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

capacity to secure his respectability inside the community were he and his
family were living. The notion of 'individuality' dominating the modern and
contemporary economic world is blurr . In the early modern world the force
of family inheritance permeaft the entire productive system.37
The family is here presented as an economic actor and can be interpreted in
terms of its flexibility and sometimes even in the creation of larger productive
units than those considered by the Cordwainers' Company. 38 From the mid-
eighteenth century a complex structure of subcontracting is evident in the boot
and shoe trade (see chapter 5)39 These complex chains in production, very
efficient in the nineteenth century in securing low labour costs and large
quantities of shoes for the domestic and international markets, although well
known to the corporative structure of the trade, did not have any codified rules.
In this case the extra-economic action of a family structure provided backward
links to ensure not only a supply of finished or semi-finished goods, but also
raw material, credit and banking. 4° The family was the right way to extend the
structure of the trade, especially in new organisations of production not
contemplated by the Company. In this sense the family was a substitute for the
Company.
With the end of the eighteenth century the growth of London presented new
opportunities for the trade outside both the corporate and the family system. The
import of shoes from Yorkshire (circa 1765) and afterwards from Stafford and
Northampton created for the first time a clear division between production and
retailing that the Cordwainers' Company had tried to avoid over several
decades. 4' The system enhanced by the Company presented in fact a
(Cambridge, 1991), P. 147.
37 J.P. Ward, Metropolitan communities, cit., p. 6.
38 The wider historiographical debate is related to the studies by Sabel and Zeitlin on flexible
alternatives to mass production. See C.F. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, 'Historical alternatives to mass
production: politics, markets and technology in nineteenth-century industrialization', Past and
Present, CVIII (1985), pp. 133-76; id., 'Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical
alternatives to mass production', in C.F. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, eds., World of possibilities:
flexibility and mass production in western industrialization (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1-29.
The Company always wanted to maintain o low level of division of labour. This was
fundamental in sustaining a productive structure based on transmissions of skills and therefore
of a corporate system.
° M. Sonenscher, 'Work and wages in Paris in the eighteenth century', in M. Berg, P. Hudson
and M. Sonenscher, eds., Manufacture in town and country before the factory, cit., p. 156.
As early as 1747 Campbell wrote that "The Country Shoe-Makers supply most of the Sale-
Shops in Town, the Price of making being too large to allow these Shop-keepers to employ
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