Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (Routledge Revivals)

MAXINE Berg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415721042
• eBook ISBN: 9781317952282
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion. The papers examine aspects of industrial structure and work organisation, including women's work, and highlight the conflict and compromise between work traditions and the emergence of a market culture. With an overarching introduction providing a background to European manufacturing, this title will be of particular interest to students of social and economic history researching early industrial Europe and the concurrent emergence of a material, consumer culture.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

1

MARKETS, TRADE AND EUROPEAN MANUFACTURE

Maxine Berg

A new interest in consumption and commercial expansion has been a characteristic of recent writing in economic and social history. But this interest has thus far been separated off from studies of economic growth during the Industrial Revolution. Economic growth in that key period has been considered almost entirely in the light of estimates of productivity change in selected industrial sectors and in agriculture, and it has been explained by changes in resource usage and technology.¹ The approach to industrialization has been dominated by supply side considerations, while factors affecting demand have been pushed into the background. The once fashionable focus on dramatic increases in foreign trade, and the steady expansion of the home market² have been dropped in favour of estimates of increases in output.

Recently, however, market structures and consumption patterns have returned to the historical agenda. Historians of the early phases of industrialization are now examining the market structures and policies which provided the context for industrial growth, and they have turned to the expenditure patterns, fashion and tastes, and the impact of new commercial structures on customary practices. Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe brings together a set of papers focused on commerce and its institutions in the creation of manufacturing communities. The book develops several themes of state policy, urbanization, marketing and mercantile organization, the role of women as a labour force and as consumers, and the impact of commercial expansion on local customary and community practices, artisan landholding and artisan credit and debt. The papers in this collection are the culmination of a long series of workshops and a conference on early industrial communities. While the early workshops in the series were occupied with proto-industrialization, discussions relating to later workshops and to these papers have ranged far beyond this literature.

The book is divided into six sections. Section I provides an introduction to the book, and a survey of European markets and trade during the eighteenth century in relation to manufacturing. Section II discusses The Market and the State, examining issues of region versus nation state, and the impact of national economic policies. Section III, Markets, Merchants and Middlemen, looks at the organization of the market through agents, marketing networks and the diffusion of fashion. Section IV, Markets and Urban Manufacture, examines the general relationship of urban and rural industrialization and the special role played by urban institutions. The special experience of Birmingham is highlighted. Section V, Market Production and Women’s Work, examines the way production for the market affected women’s access to apprenticeship in England, and their labour force status in France. Section VI, Market Structures and Social Institutions, raises issues of access to markets and older social institutions such as landholding arrangements. Community practices affecting the organization of work were also practices which affected consumption and the market. Truck payments, embezzlement, debt and tavern life marked the interface of the market and the community.

PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION AT ITS LIMIT

The theory of proto-industrialization was developed in its simplest form by E. L. Jones, Franklin Mendels, and Medick, Schlumbohm and Kriedte.³ It provided an integrated perspective on the European economy in the period just prior to industrialization, combining in a novel way the agricultural, industrial, mercantile and demographic change of that phase of capitalist development. In doing so it provided a new type of explanation of the source of industrial growth in a region.

Proto-industrialization was defined as the phase of the wide proliferation of rural domestic manufacture, a phase made distinctive by three factors. The essential features of proto-industrialization as these theorists identified them were: (1) economic and social symbiosis between agriculture and industry across the seasons; (2) industry co-ordinated by urban merchants; (3) industry dependent on distant markets. These factors distinguished proto-industrialization from other forms of industrial organization and entailed the emergence of a distinct and dynamic socio-economic system. Proto-industrialization was also a distinctively regional phenomenon. Within any single region, proto-industrialization was based on a functional interrelationship between merchant capital, involved in the putting-out system, and the family economy.

The theory of proto-industrialization has been the subject of extensive debate and criticism. Empirical work using the hypothesis has elaborated a much more complex picture of the environments favourable to manufacturing. Research on the demographic conditions, agrarian and agricultural context and social and institutional framework of proto-industrialization has dramatically complicated our understanding of its preconditions.⁴ Other research has focused on the success rates of the transition of a proto-industrial area into a region of more fully developed industrialism. Contrary to the original hypothesis, success rates were found to be poor and difficult to predict. Research on the actual experiences of individual regions constituted a challenge to unilinear approaches.⁵ The emphasis of much work on the early phases of industrialization has, as a result, shifted away from development models, demography and agriculture towards the impact of social institutions and industrial and labour organization. But little serious consideration has yet been given to a major part of the framework of proto-industrialization – markets, merchant capital and the urban economy.

COMMERCE AND MARKETS

Medick, Kriedte and Schlumbohm first located the rise of proto-industrial occupations within the context of the commercial revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A major contributory factor was, they argued, the emergence of a world system, especially the new colonialism with its plantation economy and slave trade. A new export base was the engine of growth for the first mass produced consumer industries. Yet in the debate on proto-industrialization little attention has been directed at the role and structure of the market. The traditionally-accepted division, between production in rural areas and commercial and market transactions in urban areas has not been challenged. This rural/urban dichotomy has falsely separated production from consumption and trade.

The emphasis of most work on proto-industrialization has gone, by definition, to the rural economy. This entailed a definite neglect of the urban economy and urban manufactures in the same period. To some extent, such an emphasis was justified by the preoccupation of earlier historians with either agriculture or the urban and factory phases of industrialization. Certainly, in terms of numbers, rural putting out was much the most significant form that industry took in the period just prior to full industrialization. Nevertheless, the urban economy did play an important role even vis à vis rural manufacture. And urban manufactures were themselves significant and experienced variety and change in their organizational structures over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Systematic formulations of the role of urban and commercial networks have recently been offered by Jan de Vries, Paul Hohenberg, E. A. Wrigley and Paul Bairoch.⁶ This work has assessed the commercial and even the producer role of the city in the early industrial period. It has charted patterns of urban growth and decline, assessing these in particular relation to the proto-industrial period. There is, these studies suggest, a real need to study the commercial and financial functions of urban areas as well as their own manufacturing. How dependent were these on national and international economic cycles, and how closely were they related to the surrounding countryside? The debate on proto-industrialization should have brought the commercial and the industrial, the rural and the urban together. Instead it divided them further. Proto-industrialization, and demographic and agrarian history have once again been compartmentalized from a separate urban history.

The need to relate the city to the early phases of industrialization in Europe may, at first sight, appear to need justification. Paul Bairoch has argued that the city played little part in unleashing the Industrial Revolution, or in the first stages of its diffusion to the rest of Europe. There were no traditional cities, especially large ones, among those regions in which the Industrial Revolution developed. The sectors which provided the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution were located if not entirely in rural districts, then in regions with only very small towns. Furthermore, those countries in which industrialization developed soonest were almost all initially little urbanized, while those which lagged were much more heavily urbanized.⁷ But the relationship between urban and industrial development was more complex than the co-existence or not of cities and industry.

Jan de Vries in his highly original and important work, European Urbanization 1500–1800⁸, points out the far-reaching effects of the pull of proto-industrialization on both urban and rural society. Proto-industrialization, in contrast to the production of rural handicrafts for local markets, required the commercial organization of a region, and that commercial organization was generally conducted from cities. The rise of proto-industrialization was to a large extent a consequence of city-centred investment. Rural locations attracted labour and capital from the cities, but the investors or co-ordinators were usually urban. With proto-industrialization, urban industrial employment was frequently undermined, but urban commercial and service functions were strengthened.

De Vries makes proto-industrialization the crucial link between the pre-industrial agrarian world and the growth of large cities in the nineteenth century. The smaller cities of Europe as a whole in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced decline, and the main reason for this was the transfer of industrial production to the countryside. But this development, in turn, could only have occurred because of the prior achievement of an urban system with a hierarchy of cities and towns. Thus the city’s function in the process of proto-industrialization and general economic growth has to be seen in a broad regional context.

De Vries also analyses the timing of these processes. Between 1600 and 1750 a large proportion of Europe’s cities with 5,000 or more inhabitants stagnated, as did thousands of smaller cities. The period 1750–1800 was a time of net urbanization across Europe, but it is notable that this urbanization was the result of the growth of smaller cities and the development of new cities rather than the growth of the traditional big urban centres and metropolises. This new urban growth was a growth from below, and the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were played out in such small cities and rural locations. Smaller cities with resource-based industries like metallurgy grew, while rural areas grown thick with proto-industrial textile production became industrial cities. Between 1750 and 1800 about 200 cities were added to the number of European towns with between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants. Thus we see the urban foundations within the region for proto-industrial growth, and the significance of the growth of the smaller urban areas in the crucial period between 1750 and 1800.

The regional interrelationship of town and country emphasized by De Vries was modelled by Paul Hohenberg in Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe.⁹ The model delineated some of the macroeconomic relations between town and country, in particular integrating movements in income distribution with demographic change.

Rather than looking at production costs as the determining factor in the spread of proto-industrialization, Hohenberg emphasized demand. The model related incomes, and with this demand in the towns, to conditions in the countryside. Incomes in the towns, he points out, were based largely on property, that is, rents. The expansion or decline of towns in a region was thus related, via property incomes, to conditions in the countryside. The model, in motion, showed that periods of favourable harvest might stimulate economic activity and population growth. This expansion would be shared by urban capitalists and merchants via profits. When rural producers eventually met diminishing returns, higher grain prices and lower discretionary incomes would follow. These would hurt rural manufacturers. But, for a time, alongside this rural malaise, property incomes would remain buoyant due to high Ricardian rents, and urban employment and manufacture would thrive. The crisis in the countryside would eventually hit rents, due to the onset of demographic crisis and, with this, the urban boom would end.

This very schematic model is useful for pointing out the reasons for alternating phases of urban and rural strength in manufacturing. And it produces reasons based not on the traditional factor of costs, but rather on demand and income distribution. The model points out that, within the proto-industrial framework, towns could prosper in a variety of ways: they could concentrate on trade; they could be centres of direct production, that is, proto-industrial cities; or they could administer the collection of the surplus and organize its consumption.

Though urban industry rose and waned in the manner described by de Vries, and in relationship to the countryside in the way delineated by Hohenberg, it is also true that some urban industries resisted decline or flourished, counter to the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures and Maps
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Market and the State
• Part III Markets, Merchants and Middlemen
• Part IV Markets and Urban Manufacture
• Part V Market Production and Women'S Work
• Part VI Market Structures and Social Institutions: Commerce and Customary Context
• Contributors
• Index