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Pottery Production and Proto-Industrialisation: Continuity and Change in the Rural Ceramics Industries of the Saintonge Region, France, 1250 to 1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Elizabeth Musgrave
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Extract

The Upper Saintonge region of western France was one of the primary production centres for the supply of exotic pottery to Britain and northern Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The principal manufacturing sites were rural workshops in the parishes neighbouring La Chapelle-des-Pots, on the wooded, limestone plateau north east of Saintes and some fifty kilometres down the river Charente from the maritime port of La Rochelle. The expansion of rural industries, producing for extra-regional markets, was a Europe-wide phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of proto-industrialisation has been used to explain this process. It has been argued that regionally-dense, rural industries grew up as urban merchants sought cheap production methods to profit from growing overseas demand for manufactured goods, especially textiles and metals. By the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the participation of large numbers of country people in industrial work altered traditional regional demographic and agrarian regimes, resulting in population growth, land-holding fragmentation and the creation of mercantile profit. This provided labour, finance and motive for a ‘second phase’ in the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations in some regions of Europe and fully-developed industrialisation in others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1998 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1998

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References

Notes

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42. A.D.C.M. 3 E LVIII/193.

43. A.D.C.M. Parish registers, La Chapelle-des-Pots.

44. In much of early modern Europe there was a clear and often strict gendered division of labour within household enterprises. Pfister shows that in Swiss proto-industrial households, different family members could carry out different forms of wage work as individuals. Schlumbohm, , ‘Proto-Industrialization’, p. 14.Google Scholar

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50. A.D.C.M. 3 E LVIII/157.

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55. A.D.C.M. E 783.

56. A.D.C.M. 3 E LVIII/194.

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64. A.D.C.M. Parish registers, La Chapelle-des-Pots.

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74. From 25.5 to 19 for men and from 21.6 to 24.4 for women. Julien-Labruyére, , Paysans charentais, II, 218Google Scholar.

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77. Ibid., p. 56.

78. Ibid., p. 57.