Urban Markets for Used Textiles — Examples from Eighteenth-Century Central Europe

Abstract

The vast majority of pre-industrial consumers used resources and commodities in an economic and often thrifty way. This was the result of the high relative prices of many commodities and of scarcity being a constant threat.¹ These phenomena led to a specific usage of goods and ‘household strategies’² such as reusing, repairing and recycling. Despite their relevance for past societies, these practices have so far provoked comparatively little scholarly interest, which has instead remained focused on production and first-hand retail and consumption. Only certain specific fields of pre-industrial ‘secondary’ consumption have been studied, mainly by scholars working on the history of poverty and of lower classes, although recently has there also been growing interest from historians of consumption.³ These studies revealed that the recirculation of goods, attempts to enhance their longevity, and the recycling of materials were not marginal phenomena; rather, they formed significant fields of employment and were crucial to consumption. For many craftsmen, especially those working with textiles, repair work constituted a significant part of their daily business. Likewise, shopkeepers also engaged in bartering and reselling used goods. In addition, many people found opportunities to earn a living in fields that specialised in collecting and reprocessing scrap materials or in trading second-hand goods. Since raw materials were expensive and often scarce, many consumers and small-scale producers were reliant on the use of second-hand commodities and materials until the nineteenth century.⁴