The Division of Labor, 1886

16 January 2010 at 3:41 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Another interesting passage from Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France:

Every [French] town and village was a living encyclopedia of crafts and trades. In 1886, most of the eight hundred and twenty-four inhabitants of Saint-Étienne-d’Orthe, on a low hill near the river Adour, were farmers and their dependents. Of the active population of two hundred and eleven, sixty-two had another trade: there were thirty-three seamstresses and weavers, six carpenters, five fishermen, four innkeepers, three cobblers, two shepherds, two blacksmiths, two millers, two masons, one baker, one rempailleur (upholsterer or chair-bottomer), and one witch (potentially useful in the absence of a doctor), but no butcher and no storekeeper other than two grocers. In addition to the local industries and the services provided by itinerant traders (see p. 146), most places also had snake collectors, rat catchers with trained ferrets, and mole catchers who either set traps or lay in wait with a spade. There were rebilhous, who called out the hours of the night, “cinderellas,” who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes, men called tétaïres, who performed the function of a breast pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk, and all the other specialists that the census listed under “trades unknown” and “without trade,” which usually meant gypsies, prostitutes, and beggars (p. 99).

This book is filled with economics. Here’s a passage about repeated games:

Deceit was a particular specialty of pedlars from the Auvergne. A single piece of cloth could be made to last a whole season if it was sold with the promise that a tailor would come the next day and make up the clothes for nothing. The tailor would arrive, measure the customer, take the cloth, and never return. The drawback was that a dishonest salesman had to cover vast areas compared to a pedlar who earned the trust of his clientele (p. 150).