A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers, and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (review)

In many ways, footwear provides an ideal, if unexpected, entry point for interdisciplinary scholarship. Riello has chosen a manageable topic that he can connect to specialties ranging from fashion studies to economic history to cultural anthropology, and he commands an impressive diversity of scholarly literature. His major challenge, as anyone who has attempted broad interdisciplinarity can attest, is how to combine the theories and methodologies contained in such disparate literatures successfully. Although the book has room for improvement on this count, A Foot in the Past offers creative and important contributions to the histories of long-eighteenth-century consumer society and industrialization.

By stitching together into one story the usually separate histories of consumption, retailing, and production, Riello offers a new narrative that questions many older assumptions about supply and demand. He begins by showing the extent to which British consumers demanded both an increasing quantity of shoes and an increasing proliferation of shoe styles. Through careful analysis of how people bought and sold footwear, Riello rebuts Jefferys' classic argument that little changed in retailing before the middle of the nineteenth century.¹ Many of Riello's findings reinforce Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui's paradigmatic claims in Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ontario, 1988). These significant changes in eighteenth-century consumption and retailing patterns form the fulcrum of the work; Riello shows how they forced widespread changes in the complex worlds of artisan production and financing. He successfully reverses the conventional narrative that sees mechanized mass production, with its increased output and supposedly decreased product differentiation, as the catalyst for major changes in retailing and consumption.

Integrating discussions of production, retailing, and consumption trends with questions of meaning, visual culture, and foreign competition presents a different and complex set of challenges. Riello's use of consumption and the social value, or meaning, of shoes to start his work makes considerable intellectual sense. This unlikely order helps him to assess the standard historical notion that production and supply must have come temporally before demand and social meaning. It remains difficult, however, to explain what people thought shoes meant, beyond basic class differences or military (boot) versus civilian (non-boot) distinctions. If, for example, shoelaces replaced buckles in 1790s France because people thought that they symbolized the ideals of liberty and fraternity, then why did laces become popular at the same time among Britons who roundly condemned and deeply feared the French Revolution? By applying the methodological tools of art and culture historians more systematically, Riello could have made better use of his outstanding images to explore such questions, while also explaining why feet and shoes were often focal points in eighteenth-century paintings and political cartoons.

Finally, Riello engages not just in interdisciplinarity but in transnational history. He shows the importance of grounding British shoemaking and consuming on the landscape of the European, and particularly French, shoe industries and markets. Riello's transnational approach offers promise for scholars working on a range of industries commonly seen in national frames. Yet, when exploring the competitive language and idiomatic, nationalist arguments of British producers, much like with the images, Riello might have said more than he has.

These concerns simply underscore the exceptional challenges that ambitious interdisciplinarity places before its practitioners. A Foot in the Past reveals the historical relevance of seemingly pedestrian products, while questioning fundamental ideas about the timing and impact of mechanization, the relationship between supply and demand, and the importance of retailing developments in changing both consumption and production habits. Showing the value of overlooked subjects and provoking new questions about old assumptions—are these not the most important measures of interdisciplinary success?