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

If on the one hand we can see that in the eighteenth century shoemaking was
carried out within a wide variety of different business sizes, on the other hand
we can not deny both the existence and the permanence of a core of small-scale
businesses. The study by Bamett of the scale of metropolitan trades in the 1770s
and 1820s shows that the dimension of business did not vary considerably (table
54)28 The small scale was still dominating, although with increasing
exceptions. Henry Gamble of 33 Fish Street Hill, for instance, insured £3,800
value in 1823.29 Although a clear exception, he is representative of a small group
of businesses based on large-scale activity that appeared in the half century
between 1770 and 1820 and whose existence has to be related to important
transformations in the shoe market and in the organisation of production.
Table 5.4 - London shoemakers' insurance value in the 1770s and 1820s
Capital insured
()
Under 100
101-500
501-1000
1001-2999
Over 3000
Total
No. of firms Percentage No. of firms Percentage
1770s of total 1820s of total
137 52.9
106 40.9
15 5.8
1 0.4
0 0.0
259 100.0
100 34.2
156 53.4
23 7.9
12 4.1
1 0.3
292 100.0
Source: D. Barnett, London, hub of the industrial revolution. A revisionary history, 1 775-1 825
(London, 1998), p. 163.
Large-scale and small-scale coexisted. The 1784 Westminster poii books
provide another interesting example. Shoemakers constituted the fourth group
for numerical consistency with a total 4.8 per cent of the electorate. 3° However
they were not a homogeneous group. Cordwainers and shoemakers were used to
indicate different social and occupational identities. Far from being associated
with the membership of the Cordwainers' Company as in the earlier part of the
The data are partially biased because Bamett does not take into account the inflation
dynamics of the later part of the eighteenth century.
29 D Barnett, London, hub of the industrial revolution, cit., p. 163.
30 E.M. Green, 'Taxonomy of occupations in late eighteenth-century Westminster', in P.J.
Corfield and D. Keene, eds., Works in town, cit., p. 65.
213