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

Moreover the expanding transoceanic markets required the action of specialised
traders in shoes. Large shoemakers were willing to expand business in
wholesale, specialising in the export market. John Mynde of St. Dision,
Fenchurch Street (illustration 4.3), specified that "Merchants and others may be
furnished with all sorts of Shoes for Exportation".' 4 These large London shops
combining retail and wholesale were termed in the 1740s 'shoe warehouses'.
They were selling goods to shopkeepers, small urban and rural shoemakers and
for exportation. Collyer reported in 1761 that:
The master shoe-maker in London keep shop and employ many workmen and
workwomen. Some of them export great quantities to our Plantations, both of
shoes and boots, made in London and of those they contract for in the country.
The principal business of these shopkeepers and of their journeymen and
apprentices is cutting out shoes, delivering them to the makers, receiving them
when finished, fitting them on the feet of their customers, and keeping their
books.15
In the 1764 John Came of Cheapside was the owner of perhaps the most
important of these warehouses. By that date this kind of shop was already
common as reported by a contemporary lamenting about:
the Yorkshire and other country shoe-houses in almost every publick street in
London... filled with noisy and difficult customers, especially the night-men,
penny-post-men and slaughter-house-men, who have just received their week's
wages.16
The number of such wholesale warehouses has not to be exaggerated. Surely
they have a primary importance in confirming "London's role at the heart of
interlocking regional, national, and international networks".' 7 However their
expansion took several decades to impose new patterns of production associated
to retailing.
14 The reference was in particular to merchant dealing with the 'plantations'. BM, Prints and
Drawings Department, Heal Collection 18.5. Large quantities of shoes were exported to North
America during the first half of the century (see also pp. 105-108). In 1755, for instance, Samuel
Abbot advertised in the Boston Gazette about "London brocade, russett shoes, plain shoes, silk
clogs, soles for men's shoes" he had imported. Cit. In B.E. Hazard, The organization of the boot
and shoe industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge - Massachusetts, 1921), p. 28.
' 5 J. Collyer, The parent's guide and guardian's directory (London, 1761), p. 281.
'6 liw..le or one ha if of the world knows not how the other ha If lives (London, 1752), p. 39.
17 C. Harvey, E.M. Green and P.J. Corfield, 'Continuity, change, and specialization within
metropolitan London: the economy of Westminster, 1750-1820', Economic History Review, LII -
3 (1999), p. 472.
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