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

underlined:
many Parisian manufacturers also employed outworkers in the provinces and,
more importantly, manufacturing in the capital was part of a complex division of
labour wherein Paris specialised in the finishing processes that required skills and
flair which were one of the city's great strengths but upstream processes were
usually carried out in the provinces.56
What is suggested here is that Paris remained the skilled centre of a national
system. While the London market had to compete on prices with provincial
production (leading to sweated labour), Parisian masters and workers preserved a
superiority based on skills and knowledge of their trades.
7.7 Conclusion
London and Paris remained characterised in the course of the nineteenth
century by the presence of a so-called 'small master' manufacturing economy. It
was the family firm, normally without much financial capacity to be at the centre
of a still prosperous manufacturing economy. Important differences were present
between the two cities. While in London the productive system was very much
based on sweating, in Paris the situation was more complex, showing elements of
'degeneration' but also a healthy and prosperous urban economy still centred on
craft and artisanal skills.
Two series of considerations have to be made in order to understand the
elements just presented. On the one hand, much of the French and British
historiography has interpreted the economic development of France as
'following' that of Britain. This is true not only for the form of such
development, but also for a temporal sequence of events. These theories suggest
that we are not looking at two different stories that imply a completely divergent
set of causes and effects, but that we are looking at the same phenomenon at two
different moments. Paris would have followed London. It just needed time. What
seems evident from research into a particular sector is that such 'path
dependency' between different nations can hardly be recognised. Emerging from
56 B.M. Ratcliffe, 'Manufacturing in the metropolis', p. 267.
311