Itinerant traders: elusive subjects moving at the intersection of historical fields

Abstract

ABSTRACT This special issue on itinerant trade includes new research on a range of non-fixed traders who engaged in both transnational and smaller-scale moves when trading. Itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial and consumption history, but also as a history of migration and labour, or of the underbelly economy and deviance. More recently, this topic has interested historians of material culture, emotions and folklore. The contributions to this special issue highlight these new directions and important trends in research into itinerant trade. The five contributions explore moving traders in the early modern and modern periods in Britain, the Nordics and across the wider European continent. The articles investigate: the space, temporality and material culture of the saloop stall in early-modern London; female rural petty trading in early twentieth-century Finland; the British Liberal authorities' approach to regulating itinerant trade in late-modern Britain; the geographic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and networks of itinerant traders in the late-nineteenth century Nordics; and the transnational networks of early-modern peddling in Europe.