The Shoemakers' War

Footwear is a material constant of human existence. Before the First World War, there was a shoemaker in almost every municipality in the Czech and Austrian lands. At the beginning of the 20th century, shoemaking in Central Europe began to undergo a dynamic transformation. The Great War, mass orders for military footwear and the gradual introduction of machine work played a fundamental role in this process. Several actors were involved in the process of delayed industrialisation of shoe production, from small-scale producers through shoe production cooperatives to fully mechanised factories concentrated in Vienna and the Czech lands. In interwar Czechoslovakia, shoemaking became one of the main export industries. The monograph 'War of the Shoemakers' is dedicated to the design, production, distribution, consumption and recycling of footwear as a strategic consumer good during the First World War. Interpretively, it is based on the product life cycle methour The emphasis on the product life cycle made civilian and military footwear a topic of expert debate, an indispensable part of military equipment, a subject of manufacturing experiments with new or economical materials and types of footwear, and, last but not least, a symbolic weapon in the fight against the effects of wartime misery.