Papers by Robert Gamble
Plebeian commercial activities -- in junk and secondhand shops, market houses, street corners, an... more Plebeian commercial activities -- in junk and secondhand shops, market houses, street corners, and countless other spaces around the city -- were a prominent feature of the early-nineteenth-century metropolis, a counterpoint to the seemingly rational and orderly middle-class retailscape. Secondhand was a flashpoint for contests over the shape of the commercial city, the consumer practices of the urban poor, and the legitimacy of economic transactions in these spaces. Plebeian economic activities quite often straddled these shifting cultural and legal boundaries, facilitating an insecure but potentially profitable economic landscape for men and women with ambition and resourcefulness, if not resources. Studying secondhand consumption, in particular, reveals a range of ways in which the working poor enacted discretionary choice and elective consumption, concepts usually reserved for middle- or upper-class consumers. To counter abstract forces beyond their control and the vagaries of daily life, poor men and women collaborated in shopping networks, pooled resources, bartered, negotiated, and exercised creativity in ways that blurred neat categories of legitimate and illegitimate consumption. In rapidly expanding port cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, two of the three largest cities in the country, promiscuity, not stability, characterized the urban consumer economy of most residents. Ordinary people’s promiscuous secondhand economies also raised questions about the meanings of goods, which social and political authorities attempted to control through formal and informal mechanisms of policing.
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Commercial itinerants like peddlers and hucksters formed the connective tissue of eighteenth-cent... more Commercial itinerants like peddlers and hucksters formed the connective tissue of eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic retail economies, mediating consumers' access to a profusion of goods and provisions. Male and female itinerants leveraged geographic mobility to earn a modicum of economic independence. In doing so, they encountered a legal culture that viewed unrestrained movement as disruptive to social order. Struggling to differentiate licit forms of mobility from illicit ones, such as runaway slaves and servants, local and colonial officials enacted licensing, vagrancy, and market statutes to categorize and contain itinerancy. Revolutionary upheaval, including food shortages and fears of espionage, only exacerbated concerns about commercial travelers. In the war's aftermath, women hucksters became particular targets for popular derision, underscoring the more informal mechanisms by which commercial intermediaries were policed. Even as peddlers and hucksters became more indispensable to the mid-Atlantic economy, their place in the legal and social order grew increasingly tenuous at the end of the century.
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My blog post places the recent death of Freddie Gray within a longer history of African Americans... more My blog post places the recent death of Freddie Gray within a longer history of African Americans' struggles to secure access to Baltimore's (and other American cities') public spaces, focusing on the rumors circulated and regulations imposed after Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt.
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Papers by Robert Gamble
Book Reviews by Robert Gamble
Teaching Documents by Robert Gamble