Toffee Men, Travelling Drapers and Black-Market Perfumers-South Asian Networks of Petty Trade in Early Twentieth Century Britain.

Abstract

Selling small wares, novelties, and affordable luxuries manufactured from artificial silk, the South Asian door-to-door pedlar or 'travelling draper', and his compatriot the 'Indian toffee man', were once fairly commonplace figures in British working-class life and the object of fond childhood recollections for many. Unfortunately, they have now largely drifted from popular memory, having left little trace in the historical record. However, this article's reconstruction of their lives offers a new perspective on the pivotal role inter-racial social networks played in pioneering South Asian immigration, settlement, and trade in Britain. New research into this pre-Partition, pre-Windrush immigration, particularly in and around the English industrial city of Sheffield, provides a more detailed and more nuanced understanding of their quotidian experience, their relationship to British society, and their reception by the working-class neighbourhoods within which they lived and plied their trade. The article emphasizes the men's enduring sense of agency and economic autonomy, despite the attempts of various departments of state to prevent them from exercising their right, as British subjects, to live and work in Britain.