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A New View of Industrialization: “Protoindustry” or the Role of Small-Scale, Labor-Intensive Manufacture in the Capitalist Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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1. Mendels, Franklin, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” The Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 257–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Proto-industrialization: Theory and Reality. General Report,” presented to the Eighth International Economic History Conference in Budapest (1982): 72Google Scholar; Cameron, Rondo, “A New View of European Industrialization,” Economic History Review 1 (1985): 6Google Scholar; Greenberg, Dolores, “Reassessing the Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution: An Anglo-American Comparison,” The American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1237–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I want to thank Rondo Cameron for making many of the reports and papers of the Budapest Conference available to me. I thank also my new colleagues, Melvyn Dubofsky and Charles Freedeman, for their comments on a draft of this article.
2. Mendels, Franklin, “Industrialization and Population Pressure in Eighteenth-Century Flanders,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969Google Scholar and “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase,” 241; Tilly, Richard and Tilly, Charles, “Agenda for European Economic History in the 1970s,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Tilly, Charles regarded “protoindustry” as a challenge to conventional wisdom.Google Scholar See his article, “Flows of Capital and Forms of Industry in Europe, 1500–1900,” Theory and Society 12 (1983): 131. For the critique, see Schultz, Helga, “‘Protoindustrialisierung’ und Übergangsepoche vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 31 (1983): 1082–83.Google Scholar
4. Despite continuous reformulation, none of the definitions withstood the evidence of ongoing research. Problems were numerous and involved identification of the onset of protoindustry in any specific case; neglect of the urban setting; and inattention to the variety of rural structures that coexist in time. Franklin Mendels at the Budapest conference admitted that the concept had experienced the problem of “terminological inflation.” See, Mendels, , “Proto-industrialization: Theory,” 75–80, 93.Google Scholar
5. Medick, Hans, “Privilegiertes Handelskapital und ‘Kleine Industrie’,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 23 (1983): 269.Google Scholar Also, Kriedte, Peter, Medick, Hans, and Schlumbohm, Jürgen, Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung, Gewerbliche Warenproduktion auf dem Land in der Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus (Göttingen, 1977)Google Scholar, translated by Schempp, Beate as Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar For an important analysis of the protoindustrial concept, consult, also, Eley, Geoff, “The Social History of Industrialization: ‘Proto-industry’ and the Origins of Capitalism,” Economy and Society 13 (1984): 519–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Tilly, , “Flows of Capital,” 140.Google Scholar For the flexibility of capital deployment, see the chapter by McLewin, Philip J., “Labor Conflict and Technological Change: The Family Shop in Paterson, New Jersey,” in Silk City: Studies on the Paterson Silk Industry, 1860–1940, ed. Scranton, Philip B. (Newark, 1985): 136–58.Google Scholar McLewin shows that given labor unrest or other financial constraints, capitalists will restructure and decentralize an industry. Similarly, the work by Michael Piore and Charles Sabel shows that textile manufacturers in central Italy decentralized production in the 1950s to overcome competition from lower-cost woolen producers in Japan and Eastern Europe. Despite all prediction, the authors say that twenty years later this “innovative cottage industry” was being described as a “viable manufacturing system.” See, Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984).Google Scholar In some ways, the arguments of Piore and Sabel are compatible with my own, although I part company with them decisively over interpretations of management/labor relations. Rather than seeing decentralized manufacture as a form of exploitation of cheap and vulnerable labor, Piore and Sabel argue that craft production involves collaboration between workers and managers, enhances worker control over the conditions of employment, and depends on “solidarity and communitarianism” (p. 278).
7. Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), 198, 279.Google Scholar
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9. As Deyon and Mendels argued at the Budapest Conference, Mendels, , “Proto-industrialization: Theory,” 79.Google Scholar
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14. Among others, consult, Hauptmann, Fritz, Woher wir Kommen. Ein Buch von Heimat und Vorfahren, 2 vols. (Marburg, 1970 and 1976)Google Scholar; Moeschler, Felix, Gutsherrlich-bäuerliche Verhältnisse in der Ober-Lausitz. Rekonstruktion der Dörfer Rennersdorf, Berthelsdorf und Gross-Hennersdorf bei Herrnhut in Sachsen. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Siedlungsverhältnisse im Kolonialgebiet (Görlitz, 1906).Google Scholar
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18. Seccombe, Wally, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review 137 (1983): 25Google Scholar; Levine, David, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Mendels, , “Proto-industrialization”Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, “Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat,” in Proletarianization and Family History, ed. Levine, David (Orlando, 1984), 7ff.Google Scholar
19. Gullickson, Gay, “The Sexual Division of Labor in Cottage Industry and Agriculture in the Pays de Caux: Auf fay, 1750–1850,” French Historical Studies 12 (1981): 177–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for reference to the Japanese case, see, Mendels, , “Proto-industrialization: Theory,” 81.Google Scholar For the Belgian example, see, Gutmann, Myron P. and Leboutte, Rene, “Rethinking Protoindustrialization and the Family,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1984): 604.Google Scholar Gutmann and Leboutte posit a “novelty thesis” to explain fertility and nuptial behavior in the Belgian provinces they investigate. As they explain it, “The novelty thesis extends the general protoindustrialization hypothesis, which says that rural industry reduces the age at marriage, by insisting that rural industry be not merely present but also new.” The two authors did not explore the extent of sex-role divisions within households which may help account for the pattern.
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