Markets, Street

Markets in History

Street vendors have existed in many cultures. The Athenians centered their society on the agora, or town market (agoraphobia, the fear and avoidance of open public places, illustrates the bond between the marketplace and its sense of community). Champagne fairs, held in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe, generally lasted for forty-nine days and served as a nexus for buying goods, including English wool, spices from the Mediterranean, German furs and textiles, and leather goods from the Iberian peninsula. These goods were then resold at local markets.

The Aztec market, Tlatelolco, grew from the mid-fifteenth century into one of the greatest trading places in the Americas, and other markets were set up similarly in the Americas, but on a smaller scale. The market was divided into areas where like goods were sold, and a set of three judges supervised the market and made instant verdicts on disputes of unfair trading or selling of stolen goods. The thousands of people who attended every day tended to barter and resorted to using local currency of cocoa beans or cloaks only when an item's value was in dispute. In this sense, the market was more concerned with community redistribution than with profits.

Farmers' markets, where farmers sell the food that they have grown, were popular in the colonial United States. Local government designated the trading sites as market squares and, over time, increasingly regulated the trade, legislating hours that the markets could be open and ensuring standardization of weight and volume measurements. However, in the eighteenth century, with the increase in urbanization, the markets could no longer supply the growing demand of goods. This, compounded with industrialization and developments in transportation, shifted the emphasis from the individual farmer-vendor to big business-retail sellers. The street market came to be seen as an impediment to progress and as unclean and uncouth.

In many areas of pre-industrial society, such as parts [Page 893]of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and in rural parts of Europe (mostly eastern Europe), however, the markets continued to be centers of economic and social activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Guadala-jara, Mexico, there were more than fifteen markets dispersed throughout the city. In addition to stationary markets, vendors with pushcarts or peddlers who carried their goods sold a wide range of things, including ice cream, tequila, pottery, and newspapers. Even today, the importance of informal sector activity continues in many communities, such as the LoDagaa, agricultural people in northern Ghana in Africa. The days of the week are named after the village where that day's market takes place, and the word for “day” and “market” is the same, daa.

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