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

eighteenth century; Sir John Clapham, in his substantial work in three volumes on
British industrialisation, also provided some important insights into the trade.3
Did the boot and shoe trade never deserve a deeper historical analysis because
of its limited economic importance? This seems to me a key question in my thesis.
My study points to the fact that such presumptions about this sector are wrong. Far
from being a small sector, boot and shoemaking constituted one of the major
productive activities of most pre-industrial European economies. Even if we admit
to a static situation dominating production and productive methods, my thesis
argues that important changes in retailing and consumption influenced the structure
and organisation of the trade. At an aggregate level, it is surely true what a
nineteenth-century Banbury shoemaker reported in his autobiography:
"shoemaking was a never-failing trade as people must wear shoes". 4 As Nick
Crafts has pointed out, in 1770 the British leather industry (of which the boot and
shoe trade constituted about sixty per cent) was the second most important
production of the Kingdom for value added.5
I am therefore convinced that the myth of the limited importance of the sector is
a misnoma of the economic historiography. This 'quantitative misunderstanding'
has caused a 'qualitative ignorance'. There is a general lack of knowledge about
the organisation, production and marketing of boots and shoes in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The histories of guilds and companies dominating the
production in towns until the beginning of the nineteenth century appear
particularly incomplete and of limited interest in the comprehension of the trade's
economic history. 6 The same can be said about the studies of local producers. Even
in those cases in which such studies are not simple hagiographies, they normally
M.D. George, London l(fe in the eighteenth century (London, 1925), pp. 199-204; J.H. Clapham,
An economic history of modern Britain (Cambridge, 1926), vol. i, p. 167 and vol. ii, pp. 35 and 94.
"G. Herbert, A shoemaker's window. Recollections of a Midland town before the railway age
(Oxford, 1948), p. 63.
The first sector was wool. By 1801 leather was the fourth industry after wool, building and
cotton. N.F.R. Crafts, 'British economic growth, 1700-1831: a review of evidence', Economic
History Review, XXXVI - 2 (1983), pp. 180-1. The same can be said about the export: in 1663
shoes and raw leather were the first British export item (for value) to the American plantations. See
N. Zahadieh, 'London and the colonial consumer in the late seventeenth century', Economic History
Review, XLVII - 2 (1994), pp. 239-61.
6
C.H.W. Mander, A descriptive and historical account of the Guild of Cordwainers of the City of
London (London, 1931) and J. Lang, The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers, 1439-1979
(London, 1979). There is no general history of the Parisian Compagnie des Cordonniers.
3