The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

large consumer markets, but also places of constant exchange of information on
supply and demand.
However, many of the studies that have so transformed our knowledge of the
material world of early modern Britain have concentrated mainly on what can be
called 'the world of goods'. 3 Large attention has been given to systems of
objects, rather than micro studies on particular commodities.4 On the one hand,
this has avoided an overly microscopic examination of particular commodities;
on the other hand 'consumer history' has used "a macro-scale of analysis whose
assumptions about the nature of society, demand, and the actual relationship
between goods and people can generally be reduced to certain highly simplistic
and dubious notions". 5 The absence of an economic framework has given larger
scope for social and cultural research on consumption. There has been a real
attempt to explain the way in which systems of objects can assume particular
values in specific time and space and are consequently produced and sold in
particular ways. However, economic aspects of consumption have only with
difficulty identified a systematic analysis. One particular problem relates to the
deep gap existing between the new results provided by historians of
consumption and general economic history theories still very much confined to
supply-side interpretations.6
This chapter aims to present the case of a particular sector, considering
consumption as the starting point in the understanding of the dynamics of
change in production. My case study can not be in any way considered
exemplary of the methodology to be used in other sectors. Its purpose is firstly to
highlight possible areas of consumption history that are not yet fully
investigated. Secondly it aims to provide an analysis that strongly links
consumption to production. In the first section of this chapter I will move from
an aggregate perspective on boot and shoe consumption towards the important
Consider for example Brewer and Porter's Consumption and the world of goods, cit.; B. Fine
and E. Leopold, The world of consumption (London, 1993) or, for France, the recent History of
everyday things: the birth of consumption in France, 1600-1800 by D. Roche (Cambridge,
2000).
' J. Styles, 'Product innovation in early modern London', Past and Present, CLXVIII (2000),
pp. 126-7.
D. Miller, Material culture and mass consumption (New York, 1987), p. 143.
93