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

places like Petticoat Lane that, as Mayhew reported in the I 850s, was embracing
adjacent streets and alleys full of old boots and shoe on the ground.36
Two other types of demand, such as exports and military orders, are not often
considered as part of consumption. 37 As many eighteenth-century political
arithmeticians pointed out, export and military supplies could be in direct
competition with internal consumption. Military needs were affecting the civil
consumption of boots and shoes, varying the overall supply of footwear. Joseph
Hall, a London wholesale shoe manufacturer, reported to a Parliamentary
committee that"army can overthrow the market", affectmg prices in particular.38
The British Navy, for instance, required between 1760 and 1790 more than one
million pairs of shoes from four London contractors. War periods (in darker
colour in fig. 3.2) presented enormous opportunities to produce hundreds of
thousands pairs of shoes.
160,000
140,000
120,000
100,000
'5 80,000
. 60,000
40,000
20.000
0
Figure 3.2 - British Navy's shoe commissions, 1760-1795
r'l 1 .0 00 C e t '1' .0 00 l
'0 '0 '0 '0 '0 N N N N N C 00 00 0' 0' 0'
N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N
year
Source: PRO. Adm 49/35, if. 1,4, 5, 19, 71, 81, 93, 98-102.
fashion: salesmen, pawnbrokers, taylors, thieves and the second-hand clothes trade in England, c.
1700-1800', Textile History, XXII - 1(1991), pp. 67-82.
36 J. Canning, ed., The illustrated Mayhew's London (London, 1986), p. 140. In the provinces,
peddlers were selling, among different items, second-hand shoes and slippers. GL, Prints
Department, 26,426 and 26,464: 'Old shooes for Some Broomes'.
" D.J. Smith, 'Army clothing contractors and the textile industries in the 18th century', Textile
History, XIV-2 (1983), pp. 153-64.
British Parliamentary Papers, 18 12-13, IV, pp. 642-43 (micro 14.23).
102