Factory System
The factory system was a method of manufacturing that emerged during the Industrial Revolution, where goods were produced on a large scale in centralized locations using machinery and a division of labor. This system transformed the way goods were produced, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. It also played a significant role in urbanization and the rise of industrial capitalism.
8 Key excerpts on "Factory System"
eBook - ePub- Charles Austin Beard(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As a rule, with personal knowledge there was personal respect, though not without those occasional disagreements which opposing interests will sometimes beget, however carefully they may be regulated.” But the hand workers could not compete with the new and tireless machines. Home and small industries gave place to the Factory System, under which the output was enormously increased, not only by reason of the machines, but also because of the division of labour and the consequent augmentation of the skill of the labourer. Instead of the hand worker turning out a finished product, came the organised army of workers, each filling a particular niche by performing one of the processes in the production of a commodity. To quote Hobson : “The typical unit of production is no longer a single family, or a small group of persons working with a few cheap, simple tools upon small quantities of material, but a compact and closely organised mass of labour, composed of hundreds or thousands of individuals co-operating with large quantities of expensive and intricate machinery through which passes a continuous and mighty volume of raw material on its way to the consuming public.” At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the men who owned the new machines had the advantage, and they made full use of it, for they were unhindered by factory legislation and unrestricted by public opinion. This collecting of vast armies of labourers under the dominion of one capitalist broke off the old relations of master and man, and society gradually divided into two classes, the employers and the employed, bound together only by the “cash nexus.” The ever-widening markets increased the demand for vast capital, and its relative importance consequently outgrew that of labour. Capital was necessary to buy machinery, erect factories, and initiate industries...
eBook - ePubTechnology and American Society
A History
- Gary Cross, Rick Szostak(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It is not surprising that innovators had not previously developed technology entirely unsuited to cottage production. Instead, once the factory was in place for other reasons, the technological potential of this new setting was gradually explored. As large externally powered machinery grew in importance, factories became even more advantageous. The centralized workplace did not at first emerge in the large cities. Industry had for centuries been located in the country, and both water power and cheap labor could readily be found there. Only after factories came to require an extensive pool of both skilled and unskilled labor, as well as access to repair facilities and other services, did factories begin to concentrate in new industrial centers. Even more importantly, the shift from rural waterwheels to steam engines as an industrial power source facilitated the emergence of industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham. Ramshackle worker housing surrounded these factories. Those countries like the United States that strove to catch up to Britain technologically in the nineteenth century also attempted to avoid these unsightly slums. The factories changed the meaning of labor. Even if hours worked were roughly the same in factory and home, wage-earners lost control over the pace and methods of their work. Home workers were legendary for extending their weekend drinking into ‘Saint Monday,’ and then madly trying to make up for lost time later in the week. Constant supervision was also a novel experience, at least for the head of household. Even though families often worked together in the first factories, something was nevertheless lost with respect to family togetherness. It is clear that a wage premium had to be paid in factories to entice workers into that setting. Even with that, most cottage workers (especially handloom weavers, who were the most studied of these) chose to stay in their homes...
- E. Royston pike(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...THE RISE OF THE Factory System ‘Previously to 1760,’ said Arnold Toynbee in one of those lectures delivered to an Oxford audience in 1881 that inaugurated the specialized literature of the Industrial Revolution, ‘the old industrial system obtained in England.’ What was the ‘old industrial system’? It has often been described, and almost as often in the most sympathetic terms. One of the best accounts, if by ‘best’ we mean ‘readable’, is that of Peter Gaskell, given in the opening chapter of his book, The Manufacturing Population of England, first published in 1833. Its peculiar quality will be appreciated from what is reprinted here (No. 1). Gaskell disclaimed any intention of painting an Arcadia, but there is none the less about his description a glow of nostalgic warmth. How far Gaskell wrote out of personal knowledge and experience is hard to ascertain, since very little is known about him. He qualified as an apothecary in London in 1827 and in the next year was admitted to the membership of the Royal College of Surgeons. He seems to have lived in the neighbourhood of Stockport, in Cheshire, and it is reasonable to assume that it was then that he obtained his obviously considerable acquaintance with the poor and their problems. The most important thing about him is his book, which, as stated above, was published in 1833; a second edition, revised and slightly enlarged, appeared three years later, under the title of Artisans and Machinery. Gaskell died in 1841, at the age of 35, when he was living in Camberwell, then one of the more rural of the London inner suburbs. Very possibly the book would have remained as obscure as the young surgeon who was its author if it had not attracted the attention of Frederick Engels, the friend and supporter, in more ways than one, of Karl Marx...
eBook - ePubTextiles
A History
- Fiona McDonald(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Pen & Sword(Publisher)
...Where running water was available, mostly where mills were already set, water power was not a difficulty. The answer lay in the steam engine. James Watt James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769 and its first application to the textile industry was in 1785 when it powered a cotton mill. By the end of the century steam was far more prevalent for powering textile mills than water was. The result of all this activity was that the new innovations required large amounts of capital, as well as adequate space, to run. Such machines were not even dreamed of by the cottagers who had formed the basis of the old domestic system. Machines would spell the end of the long established domestic system. What took its place was the factory. The Factory System Men with money invested it in textile mills. The mills needed money to set up with machinery and then they needed a labour force to make them earn their keep. Even though machinery had revolutionised the industry, making cloth faster than humanly possible by hand, it still required many people to run them efficiently. Machinery plus men under the one roof equalled the first factories. It was making cotton textiles that first became mechanised and organised into a factory. It was not long before the woollen cloth industry followed suit and eventually other industries all started using the new ‘Factory System’ as opposed to the long standing ‘domestic system’ of production. From 1760 until approximately 1800 the introduction of machinery and steam power altered the whole manufacturing process and, in this short time, it managed to produce a whole range of social problems too. Workers who had long been able to make extra money working from their own homes at their own times were now expected to go to the work site at specific times to work set hours. This automatically disqualified workers who lived any great distance from an industrial centre. Cotton mill. The Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution means exactly that...
eBook - ePubCapitalism
A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique
- Johan Fornäs(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production, but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. 26 In medieval feudalism, craftsmen had to go through years of training in order to fully master their work. Industrial capitalism initially reduces this demand. However, machinery leads to a flexibility of production that requires a similar flexibility on the part of the workers, so that they can easily adapt to new modes of production and perhaps also move between different branches, when the labour market forces them to do so. Modern industrialism therefore also coincided with legislated compulsory school attendance, which has since then been prolonged and is now usually 9–10 years in most industrialised countries. While the value of labour-power diminishes due to the rise in productivity of labour, it on the other hand tends to grow because of increasing costs for the necessary provision of general basic education. Marx repeatedly asserts and tries to show that ‘the development of the contradictions of a given historical form of production is the only historical way in which it can be dissolved and then reconstructed on a new basis’ 27...
eBook - ePub- Nathan Rosenberg(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter IV The Nineteenth Century: America as Initiator Although, as we have seen, America relied heavily upon British technology, she also developed an industrial technology possessing certain special features which distinguished it from the technology which had been developed earlier in Great Britain. These features were so special that, by the first half of the 1850s, they were beginning to be admired and borrowed without reservation by Great Britain, already known as “the workshop of the world.” Indeed, the British themselves coined the phrase “The American System of Manufacturing” to describe the new technology. In concentrating our attention, as we will, upon the manufacturing sector, it should be understood that we are examining a sector which was relatively small in the early nineteenth century but which grew at a striking rate during the course of the century and was easily the largest single sector by its end. This growth is apparent in Table 3. Moreover, within the manufacturing sector, more and more of its resources were devoted to supplying critical machinery inputs which were responsible for the growth in productivity in other sectors of the economy. Successful economic development in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a compositional shift in the stock of capital in favor of machinery. 1 1. Gallman’s figures show a sharp rise in manufactured producers’ durables as a proportion of the total output of capital goods (i.e., manufactured producers’ durables + farm improvements + total construction). This ratio rose from 10 percent in 1839 to 15 percent in 1859, 20 percent in 1879, and stood at 31 percent in 1899. See Gallman, op. cit., p. 36. Table 3 Sector Shares in Commodity Output, 1839-1899 (Percent) The point is that technological change in the nineteenth century was both generated and, eventually, institutionalized, in a very special way...
eBook - ePubEconomics. Premium Collection. Illustrated
The Wealth of Nations, Capital, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and others
- Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing(Publisher)
...If it seize upon a particular stage in the production of a commodity, the other stages of its production become converted into so many independent industries. It has already been stated, that where the finished article consists merely of a number of parts fitted together, the detail operations may re-establish themselves as genuine and separate handicrafts. In order to carry out more perfectly the division of labour in manufacture, a single branch of production is, according to the varieties of its raw material, or the various forms that one and the same raw material may assume, split up into numerous, and to some extent, entirely new manufactures. Accordingly, in France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different kinds of silk stuffs were woven, and, in Avignon, it was law, that “every apprentice should devote himself to only one sort of fabrication, and should not learn the preparation of several kinds of stuff at once.” The territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country, acquires fresh stimulus from the manufacturing system, which exploits every special advantage. The Colonial system and the opening out of the markets of the world, both of which are included in the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period, furnish rich material for developing the division of labour in society. It is not the place, here, to go on to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties, which caused A...
eBook - ePubThe Evolution of the British Welfare State
A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution
- Derek Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...A visit to one large mill in industrial Lancashire or Yorkshire could furnish the evidence of child labour which would have taken a large-scale investigation into private dwellings in the age of the domestic system. The excessive labour of children could be ignored when scattered across the Pennine hamlets, but not for long would it remain unnoticed and unremarked in a smoky industrial city. Apart from this concentration, the Industrial Revolution added two main strands to the prevailing pattern, those of discipline and danger which were the creation of the new Factory System. Many of the abuses to which children were subjected stemmed from the discipline imposed by the very nature of factory labour. Excessive hours produced tiredness, and the overlookers or foremen were motivated as much by the need to keep children awake and alert as by the proverbial sadism for which they were pilloried. Factory discipline was most easily administered by the strap and, as one former child operative reported later in life, ‘The confinement and the labour were no burden but the severity was intolerable, the marks of which I yet carry and shall carry to the grave.’ The relentless process of mechanised production led to a monotonous but demanding routine from which, like the treadmill, there was no escape: For 12 mortal hours does the leviathan of machinery toil on with vigour undiminished and with pace unslackened and the human machines must keep pace with him. What signify languor, sickness, disease? The pulsations of the physical monster continue and his human agents must drag after him. 2 The rigorous demands and the dehumanising effects of the discipline of the Factory System were galling to adults and even more pernicious for children. The second new factor was the danger, both physical and moral, which was an apparently inevitable feature of the Factory System...
