Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820–1960

Forgotten Livelihoods

Jutta Ahlbeck, Ann-Catrin Östman, Eija Stark

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9783030980795
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030980801
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

This open access book uncovers one important, yet forgotten, form of itinerant livelihoods, namely petty trade, more specifically how it was practiced in Northern Europe during the period 1820–1960. It investigates how traders and customers interacted in different spaces and approaches ambulatory trade as an arena of encounters by looking at everyday social practices. Petty traders often belonged to subjugated social groups, like ethnic minorities and migrants, whereas their customers belonged to the resident population. How were these mobile traders perceived and described? What goods did they peddle? How did these commodities enable and shape trading encounters? What kind of narratives can be found, and whose? These questions pertaining to daily practices on a grass-root level have not been addressed in previous research. Encounters and Practices embarks on hidden histories of survival, vulnerability, and conflict, but also discloses reciprocal relations, even friendships.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Encounters and Trading Practices
• 2. Unearthing Livelihoods: Sámi Trade as an Active Livelihood
• 3. Dressed for Peddling: Dalkullor, Marketing and Practices of Tradition
• 4. Rag Collectors: Mobility and Barter in a Circular Flow of Goods
• 5. Unruly and Submissive Marketgoers: Peasants Practicing Trade and Forming Markets
• 6. Gifts, Feasts, and the Surplus of Friendship: Practices in a Remembered Economy of Petty Trading
• 7. Mobile Sex Trade: Fairs and the Livelihoods of Female Itinerant Sex Workers in Early Nineteenth-Century Finland
• 8. Exhibiting the Extraordinary Body: Six Itinerant Performers and Their Livelihood in the Nordic Countries, 1864–1912
• 9. “The Whole World Had the Sound of the Barrel Organ”: Representations of Fairs in Finnish Newspapers and Fiction from the 1870s to the 1910s
• 10. “Threatening Livelihoods”: Nordic Enemy Images of Peddlers from the Russian Empire
• 11. Respectable and Masculine Livelihoods: Roma Stories of Horse Trading
• 12. Forced into Trade Out of Necessity: Working-Class Narratives on Petty Trade
• 13. Settling Down and Setting Up: Itinerant Peddlers from Russian Karelia as Shopkeepers in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Finland
• 14. Conclusions: Dealing with Difference
• Back Matter