Abstract
Itinerant trading changed tremendously between 1850 and 1950 in the context of urbanisation, globalisation and state-building, both in terms of demographics, legislation, salesmanship, but also in how this traditional means of distribution was viewed by the middle class and the elite. Urbanisation and commercial innovation led to the proliferation of alternative retail outlets and the growing association between itinerant trading and an idealised rural past. State-building led to an inflation of local and national laws on itinerant trading, reflecting elite attitudes towards the trade. The dialectics between globalisation and nation-building meant that migrants and foreigners played an important role in itinerant retailing but were racialised and, from 1914 onwards, increasingly scrutinised by the state. Scholarship has failed to examine the emotional and cultural impact of this changing context on daily commercial interactions. This project fills the gap by adopting a bottom-up approach, based on working-class autobiographies and iconography. It will investigate the emotions surrounding or shaping interactions between itinerant traders and their customers. It will identify the dialectics between elite attitudes and the emotions of those who participated in itinerant trading, as well as the performance traders engaged in to elicit specific emotions from their clients.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)