Stigmatizing Street Vendors and Market Traders: The Case of Amsterdam from a Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on the stigmatization of street vendors and market traders by illuminating the moralizing and disciplinary state interventions that city officials used in Amsterdam to direct the social and spatial behaviors of this group in the period of the “civilizing offensive” at the beginning of the twentieth century. By using archive materials, this article empirically demonstrates that these interventions were justified by stigmatizing narratives that represented street vendors as “ill-adapted” and “undisciplined,” and considered their behaviors as an inevitable outcome of their marginalized socioeconomic position. Whereas in recent studies neoliberalism is often mentioned as the driving force behind narratives that stigmatize street vendors and market traders, the case of Amsterdam demonstrates that the stigmatization and regulation of such marginalized communities could better be considered as consistent and historical processes in which the state, particularly the local state, offers its assistance.