“For Lucre of Gain and in Contempt of the Laws”: Itinerant Traders and the Politics of Mobility in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic

Commercial itinerants like peddlers and hucksters formed the connecctive tissue of eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic retail economies, mediating consumers’ access to a profusion of goods and provisions. Male and female itinerants leveraged geographic mobility to earn a modicum of economic independence. In doing so, they encountered a legal culture that viewed unrestrained movement as disruptive to social order. Struggling to differentiate licit forms of mobility from illicit ones like runaway slaves and servants, local and colonial officials enacted licensing, vagrancy, and market statutes to categorize and contain itinerancy. Revolutionary upheaval, including food shortages and fears of espionage, only exacerbated concerns about commercial travelers. In the war’s aftermath, women hucksters became particular targets for popular derision, underscoring the more informal echanisms by which commercial intermediaries were policed. Even as peddlers and hucksters became more indispensable to the mid-Atlantic economy, their place in the legal and social order grew increasingly tenuous at the end of the century.