Child experiences as street traders in Peru: contributing to a reappraisal for working children

By exploring the experiences of over a hundred child traders in Cusco, this research provides an insight into the more everyday circumstances of children's work in developing countries. The working conditions of child traders raise serious concerns, including: dangers of accidents, theft and abuse; shortage of time for play; and some disruption to education. Nevertheless, the positives of trading work are substantial. Although the children feel that they have to work, they gain enjoyment and economic empowerment. Moreover, they display a certain self esteem and confidence in the knowledge of their trading skills, and a spatial awareness of the best trading sites, demonstrating agency in their choice of trading locations. The findings suggest that international policy, which emphasises universal condemnation and prohibition of child work, requires revision. Such policy should be replaced by a more flexible approach, which recognises the benefits of children's work and embraces supportive protection for children engaged in the lighter forms of work such as trading.     

Merchants' attitudes to work in the Barcelona of the later Middle Ages: organisation of working space,distribution of time and scope of investments

The debate concerning the attitude to work of medieval and renaissance merchants has been one of the most intense in twentieth-century historiography. Arising from the publication of the classic works of the sociologist Max Weber, the debate entered the field of historiography proper after the appearance of articles by Werner Sombart and Henri Pirenne. In the 1950s and 1960s, the works of Yves Renouard and Armando Sapori centred discussion on the development of a specifically mercantile culture in the Italy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In this historiographic context, the article below is an attempt to approach, through original sources, the figure of the merchant in late medieval Barcelona. These sources are inventories, wills, and marriage contracts, through which is offered a three-dimensional analysis of the professional culture of such a merchant; the concept of professional space; the organisation of time; and the bearings of his commercial and patrimonial investments. The result of this analysis is an attempt to reinterpret the decadence of Barcelona at the end of the fifteenth century through the notion of work entertained by those involved in commerce, attempting by this means to merge the consideration of economic and cultural matters. It is also a proposal for a model of analysis of professional categories, which on so many occasions have been left to one side because of the preponderance of more traditional questions such as those concerning society, economics or politics.