Mobile Lives

Selling goods, services, and experiences on the streets or roads has been a common activity in many parts of the world throughout history, as it still is today. The mobility and social marginality of many itinerant and street traders, however, has often caused them to be neglected by historians, when in fact they should be considered as central to the economic, social and cultural history of many cities and regions. Mobile Lives investigates the nexus between peddling, street trading and a series of interconnected issues (migration, the uses of urban space, the informal economy, cross-cultural encounters, street entertainment) across the longue durée and from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The chapters present case studies spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries and consider questions including the connections between street/mobile trades and migration across the centuries and in different regions; how this largely informal economy interacted with the licit economy; what kinds of spaces mobile traders have occupied in and between cities; how they have been regulated by local or national authorities; and how we can study them in the past given the limits of documentary and visual sources.