The profession of peddling has until now received only slight and fragmentary scholarly attention. Usually treated in an anecdotal fashion, the pedlar has generally been thought of as a marginal figure, closer in character to a vagabond than a trader. In this first sustained account of the profession in Europe, Laurence Fontaine argues that peddling, particularly as a means of distributing new commodities such as books, watches, and tobacco, played a crucial role in the formation of the modern European economy. Focusing primarily on the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Fontaine traces the origins and development of peddling and the establishment of trading networks. She analyzes the changing social construction of the practice and the effect of encounters between traders of different regions. Following the pedlars' trade routes across Europe from Spain to Sweden and Scotland to the upper Rhine, she examines their importance as channels of communication as well as of goods and raises such issues as the impact of pedlars on the values and cultural practices of the communities they visited and the ways in which being merchants changed the lives of these migrants. History of Pedlars in Europe separates the mythology that surrounds peddling from the historically reliable and integrates existing studies with new archival research to illuminate one of the most remote areas of the social and economic history of early modern Europe. A means of trade based on mobility, uncertainty, and interdependence, peddling is rediscovered as a dynamic force involved in nothing less than the creation of a modern consumer society.

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

Itinerant salesmen, also called pedlars, street hawkers, hucksters and ballad singers are considered to be the most important distributors of popular printed matter in Europe between 1600 and 1850. A general assumption is that the pedlar travelling from town to countryside was strongly distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to the educated and affluent buyer. The commercial position of the urban pedlars, however, is very often underestimated. In this book, therefore, the itinerant book trade is studied in an English and Dutch, urban context, leading to a new perspective on the role of the pedlars as an intermediary between the established booksellers and an extensive, socially diverse reading public.

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. Across Europe, the Early Modern period was marked by political, religious and cultural upheaval, and saw the emergence of the first global economy, developments which profoundly impacted how people shopped and what they were able to buy. This volume engages with the key debates around continuity and change in consumer behavior in the 'long 16th century' and the ways in which shopping became an educational and exciting act for many women, men and children across the social spectrum: shops and market stalls were filled with an increasingly wide range of goods made by skilled craftspeople and transported by merchants making evermore ambitious and lucrative journeys across the world. Even servants and the poor were exposed to these new things, for they could consume by eye and ear what they could not afford to take home in material form. Although they did not yet have a word for the activity of “shopping,” in this period men and women came to understand that this activity was more than a functional act to acquire necessities. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

A history of the rise of industrialism in modern Europe, containing a description of the revolutionary changes which transformed industry, commerce and agriculture at the beginning of the last century, with an account of their reactions on the political and economic condition of the chief European nations. The social problems created by this momentous revolution are discussed in detail, and a historical survey is given of the various attempts to correct the evils of industrialism, on the one hand through state intervention by means of poor laws, factory laws, schemes of social insurance, etc., and on the other through voluntary effort as manifested in movements like trade unionism, co-operation, profit sharing and co-partnership. Post-war developments such as the Russian Revolution and international labour legislation are also described in detail and depth. This book was first published in 1930.

The never-before-told story of countless Jewish on-the-road peddlers who crossed the globe in search of better lives

This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.