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

The structure of the sector was still dominated by small-scale producers with 41
per cent of employers declaring to work on their own and another 34 per cent
employing just one or two workmen. Less than 2 per cent of shoe producers
employed more than 20 workmen in their premises. For sure the lack of
mechanisation in the sector influenced its structure. In London the 1849 Post
Office Directory accounted for 2,008 retail boot and shoemakers, 73 wholesalers
and 3 factors.45
7.6 Sweating, quality and late development
The application of the sewing machine has been considered as the turning
point in the boot and shoe trade. In the course of the 1 850s the boot and shoe
trade became an 'industry': modernisation meant first of all mechanisation.
Mechanisation gave stimulus to centralisation of production and coincided with
the birth of the factory system. This is a phenomenon that affected emerging
shoe towns such as Northampton, and more importantly, Leicester in Britain and
Romans in France. However the sewing machine did not completely change the
structure of the sector for at least another 40 years. As Duncan Bythell has
observed "whereby the sewing machine came in fairly quickly, (...) by and large
the factory did not". The sewing machine was small enough to be used in other
places rather than centralised factories and did not require any centralised source
of power. Other machines, such as the sole machine (to cut out soles) or the
Blake sole-sewing machine (to sew soles and uppers) were adopted much more
gradually than in the United States. 47 Such backwardness was evident even
45 Reported in E.P. Thompson and E. Yeo, eds., The unknown Mayhew (London, 1971), p. 229.
46 D. Bythell, The sweated trades. Outworking in nineteenth-century Britain (London, 1978), p.
111. See also P. Head, 'Boots and shoes', in D.H. Aldcroft, ed., The development of British
industry and foreign competition, 1875-1914. Studies in industrial enterprise (London, 1968),
pp. 162-3.
'' R.A. Church, 'The effect of the American export invasion on the British boot and shoe
industry, 1885-1914', Journal of Economic History, XXVffl - 2 (1968), pp. 223-54; P.S.
Bagwell and G.E. Mingay, Britain and America. A study of economic change, 1850-1939
(London, 1970), pp. 164-5. On the US footwear industry see: C.E. Hazard, 'The organization of
the boot and shoe industry in Massachusetts before 1875', Quarterly Journal of Economics,
XXVII - 2 (1913), pp. 236-62; W.H. Mulligan Jr., 'Mechanisation and work in the American
shoe industry: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1852-1883', Journal of Economic History, XLI - 1(1981),
pp. 59-63; id., 'The transmission of skills in the shoe industry: from family to factory training in
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