Industrialization before industrialization

by Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, Jurgen Schlumbohm

Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there developed in many rural regions of Europe a domestic industry, mass-producing craft goods for distant markets. This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization', and considers the question whether it constituted a distinct mode of production, different from the preceding feudal economy and from subsequent industrial capitalism, or was part of a process of continuous evolution characterized by the spread of wage labour and the penetration of capitalism into the process of production. It is a full-scale attempt to take a look at the place of proto-industrialization in the genesis of capitalism, and will interest economic and social historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and others concerned with the development of capitalism.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1982

Reviews

[Durakov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of foundational essays on domestic industry, the putting-out system, and related topics. They cover the political and economic conditions for "proto-industry," the family system of organizing labor, and where domestic labor goes as a country creates a factory system. Slow but not because it's a slog, but because it's very dense. Still, it took me a much long time than expected to read some of the short 30 page sections. One of the later essays addressed my biggest complaint of the "proto-industry" concept, which is that it's teleological (implies that domestic industry is on the way to the factory system), and clarifies that that isn't necessarily true.