Black Market Britain, 1939-1955. By Mark Roodhouse.

Abstract

The cover image of Black Market Britain, 1939–1955 is a photograph of four men, dressed in 1950s trench coats, huddled in conversation in a shopping street. We cannot know the conversation the men had, but their dress and demeanour fit the post-war stereotype of the ‘spiv’, purveyors of illicit goods and services to a British public facing austerity measures. The market controls imposed during the Second World War and early-to-mid-1950s bestowed on Britons a set of choices about compliance or resistance. Despite the book’s cover it is really this set of choices that Black Market Britain sets out to trace, by asking how Britons—beyond the surreptitious world of the spiv—understood the black market during the war and the years of austerity that followed. The book’s argument is that black markets were socially significant and economically unimportant. They were socially significant because most black marketeering occurred among legitimate (often small) businessmen and women and their customers, rather than as part of professional or large-scale organized crime. They were economically insignificant because they did not pose a serious threat to economic policy and, despite widespread evasion of price control and rationing, economic control was a success. In contrast to existing histories of black markets that have sought to trace the extent of economic evasion, Black Market Britain adopts a social and cultural approach to the study of economic life to explore the moral and social dimensions of black marketeering. Three sections of the book trace this attitudinal terrain: Part 1 gauges the pattern of black market activity in wartime and austerity Britain, Part 2 charts the legal responses to non-compliance with price and rationing regulations, and Part 3 explores in what ways social norms encouraged or discouraged non-compliance.