conference also aimed to add to a broad history of labour by looking at workers’ practices and strategies, whether in the workplace or in their daily life.

While the conference focused on ‘Moving Labour’ in its widest sense, we were inspired by the rich range of papers on itinerant trade and the new information they highlighted on a selection of non-fixed traders including commercial travellers, street traders, pedlars, hawkers, and travelling tailors/crafts people. We decided to publish a selection of the papers that pushed research in new directions in a special issue of this journal. Like moving labour, itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial or 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. Recent academic works, as well as speakers from the Moving Labour conference and contributors to this issue, highlight a few important trends regarding itinerant trading.

The enduring importance of peddling through the modern period is emphasised by historians. Scholars have traditionally written about the competition between itinerant traders and fixed shops, as well as the slow decline of the former in the late modern period. Since the 1990s, however, a large body of works has highlighted the diversity and the interdependence of modern retail circuits.² Historians have also questioned the alleged backwardness of itinerant trading (in comparison to fixed shops and fairs) by showing the importance of pedlars in shaping consumer preferences and in distributing fashionable goods in rural areas. Scholars also underline their contribution to the dynamism of European urban centres, notably through the establishment of large credit networks. The central role of pedlars and hawkers in the distribution of certain goods is notably underlined in the case of textiles, clothing, and print material.³

Commercial historians furthermore show that itinerant trading remained a dynamic occupation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pedlars, hawkers and costermongers took advantage of or created niche markets and attracted customers unable or unwilling to visit fixed shops. Contra the idea that street markets were an unsophisticated form of commercial outlet, scholars highlight that the demand for goods sold from itinerant barrows was high from the eighteenth century onward. This strand of research is still dynamic today, with works focusing on the social role as well as on the economic demand linked to street markets and itinerant traders.⁴ The latter's stall represented important moments of sociability, especially for workers or women. This is a topic tackled by Freya Purcell in her contribution to this issue. She examines the space of the saloop stall, a beverage sold in the streets of early-modern London, and shows that this stall, its lights and its warmth constituted a welcome respite for London's labourers up to the 1820s.

A common assumption is that peddling, after the 1850s, was on the verge of extinction, and that it only survived through its role as a safety net for the destitute and the unskilled, becoming the preserve of the history of urban poverty and deviance. The fact that a large pool of itinerant traders were indeed poor, or that the activity could serve as a safety net for humble labourers, can indeed not be denied. This, however, should not mean that the occupation does not deserve academic attention. As John Benson shows in his works on ‘penny capitalism’, itinerant trading remained an important activity in times of seasonal slack, depression or unemployment, thus fulfilling an economic and social need of the popular classes on the supply as well as on the demand side of the market.⁵ This is the perspective utilised by Ann-Catrin Östman, who investigates female petty traders in early twentieth-century Finland. She however adopts an original focus by investigating peddling not in the context of urban poverty, but in a rural context. Léa Leboissetier also discusses makeshifts peddling, but does so by operating a shift of perspective and exploring how the British Liberal authorities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries sought to promote self-help among humble and honest labourers by encouraging them to take up such an activity. The history of peddling is thus associated with the history of the slow emergence of the welfare state, but also to that of police control and state growth, be it on the local or the national scale.

One important area of investigation, since the 1990s, has consequently been the marginality of itinerant workers, as well as their relationship with and regulation by the authorities including the police, local government and fixed retailers. Peter Jones and Stephen Jankiewicz have underlined the subversive potential of street sellers: their use of commons, of public spaces as trade locations, and of interpersonal relationships between customers, middlemen and providers became increasingly rejected by local authorities.⁶ As underlined by Leboissetier, police control was not limited to the poorest traders: issues of street congestion, noise and hygiene or credit relations also were sources of concern for the British legislator long after the 1870s. Despite the state's increasing wish and ability to monitor their moves and practices, itinerant traders were often able to bypass legislation and invoke customary rights in order to legitimise their occupation: this is the case of Östman's female country-dwellers.

We should however point out that it would be wrong to assume that itinerant traders were uniformly poor, deviant or marginal. First, the idea that peddling, hawking and street trading declined with the rise of fixed shops has also been qualified. Laurence Fontaine underlines in her contribution as well as in her previous works on early-modern pedlars that merchants of luxury good remained successful well into the second-half of the century: this was notably the case of the flower sellers from Oisans.⁷ Furthermore, cities like London still featured a lot of perambulating merchants well into the 1930s.⁸ The latter were in constant contact with other members of the working classes, a fact highlighted in all the contributions to this issue. We can thus argue that their history fits well in the new trends of broad labour history, a strand of historiography which has developed concurrently to narrow labour history but has gone beyond the theme of labour politics to embrace various aspects of working-class lives.

Work on itinerant trade has increasingly explored the role of itinerant traders in the consumption patterns of the lower classes. This theme is explored in Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm's contribution, which explores itinerant traders of different geographic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds who played a significant role in everyday consumption as well as the occasional purchases of luxuries in the late nineteenth-century Nordics. Freya Purcell similarly explores the theme of everyday consumption in her contribution on the eighteenth-century saloop stall.

The diversity of itinerant traders has finally been increasingly highlighted over the last decades, be it in terms of socio-economic conditions, gender, race or religious beliefs.⁹ Since the 1970s, these new categories of analysis have indeed come to the fore of historical analysis: a common line of criticism addressed to labour history has been its tendency to ignore the dividing lines running through the popular classes. Faced with the crisis of mainstream labour history, focusing on groups of male industrial workers, scholars have been keen to rethink the concept of class, to pay closer attention to the heterogeneity of the working classes and to think beyond national boundaries.¹⁰ Similarly, we should consider pedlars and hawkers as a diverse group of individuals. This theme runs through the issue: Ann-Catrin Östman illustrates this trend by focusing specifically on female traders. Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm instead focus on itinerant traders who were considered ‘outsiders’ in the Nordics – Eastern European Jews, Tatars, Russian Karelians and German hair cutters. These differences had an impact on how traders operated and were perceived, controlled, but also on what they sold and which networks they participated in.¹¹

In the case of itinerant traders, patterns of mobility and migration should also be considered. Compared with the sprawling transnational networks of early-modern peddling identified by Laurence Fontaine in this issue, it can be tempting to dismiss the moves of poor pedlars selling a couple of laces from door-to-door as irrelevant. However, recent work in migration and imperial history show that transnational commercial mobility was still alive and well in the twentieth century. While the patchiness of the sources adds to this impression of relative immobility, in Britain alone studies have for instance been carried out on Jewish newcomers engaging in the rag-and-bone trade¹², East Asian migrants peddling textiles and confectionary¹³, Italian plaster figurine hawkers and Breton onion sellers.¹⁴ Despite a lack of overarching studies of these migrant groups, these case studies prove that international peddling networks were still a feature of twentieth-century Europe.

Smaller-scale moves should also be taken into account. Scholars such as Leo and Jan Lucassen or Leslie Moch argue that short distance and internal moves can have strong transformative effects on individuals, departure and host societies, even more so when the former relocated to a place with different values, religion, political system, technologies or social rules than in their society of origins.¹⁵ Laurence Fontaine, for instance, shows that pedlars acted as cultural-brokers and providers of exotic, new or fashionable goods in the pre-1850s period, even when their moves were interregional and not transnational. Freya Purcell underlines that despite its ephemeral existence, the saloop stall introduced many working-class Londoners to the new material culture of tea-wares. Finally, the fact that some pedlars were migrants, foreigners, or were perceived as such should also be taken into account. Itinerant traders were regularly perceived to be strangers or outsiders even when they did not cross any political or administrative border.¹⁶

Itinerant traders relied on networks to succeed. The study of networks has been an expanding area of enquiry, where the various types of networks that characterised mobile trade have been investigated. As underlined in Laurence Fontaine's contribution, expanding networks covering both rural and urban locations were a key element in the success of the large peddling ventures of the early-modern period. Fontaine also highlights the importance of credit networks for pedlars: without them, their whole occupation crumbled.¹⁷ Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm explore this trend in their article on the northern European mobile trade between 1850 and 1920. They outline the connections that traders from certain regions established between themselves to further their business in the Nordics, the networks formed between pedlars and their customers and the role of transnational, national and local networks for the acquisition and transport of goods over long distances.

As itinerant traders typically engaged in small-scale trading practices on the edges of society, informally or on the fringe of legality, it can be difficult to access information on moving traders. Archival material, whether newspaper sources, fiscal, business or legal sources, typically document the view of the authorities on the work of itinerant traders and provide a view from ‘above’. While this provides an interesting insight into police and reformers’ attitudes to pedlars and hawkers, a range of diverse and original sources have been used by our contributors to try and highlight different perspectives on mobile trading. Freya Purcell, for instance, utilises a range of sources including contemporary literature, visual culture and court testimonies to explore the material and sensorial attributes of the saloop stall itinerant street traders. Purcell also shows through visual sources and material objects of tea associated with the saloop stall, including ceramic cups and hot tea urns, that they were removed from domestic spaces with which these objects are typically associated.

Recently, historians publishing on itinerant trade, particularly in Scandinavian countries and in Ireland, both parts of the world with rich folklore traditions and archives that collect ethnographic material, have utilised folklore and ethnographic collections to explore what these sources reveal about trading practices occurring on the margins of the economy.¹⁸ Folklore and ethnography have been particularly utilised to investigate rural trading practice and consumption; salesmanship at a local level; consumer-trade relationships; the scale of the movements of itinerant traders and how this was locally understood; and how the itinerant traders were received and encountered by their customers and the communities they visited. These sources of information are important because they reflect the perspective of the consumer that itinerant traders served and they provide a view ‘from below’. They help us to glean information on the emotions, feelings and perceptions of the mobile trade from their customers, as well as sometimes providing the perspectives of mobile traders themselves.

A source that has been utilised by two contributions in this special issue is the ethnographic questionnaire, which provides access to the consumer perspective of the itinerant traders. Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm's contribution showcases the importance of analysing a wide source base to identify the networks of pedlars, including interviews with former pedlars, newspaper articles documenting police reports, and a rich collection of ethnographic questionnaires held in archives and museums in Turku, Uppsala and Stockholm. Ann-Catrin Östman's article on women mobile vendors in rural Finland draws on ethnographic material collected in the 1960s by the Finnish Heritage Agency. Rural respondents provided information on customary and local practices of trading.

Despite the declining numbers of itinerant traders in the twentieth century, the articles in this special issue evidence that pedlars had cultural significance in Europe from the early modern period into the twentieth century. Work on mobile trade of all kinds is expanding in new directions, but despite this rich new historiography, there is still more to explore. Studies of individual mobile traders, and more expansive studies that cover larger geographical spaces and groups of people provide us with rich new insights into itinerant trade. Presentations at the Moving Labour conference and the subsequent contributions to this special issue highlight the advantages of particular types of document and raised the profile of importance of underutilised archives which offer a wealth of material for future research and inspiration for other scholars. We hope that this special issue will add to the growing body of work on the itinerant trade and of moving labour more broadly and demonstrate some of the rich possibilities to continue expanding research on mobile traders and their role in trade, retailing and consumption that occurred beyond the boundaries of the shop.

Disclosure statement

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

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.

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.