Food hawkers were as familiar a sight in early modern Europe as they are in developing countries today, but even though they are a vital part of every city centre, historians have hitherto failed to give them the attention they deserve. This book is therefore a welcome starting point, offering an excellent introduction to the multifarious street food trade.
Two major threads wind through the nine essays of the book, which range across time and space from ancient Rome to contemporary Asia. The first investigates characteristics of the trade itself: the diversity of workers; their organisation; the array of foods sold on the streets; the great variety of mobile stalls from which food is sold; how vendors promote their merchandise; gender aspects of hawking; and how market organisation and governance impacted food hawkers generally, and affected their gender composition. The second thread considers cultural transactions between food sellers, their customers, and the city as a living entity. Both threads often interweave to richer effect, and those essays that concentrate on cultural aspects never fail to explore the range of products that hawkers offer, or the role of self-promotion. The essays rely on a rich set of sources: visual evidence, literary texts, travellers’ accounts, legal sources and, for Melissa Calaresu's study of Naples, documents of a type which rarely survive, resulting from attempts to tax commercial activities, in this case by the municipal government in 1692.
The book is organised chronologically, ending with three chapters on contemporary Asia. Unfortunately by choosing this structure the editors have missed an opportunity to create a dialogue between those studying the past and those considering today's world. The essays on earlier periods rely on modern models to unravel past realities, as in Claire Holleran's discussion of ancient Rome, or on the work of modern economists to decipher how the street food trade functioned in the past, as in Danielle van den Heuvel's analysis of food hawkers in pre-industrial Holland and England. Not only is such application of the present to the past too simplistic; it needs further contextualisation. The potential flow of ideas in the opposite direction is not exploited either. The complex realities that the early modern articles bring to light, by virtue of their analysis of a great diversity of sources, could have enriched some of the contemporary studies, and sharpened the analysis by challenging it with a different context.
The essays looking at cultural representations of food hawkers are fascinating. Deborah Krohn analyses songs and music inspired by the cries of London hawkers in the seventeenth century and shows how different types of vendor were represented, and how the hawkers themselves, particularly women, subverted these stereotypes by playing with double entendres in some of their cries. Krohn also examines how the songs evolved over time and were adapted to suit different audiences. In the early modern period, it was not uncommon for London's River Thames to freeze solid, attracting large crowds of all classes to the spectacle. Thanks to the many illustrated printed broadsides and ballad sheets that survive from the time, and additional descriptions provided by better-known authors, Ivan Day is able to evoke the scene in great detail, including such details as whole oxen and other animals being roasted in front of an enormous fire. Many vendors left their usual city haunts to take advantage of the carnival-like atmosphere, making money by selling all kinds of beverages, hot pies, and souvenirs such as mugs. In another impressive study, Tom Stammers considers the evolution of the representations of la belle Madeleine, the marchande de gateaux de Nanterre (the cake seller of Nanterre) across a variety of literary genres. Each genre produced its own version of Madeleine, providing a barometer of changing retail practices in France, and also capturing shifts in patterns of taste and consumption.
In one of the concluding three essays on contemporary Asia, Annemarie Hiemstra considers the female hawkers who dominate Vietnam's street food sector. She sets out to investigate the hawkers’ ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviour by looking at their psychological motivation and how they viewed their own economic aims and performance in the market place. Female vendors were questioned about their goals and their perception of competitiveness. They were also asked about their motives for becoming street vendors, and to assess their career prospects. This analysis would have been more convincing had it taken on board the many uncertainties in the lives of these women and in their trade; a consideration of van den Heuvel's treatment of female hawkers in Holland would have helped Hiemstra frame her questions to better purpose. Working on Calcutta, Manpreet Janeja offers a dense and subtle analysis of the many ways in which gender can interact with class. She also considers the multiple ways in which middle-classes families interact with street food vendors. Janeja shows how difficult it is for city or state authorities to regulate street vendors and to enforce the legal framework pertaining to them, an observation that would merit further attention by the early modern historians contributing to this volume. The final paper by Anja Franck offers a very precise analysis of the intersection between gender, work and place in Malaysia. Franck considers ethnic diversity amongst pedlars, looking at Malay, Chinese and Indian vendors, but focusing primarily on Muslim Malays. Franck discusses how food hawkers are organised along gender and cultural lines particular to them as a group, and analyses how new policies, such as the need to obtain a licence from the local municipal council, a drive to move hawkers off the streets and into designated market sites, and the development of residential areas that change the environment in which the hawkers operate, have had an impact on the street food trade and the gender distribution of its workers.
All in all, the great variety of the essays, and of the places and times they consider, makes this book a very valuable introduction to the ubiquitous activity of selling food on the streets.
