Abstract
Small businesses such as trades and crafts have always been natural part of the business environment alongside medium and large companies. A large part of the national product is realised in its sphere, and in the 19th century it was even a larger part of it. In the environment of the Habsburg monarchy, the importance of small business is accentuated by the delayed transition from feudalism to civil society with its many post-feudal residues, which resulted in delayed and less successful capital accumulation. Small-scale entrepreneurship is particularly characteristic of the smaller national and ethnic communities of the Habsburg monarchy, which underwent a process of emancipation from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.
The paper is focused on a specific type of business, the phenomenon of so called beggar's concessions/licences (Bettellizenz) in Bohemia in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Although formally it was a "business" - which is repeatedly confirmed by contemporary interpretations of the trade regulations, beggar's licences fulfilled in its primary function a social purpose. The paper thus illustrates the proliferation of an archaic phenomenon born in the feudal era and surviving deep into the 20th century. Naturally, beggar's licences could be examined under the prism of poverty and welfare, that is, through the lens of social history. Our approach based on a wide range of documents of an official nature (from municipal authorities to the governorate), contemporary press and literature, however, programmatically opts for an economic perspective that gives a deeper understanding of the social content of the issue, a new dimension. We start from a post-Chandlerian conception of business history, where the subject of its investigation are, among others, entities moving on the market and trading goods without seeking profit in principle. Licensed begging exhibits distinctive features of business activity to such an extent that the specific methodology of business history can be successfully, justifiably and productively applied to it.