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

3.2.4 Demand and standardisation: exports
In the same way, export provided another important source for the development
of a ready-to-wear market.48 From the seventeenth century large quantities of
shoes were exported to the West Indies and the North American colonies, in
particular from London and Bristol. 49 This was the beginning of a ready-to-wear
market, well before the invention of the sewing machine or mechanisation of
production. Enormous stocks of boots and shoes, such as the one of Robert
Goodson, a cordwainer in Bassingshaw Street in the City of London in the late
seventeenth century, testifies the existence of ready-made products and the
presence of vast scale subcontracting. 5° Shoes were the fifth product exported
from London to the West Indies in 1686 with a total value of £4,200 and the
sixth product exported from London to North America in the same year with a
total value of more than £5,000.51 The frequent references by warehouses to
supply of merchants for foreign markets, show the increasing importance of the
export market for London and provincial shoe and bootmakers in the eighteenth
century.52 Massie in 1757 calculated that Britain was exporting more than three
million pounds of leather per year and about 120,000 pounds of leather that were
manufactured into shoes, equal to 120,000 pairs of shoes. 53 The figures provided
by Massie and by Gregory more than half a century earlier coincides with the
general trend of export of 'wrought' leather from Britain. It is therefore possible
to estimate the English export of boots and shoes for the period between 1690
and 1805 (fig. 3.3).
48 Various eighteenth-century trade cards specified that "Merchants and others may be
furnished with all sorts of Shoes for Exportation". BM, Heal Collection 18.5 (1749).
CLRO, Orphans Court, mv. 1481 (3 July 1679 - Thomas Dolman); E.E. Rich, ed., Minutes
of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1679-1684 (Toronto, 1946), vol. ii, pp. 8, 13, 251; P. McGrath,
Merchants and merchandise in seventeenth-century Bristol (Bristol, 1968), PP. 200, 250, 263,
268-71.
5°CLRO, Orphans Court, mv. 1297 (4th September 1677 - Robert Goodson). He counted on an
large stock of 99 pairs of laced shoes, 414 pairs of plain shoes, 199 pairs of cloth shoes, 155
pairs of pumps, more than 215 soles, 50 hides and skins for a total value of121 17s 8d.
51 N. Zahedieh, 'London and the colonial consumer in the late seventeenth century', Economic
History Review, XLVII - 2 (1994), pp. 250-1.
52 See shoemakers' trade cards at the British Museum and Guildhall Library.
J. Massie, Considerations on the leather trades of Great Britain, cit., p. 18.
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