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

appears from an analysis based on quality, variety and quantities of goods
present in the market. As far as shoes are concerned two elements have to be
examined: firstly the role of local and distant sub-contracting and secondly the
particular action of Northampton before its take-off in the 1850s.
5.3 Subcontracting
As Maxine Berg has shown, much research still takes for granted the so-
called 'Chandler thesis' in which scale and complexity in production are
managed successfully only though large-scale productive systems. Although
conceived and applied to nineteenth-century American industrialisation, such an
evolutionary view of business organisation has perpetuated a series of
assumptions about pre-industrial craft production. In some ways, it has
underlined the less innovative aspects of early-modern urban productive
systems. The workshop has been seen as a small unit of production suitable only
for small and relatively simple markets. Little has been said about possible
advantages of such a system. Similarly the institutional view presented by
Chandler has forgotten the importance of what is defined as 'environment' that
is to say the number of different ways in which a firm can rely on skills, capital
and labour that are not endogenous. This vision has been recently applied to the
London trades by John Styles who has observed how the workshop can be
considered as an assembly point. Many London trades operated within a
metropolitan industrial district "with an exceptionally high density of skilled
workers in an unprecedented range of trades, linked through criss-crossing
networks of subcontracting and piecework." 45 The physical boundaries of the
workshop become less important in the connotation of a productive system that
expands into flexible and diverse structures.
R. Sweet, The English town, 1680-1 840: government, society and culture (New York, 1999),
p. 181.
M. Berg, 'Factories, workshops and industrial organisation', in R. Floud and D. McCloskey,
eds., The economic history of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge, 1994), vol. i, pp. 125-6.
" J. Styles, 'The goldsmiths and the London trades, 1550-1750', in D. Mitchell, ed.,
Goldsmiths, silversmiths and bankers: innovation and the transfrr of skills, 1550-1 750 (London,
1995), p. 114.
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