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

one shop. For the high-class shop it meant the possibility of choice; for the fast-
selling shop it meant more customers. The 50,000 pairs of shoes in stock
advertised by Olivers were not only an assurance that every need could be
satisfied, but also that every individual person could be served.53
This leads us towards an aspect of consumer history that has not yet been
fully investigated. Consumption is always considered as an act of a single person
(carefully connoted within class, gender, place of residence) towards a group or
system of objects. In my examination of boot and shoe consumption and its
connection with retailing and production, it appears tLf the opposite
relationship is equally important: how a group or system of people relates to a
single object (distinguished in variety). 54 A wide range of different shoes or
boots was provided by a single shop because of the 'family' nature of the
customer. If bills or daybooks are examined it appears i% entire families or
households were supplied by one shoemaker. This depended on the easiness of
having one main supplier and by 'economies of specialisation' of consumption.
The family, as a unit of consumption, has not yet deserved the attention of
historians interested in the dynamics of change of social and material practises.55
If the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the birth of restricted
households dominated by strong affective bonds, the implications that such
changes had on consumption are not yet clear. From a producer's point of view,
retailing provided an efficient way of recombining production in order to satisfy
shifting consumers' needs. It can be argued that retailing is an important field of
study, especially for its links both with production and consumption.
When the division between production, wholesale and retailing is examined,
we find that it is difficult to distinguish middlemen form from organisational
structures with multi-layers of subcontractors. The recourse to the market was
fairly common in the eighteenth century to provide part of the merchandise on
sale. For part of the spectrum of products the shoemaker was simply a retailer,
although with the advantage to be actively involved in production and therefore
able to judge the quality of products bought from wholesalers or from other
Ibid., 'Trade card of Olivers. Newington Causeway, London, c. 1830'.
V. De Grazia, 'Introduction', in V. De Grazia and E. Furlough, eds., The sex of things:
gender and consumption in historical perspective (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 8-9.
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