Labor Before the Industrial Revolution

Work, Technology and their Ecologies in an Age of Early Capitalism

Thomas Max Safley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367664848
• eBook ISBN: 9781351251068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

One cannot conceive of capitalism without labor. Yet many of the current debates about economic development leading to industrialization fail to directly engage with labor at all. This collection of essays strives to correct this oversight and to reintroduce labor into the great debates about capitalist development and economic growth before the Industrial Revolution. By attending to the effects of specific regulatory, technological, social and physical environments on producers and production in a set of specific industries, these essays use an "ecological" approach that demonstrates how productivity, knowledge and regime changed between 1400 and 1800.

This book will be of interest to researchers in history, especially labor history, and European economic development.

1 Introduction

Thomas Max Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband

At the outset of his reflection on economic growth, in the first sentence of his introduction, Adam Smith made labor the essence of a nation’s prosperity:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.¹

Then, he enlarges famously on the dynamism of labor, its capacity not only to provide, but also continuously to shape and increase that wealth, in the first sentence of his first chapter: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”² His example of the pin factory was not original; he likely borrowed it from Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, whose Art de l’É pinglier used it first.³ Yet, Smith connected labor and its organization not merely to lower costs but significantly to increased production, to the development of a state’s economy. For him, labor, not consumption or technology or knowledge or resources, was the key.

This volume takes up labor, especially in the course of production, before the predominance of large-scale, mechanized industry. Each of its various chapters explores a distinct industrial niche and thereby exposes a distinctive ecology of work. Together they examine how specific physical environments, regulatory systems, market forces, social relations or economic institutions, to name but a few possibilities, render every workshop and factory—every locus of production—unique. Yet, each essay also demonstrates the mobility of workers as well as work regimes and cultures, their cosmopolitan qualities. They serve as a reminder that labor in all its messy, lived reality is still key, that to reduce it to a lifeless generalization—a mere factor of production—is to skew the history of economic development.

Writers of all sorts have recognized the importance of work to economic life and growth—indeed, to all life and growth. In the Bible, work constitutes the divine purpose for humanity: production and preservation in creation.⁴ To this end, all human resources—intellectual and social, as well as physical—were to be applied.⁵ The Bible established not only the essential necessity of work but also its socio-economic importance. Family units come into being to promote that work of production and preservation. So too the fundamental distinctions and divisions that characterize labor find mention: the division between work and leisure; between men’s work and women’s work; between skilled work and unskilled work; between manual and mental work.⁶ The ethical obligation to labor conscientiously and the reciprocal obligation to compensate labor justly have biblical roots as well.⁷ Rest—leisure—finds meaning in the context of work.⁸ Finally, for Jews and Christians alike, labor becomes not only the purpose of humanity but its condemnation and redemption. Ancient and medieval scholars echo many of these notions. For Plato, the ideal state rested upon the appropriate labor—indicating specialization rather than division—of each of its inhabitants.⁹ Aristotle is said to have understood the value of all material goods and services in terms of the labor required to produce them.¹⁰ Thomas Aquinas followed his lead, asserting that the value—but not the price—of any good or service derived immediately from the labor required to produce it.¹¹ Likewise, Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah, attributed value to labor and growth to its division and specialization.¹² For all of these thinkers, considering pre-industrial, agricultural societies and economies, labor was the source and determinant of value, prosperity and well-being. Profit might arise from other means, but those occupations and professions were viewed with a degree of skepticism.

From the 15th century forward, as the economy of the West began to grow, the thinking about labor began to change. Attention turned to the ways in which labor might be manipulated—it went from subject to object. The division of labor, rather than its intrinsic activity or value, became central to the discussion; value shifted from labor to more complicated, extrinsic notions. Smith realized a labor theory of value was not sufficient in itself and advocated what might be called a cost-of-production approach: Not only labor but also rents and profits influenced the price, and hence the value, of a thing.¹³ He felt this understanding, which resembled in some ways an exchange theory of value, better explained natural prices in the market. It also provided an alternative to a contemporaneous theory of value that he explicitly rejected, that is, the utility theory of value: value understood in terms not of the labor that went into a good or service, but of the use a consumer derived from it. David Ricardo and Karl Marx pursued a similar line, attempting to identify and quantify all the labor components that entered into the production of goods or services, not only the wages of the producers themselves, but also the cost of the labor that went into their tools, workplaces, etc.¹⁴ Measures of value extrinsic to labor gained in importance: Any commodity had a use value if it satisfied wants or needs on the part of the consumer; it likewise had an exchange value, if it traded in markets. To these, non-Marxist economists added marginal value, the incremental value that is achieved through additional output, whether through a product modification that results in an increase in price or in unit production. Labor had ceased to be the source of value; it had lost agency and become something to be acted upon.

In studies of capitalism, attention has tended to focus quite understandably on capital, its protean quality and seminal force. That focus, however, has consistently obscured the central power of labor—its means, methods and modalities—to deflect or influence the effects of capital. Few terms are so frequently used and infrequently defined, as the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History makes clear:

The term [capitalism] has been used differently by economists and historians. Economists take a narrow view, using it to answer questions about the determination of production, consumption, and distribution with the emphasis on the use of the market for resource allocation and of capital as a factor of production. Economists also have a precise theoretical model of an ideal form of capitalism, an economy in which all resources are privately owned and in which the market determines the allocation of all resources.

Such economies do not exist, and historians and economic historians, with broader interests than economists, use capitalism to describe a particular socio-economic system in which a variety of factors, but particularly the distribution of the ownership of wealth (including human capital), determine the structures of social organization and government. They are also interested in the motivation and values in society that condition action; the opportunities that determine action and the customs and laws that restrain it; the evolution of interest groups (like trade unions), classes (loosely defined by income), voluntary associations and political parties (which cooperate or conflict in pursuance of particular goals); and the interdependence of political, economic and social institutions in the growth of wealth and the power of governments. Their concept of capitalism goes well beyond the market to examine more general social conditions and attempts to cope with the complexity of history.¹⁵

The origins of that socioeconomic system, which reduces labor to a factor, but not a principle, have been the subject of much debate. The traditional explanation holds that it began to emerge in northwestern Europe in the late-15th century (earlier still in some accounts), fueled by expanding trade, the profits of which—often referred to as “primitive capital”—were invested in productive processes and technologies.¹⁶ It is a relentlessly top-down model of accumulation by independent peasants, improving masters and acquisitive traders, who gained direct access to markets and therewith learned what risks and rewards it offers. They ceased to be laborers and became middlemen, connecting production centers to consumer markets. They imposed new techniques, new processes and new organizations upon laboring men and women in order to offer new goods and services to consumers. They plowed the proceeds back into their emergent industries, seeking to intensify production or discover new opportunities for it. According to this narrative, labor executes the directives of capital, occasionally rising in futile reaction to defend their ancient customs and corporations but is steadily reduced in terms of any decisive role in production. By the late-18th century, the accumulation and reinvestment of commercial capital had reached such a level that control of capital passed from some merchants to industrialists. Reinvestment in production yielded new technologies and factory organizations that undermined traditional handicrafts, increased productivity and lowered prices.

According to this interpretation, capitalism is also relentlessly monolithic. In both its narrow and its broad sense, as an economic and socio-economic system, capitalism changes only when capital changes. Largely unremarked in this narrative—but at the center of this volume—are the many ways in which different industries require different investment strategies, different production organizations and, not least, different work regimes, creating the possibility of multiple forms of early manufacturing capitalism at any given time.

This characterization applies not only to the historiography of capitalism, but also to the historiography of the Industrial Revolution. According to that historiography, the Industrial Revolution was largely top-down: growth imposed on a not always willing society. So, too, it was monolithic: The model for industrial take-off was and remains Britain and its textile industry. All else was, as David Landes put it, “continental emulation.”¹⁷

Most of this literature shares one assumption with the economics of development: It separates absolutely the pre-modern from the modern economy.¹⁸ The pre-capitalistic world was marked by different cultures, structures, practices and institutions. The evident survival of traditional economic organizations and traditions, such as the family firm, has done little to alter the consensus that formed around Albert Chandler’s “visible hand.”¹⁹ The same might be said of small- and medium-sized production units. Rather, the Industrial Revolution is understood in triumphalist terms:

Industrial Revolution is normally reserved for a set of events that took place in Britain roughly from 1760 to 1830. The historical events in question consisted of a set of technological, economic, and social changes that in the long run revolutionized not just the British economy but that of the rest of western Europe, North America and eventually much of the rest of the world. The Industrial Revolution brought about a “modern” economy in which technological progress did not just happen from time to time in isolated sectors but became a sustained and continuous process, resulting eventually in unprecedented economic growth and increases in living standards in much of the world.²⁰

Nor was it the labor of working men and women (and children) that brought about this “modern economy”:

Technology was at the core of everything. … Yet these inventions did not rain upon Britain like manna from heaven. Technology may have been an engine that propelled the economy forward, but it took its fuel from a society and an economy that were exceptional, not just relative to non-European nations but even in comparison to its close European competitors and enemies such as France and the United Provinces. Eighteenth-century Britain was what we may call a technologically competent society. It was teeming with engineers, mechanics, millwrights, and dexterous and imaginative tinkerers who spent their time and energy designing better pumps, pulleys, and pendulums.²¹

Following this narrative, the workplace and those who labored in it had disappeared largely from view. They have become outsiders—or, worse, free-riders—to the process, replaced by generations of forward-thinking inventors who somehow arose in the 18th century to seize control of production and call forth the so-called blessings of technological modernity. In consequence, a series of questions remain that have ignited scholarly debate and inspired this volume.

How did labor contend with a growing, “modernizing” economy? Studies leave little doubt that working-class men and women, like their middle- and upper-class contemporaries, were tempted by a wave of attractive and attractively cheap consumer goods.²² It is less clear, however, that they heedlessly threw their shoulders to the wheel for the sake of consuming more, as Jan de Vries has recently hypothesized.²³ Tastes were changing, and consumption was rising, but, as Leonard Rosenband, Thijs Lambrecht and Corine Maitte suggest in the studies of paper-makers, crop-harvesters and glass-makers that appear in this volume, the ability and willingness to work more were not unlimited. Workers in many industries confronted a variety of legal and institutional constraints that bound them to produce fixed amounts of goods in fixed periods of time. William Ashworth joins Lambrecht in showing that assumptions about higher productivity based on an improved diet need likewise to be placed carefully in a specific co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Practice and vision: The depiction of paper-making in 18th-century encyclopedias
• 3 Fashion, capitalism and ribbon-making in early modern Europe
• 4 The commodity form of labor: Discursive and cultural transitions to capitalism(s) and labor in the Low Countries’ ceramic industries (1500–1900)
• 5 Quality disputes among the London leather trades in the 18th century
• 6 Harvest work and labor market regulation in Old Regime northern France
• 7 “Quand le bâ timent va, tout va.” The building trade in the Latin West in the Middle Ages
• 8 On land and at sea: Maritime work and maritime workers in medieval Catalonia
• 9 Glass-making and glass-makers from the 16th to the 18th century
• 10 Mercury mining and miners: The transition from boutique metal to strategic commodity in the 16th century
• 11 Labor and the alternative economy in Britain, 1660 to 1842
• Select Bibliography
• Index