Directions in the Study of Proto-Industrialization

Lydia Simpson

12/9/2013

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For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, the majority of economic historians and

economic scholars working within the social sciences were stuck in the shadow of Karl Marx and

his neo-Hegelian concept of historical forces. Modernity was defined by progress, guided by

conflict, toward, ultimately, some kind of utopian ideal society. Even where historians rejected, or

at least refrained from, any explicit utopian construct, the materialist dialect of class struggle

shaped the framework, either as something to argue within or against. For Marxian historians and

social scientists, history was a series of conflicts between opposing, or antithetical, could then be

seen as a necessary and positive step in the socioeconomic progress of the world, the ultimate

expression of which could only be reached once the proletariat revolution had reached every

capitalist nation in the world.

For the majority of leftist economic historians of the mid-twentieth century, surrounded by

the chaos of wars between capitalist and communist or socialist powers, perhaps there was a sort

catharsis in the logic and structure of a dialectic conflict between the historically oppressed and

their oppressors, and as long as the “revolution” appeared to be moving apace, it was a handy

concept to use as a foundation for theoretical work, which preoccupied most economic historians

until the last couple of decades of the century. Economic theorists looked backward in strained

efforts to elucidate the laws and patterns which shaped transitions and dictated revolutionary

change.

“Proto-industrialization,” a phrase whose first appearance is attributed to Franklin F.

Medels’ 1972 article “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrial Process,” published

in the Journal of Economic History, derives its conceptual ancestry from “cottage industry,” a

phrase common throughout Marxian histories of the Early Modern period.1 Proto-industrialization,

however, unlike cottage industry, meant more than a particular type of economic activity. Proto-

industrialization, according to Mendels and the historiographical body of literature which dealt with

the subject for several years thereafter, was an important and necessary step on a linear,

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formulaically-conceived road from medieval feudal to modern industrial-capitalist society in

Europe.

Mendels’ article emphasized the materialist idea that proto-industrial economies cropped

up wherever a population suffered from insufficient land availability and soil quality to take

advantage of the increasingly important commercial agricultural production of the late Middle Ages

and Early Modern period, setting up a dichotomy between agricultural and proto-industrial areas.

Where the land was more suited to commercial agriculture, according to Mendels, cottage industry

failed to become an important part of the economy because the extra economic activity was not

necessary for subsistence. The increasing specialization of both early manufacturing and

agricultural practices in both the countryside and cities as a response to crises and recovery in the

early modern period provided the basic materials for the transition to a market-oriented economy in

which producers, both industrial and agriculture, were unable to grow or make everything they

needed at home. Technological innovations in the agricultural sector of the economy, such as the

crop rotation system, played an important facilitating role by allowing more productivity per

worker and per hectare of land and by flattening out some of the seasonal vagaries inherent to

agricultural work.

Because of the long-distance nature of transactions between agriculture and industry,

mercantile middle-men played an increasingly integral role in the process, accumulating capital

along the way which in turn became, according to Mendel, the investment capital which would

facilitate the transition to a modern, industrial economy. With capital drawn from their role

facilitating trade between the proto-industrial and agricultural sectors, these early entrepreneurs

purchased the equipment for mechanized industry, which Mendels explained as a sign of the

completion of the proto-industrial process to the full-blown modern capital industrialism of the

Industrial Revolution.

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The implications inherent to the transition from agrarian to proto-industrial to modern

industrial reached beyond economic activity, inextricably connected to the socio-political

framework, which itself played an integral role in the success or failure of industrial activity within

a state. As a nation’s reach expanded through trade and colonization, the role of its government’s

foreign and domestic economic and trade policies grew more significant to the transition process.

In terms of the relationship between proto-industrialization and demographic shifts,

Professor Mendels argued that the relative income stability brought by the availability of industrial

wage labor prompted peasants who would otherwise delay marriage and restrict reproduction to

marry earlier and have more children. As Mendels phrased it, “the development of labor-intensive

industry by the peasants made it possible for them to multiply in their villages without

corresponding increase in the arable surface,” causing the population to grow more rapidly in

proto-industrial regions than in non-industrial ones, setting the stage for the urbanization of the

subsequent factory industrial phase.2 In turn, population growth led to a labor surplus which

facilitated more centralized production and the economic restructuring of capital circulation toward

a more complex, modern system.

Mendel’s formulation started a hare running, to borrow a turn-of-phrase from R.A. Butlin,

which continued running for much of the 1970s and 1980s.3 Subsequent work largely focused on

the same issues of agricultural technology, demographic change, organizational structure, capital

accumulation and circulation, and the role of the state, emphasizing the primacy of one or another

aspect of the process in the transition from a feudal to a capitalist society. In 1977 David Levine

published Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism, a close-up study of the demographic

changes which accompanied what he sees as the transitional period, 1550-1850, from feudalism to

capitalism. Levine specifically focused his research on English villages, allowing a detailed

analysis of multiple facets of demographic shifts and their temporal relationships to socioeconomic

changes.

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In his analysis, Levine argued that the gradual proletarianization of the peasants played a

crucial role in workers’ marriage decisions, largely by wearing away the traditional social

structures which were typically used to motivate and enforce family formation patterns in rural

villages.4 By looking at the villages comparatively, Levine was able to examine specific

demographic changes in the context of their accompanying socioeconomic transitions. In the

villages he studied, Levine’s findings were roughly consistent with Mendels’ assessment of the

relationship between socioeconomic and demographic change; Levine found an association

between population growth in the eighteenth century and the relative stability created by the wider

labor distribution necessitated by proto-industrial activity, population growth which he attributes to

a lowered nuptial age as a result of reduced contraindications against younger marriage and high

fertility.

Despite some concerns about Levine’s assertions sometimes overreaching his evidence,

Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism was lauded by critics for providing a much-

needed framework for future studies examining the relationship between demographic change and

economic and social structures.5 Levine’s analysis also acknowledged the close ties and

similarities between agricultural and industrial/proto-industrial areas throughout the era, early

indications of a modernizing world.6

The same year in which Levine published Family Formation in an Age of Nascent

Capitalism, saw the German release of Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohm’s

Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism , which was

translated by Beate Schempp and republished for the English-speaking world in 1981. 7 The

primary authors of Industrialization before Industrialization divided the chapters of the book to

examine different aspects of the initial phase of rural industry and the role of industry in rural

society as well as in the world economy. Two additional contributors via reprints from previous

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publications, Franklin F. Mendels and Herbert Kisch, provided case study analyses which followed

similar lines as the perspectives provided by the primary authors.

At the heart of the central arguments within Industrialization before Industrialization,

Kriedte et al explicated an assumption of the rural nature of proto-industrial origins based on the

“putting-out” system, the complexity of the process, and the nature of proto-industry as a

transitional activity, rather than a separate phase in and of itself, in which new capitalistic relations

of labor emerged from rural industrial models which formed the basis for the Industrial Revolution.

The authors also explored the multiplicity of forms in which proto-industrial activity was

undertaken, and various seemingly experimental methods of labor organization and task

management practiced by industrializing peasants of various crafts.

The authors define proto-industrial activity as “the development of rural regions in which a

large part of the population lived entirely or to a considerable extent from industrial mass

production for inter-regional and international markets.”8 The market-orientation of peasants’

economic activity is of crucial significance in defining the difference between traditional cottage

industries, in which households often practiced some kind of production craft at home as part of

their family economy either for home consumption or a close-range exchange community, but the

activity was restricted to part time and practiced in a relatively simple market exchange format

which was based on utility value.

The genesis of “market value” is an important factor in many long-range analyses of

protoindustrialization. In Peasants, Landlords, and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World

Economy, 1500-1800, one of the co-authors of Industrialization before Industrlialization, Peter

Kriedte, placed proto-industrial activity into the context of the broadening global economic market

structure of the Early Modern era. Still working within the Marxian framework, placing feudalism

and capitalism in diametrical opposition, with proto-industrial activity serving as an agent of

transition (likened to Homsbawm’s ‘crisis’ by critic Thomas Max Safley), Professor Kriedte traced

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market relations and industrial activity through three centuries, as his eponymous peasants,

landlords, and merchant capitalists creatively negotiated labor relations, trade relationships,

government policy, marriages, fertility, migration, and mortality in the emergence of a new

economic system.9

In Peasants, Landlords, and Merchant Capitalists, Kriedte emphasized the importance of

expanding networks of trade, placing town and country in opposition to one another in the process.

According to Kriedte, the “price revolution” of the sixteenth century, caused by a Malthusian crisis

which led to rapid population decline and then a gradual rebound, led to a trade network based on

market value rather than utility value, in which money played a more integral role in the balance of

trade than in earlier centuries. At the same time, guilds in the cities worked against outside control

of artisan labor by merchants. Early merchant capitalists who wanted to take advantage of the

perpetually expanding markets of the Early Modern period then turned to the peasants in the rural

countryside for inexpensive, non-guild labor.

While Industrialization before Industrialization and Peasants, Landlords and Merchant

Capitalists both made significant theoretical contributions to the field, Kriedte and his cohorts have

also taken a significant amount of criticism. In his 1983 essay “Protoindustrialization: A Concept

Too Many,” which appeared in The Economic History Review, D.C. Coleman attacked the theorists

on the basis that they had formulated their propositions with too many qualifications in order to

force the evidence into their carefully constructed frameworks.10 He also called into question the

theorists’ dependence on certain regions, especially Britain, and certain industries, particularly

textiles, for their evidence.11 Finally Coleman picks apart theorists’ definition of “proto”-

industrialization as being in essence a misuse of the “proto” prefix, rendering it effectively useless

as an analytical framework.12 R.A. Butlin made a similar argument three years later, but also

allowed that the use of the proto-industrialization framework had been applied too narrowly and a

broadening of its application could revive it.13

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Although theoretical applications of protoindustrialism fell out of favor in scholarly circles

in the mid-1980s, concern with the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism retained its

status in the literature. Francois Crouzet’s The First Industrialists: The Problem of Origins,

published in 1985, examined the economic activities of the industrial capitalists who orchestrated

the development of early industrial endeavors. Though most of Crouzet’s research focused on the

nineteenth century, he also drew on a longer period for his analysis, employing the term “proto-

industrialist” in contrast to the more modern industrialists with whom he was primarily concerned,

and also with merchants whom he labeled “paleo-industrialists.”14 Instead of focusing on the

transitionality of proto-industrialization, he looked for “paleo-industrialists” and “self-made men,”

in fact and myth, who established the first centralized, and even mechanized, manufacturing

facilities in Europe.

The problems and questions on which Crouzet chose to focus differed from those with

which the economic theorist of proto-industrialization concerned themselves. In a sense, Crouzet

sought to rescue human agency from the clutches of irresistible forces, attributing change to matters

of choice and action at least as much as to elusive “market forces,” though access to markets and

capital certainly played a large role in the success or failure of budding industrial capitalists.

Though present, however, the shift of focus to human agency was incomplete, as Crouzet still

remained enamored by the class differences between early industrialists Crouzet’s work was hailed

by critics because it allowed for diversity of activity in the context of a framework which did not

require the careful manipulation of limited data in order to uphold predictive laws and patterns. 15

The work of economic historians and geographers in the latter part of the 1970s and 1980s

in response to the formulation of protoindustrialization as an analytical construct produced a large

body of work on various parts of Europe from which later historians could draw. In 1984 Myron

Gutmann and Rene Leboutte coauthored a reappraisal of some of the demographic work that had

been done, “Rethinking Protoindustrialization and the Family,” focused on an industrializing rural

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area of eastern Belgium as a case study for demographic theories about protoindustrialization,

questioning assumptions about the underlying causes behind demographic change in industrializing

areas. Gutmann and Leboutte painted a more complicated picture of the changes happening in their

region of study in the eighteenth century, illuminating gaps in the analytical framework of their

predecessors.

More complex perspectives characterized much of the work of the last years of the twentieth

century, as the Cold War thawed and came to an end, marking the failure of the proletariat

revolutionary project, deadening the drama and urgency of Marxian theoretical pursuits. In 1996,

Cambridge University Press published European Proto-Industrialization: An Introductory

Handbook, edited by Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman. The edited volume provided both a

general overview of the debates within the historiographical discourse as well as some important

contributions of its own right, including a chapter which reinserts the role of the state and other

exogenous social institutions in a more significant way than had been done by previous historians. 16

The volume also pointed the way toward more regionalized analyses conducted within more

flexible frameworks, examining continuities rather than seeking moments of revolutionary change,

in order to build useful theories.

A few years after Ogilvie and Cerman’s volume, in 1999, the publication of Peter

Musgrave’s The Early Modern European Economy added a worthwhile act of synthesis and

suggested directions to the proto-industrialization discourse. Significantly, Musgrave avoided the

kind of grand theorizing which had characterized the literature of early modern European

economies in the 1970s and 1980s, taking an approach which favored agency over structure and

stability over conflict.17

Removing the assumption of inevitability of outcome which guided earlier scholars’ work in

formulation, Musgrave’s argument added a mild corrective to the pro-European bias of previous

generations; by removing “progress” from the equation prohibits the abuse of history to uphold the

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underlying value judgments associated with nationalistic and even racist supremacist arguments.

As Musgrave stated, “the early modern period was not simply or chiefly a period in which the

ground was prepared for the inevitable triumph of industrialization and industrial capitalism.” 18

Reflecting a post-modernist attitude toward historical forces, Musgrave sees the rise of industrial

capitalism as a very specific phenomenon which arose out of particular circumstances.

In an ambitious general survey of the last millennium of the European economy, despite

Musgrave’s call for new directions, Francois Crouzet stuck closely to the traditional framework of

proto-industrialization, but in a more complex international analysis. Though Crouzet

acknowledged the extent to which the more stringent theoretical aspects of proto-industrialization

as an analytical construct had been poorly deployed, the author also accepted its more basic

usefulness as a framework in which the complexity of relationships between agricultural and

industrializing areas could be made more explicit.19 The breadth and scope of the book, however,

rendered any in-depth or sustained analysis of the subject unwieldy. Also within an

internationalized context, Eric Mielants’ The Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West,”

published in 2007, removed proto-industrialization from the equation as an explicit framework for

analysis entirely.

In 2010, Julie Marfany brought the old debate out of the closet and dusted it off. Her

article, “Is it Still Helpful to Talk about Proto-Industrialization? Some Suggestions from a Catalan

Case Study,” first appeared in the Economic History Review, followed in August 2012 by a

monograph, Land, Proto-Industry, and Population in Catalonia c. 1680-1829: An Alternative

Transition to Capitalism? Like other post-Cold War scholars of the subject, Marfany’s work

reflected more interest in continuities than in conflict and in complexity rather than predictability.

In her brief article, though Marfany’s primary focus was a family reconstitution study to examine

the reactions of the peasant population to socioeconomic change, she deftly accounted for the

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multiplicity of factors affecting outcomes in her region of study, including the crises, the state,

wars, and power structures.

An important feature of Marfany’s argument was her stress on the role of breastfeeding in

understanding the impact of proto-industrial economies on social structure. While prior studies

examining population changes had examined the surface details of marital fertility and marriage

age, Marfany took the analysis a step further by using statistics on breast feeding in proto-

industrializing regions in the eighteenth century. Marfany attributes higher levels of marital

fertility in proto-industrializing regions to shorter breast feeding periods, indicative of the social

changes inherent in the labor relations of proto-industrialization.20

Marfany also examined population in terms of migration patterns, finding that in proto-

industrial areas, proletarianizing peasants were less likely to emigrate, contributing to population

stability. However, infant mortality increased as breast feeding practices declined. Her findings

that marriage age dropped were generally consistent with previous scholars, explained in terms of

inheritance restrictions and the flexibility wage labor allowed non-inheriting sons to exercise in

their marriage choices.21

As suggested by Musgrave, Professor Marfany found proto-industrialization to be a useful

tool for periodization and analysis as long as its implementation avoids stringent predictive grand

theories. As she put it, scholars who “deny any value to proto-industrialization because it fails to

explain all cases of transition or to fit all experiences of demographic change are abstracting the

theory from ‘the actual lumpiness of life’.”22 The proto-industrial process in Catalonia reflects the

industrialization of a marginal area in which agricultural failure necessitated some kind of change,

but the alternatives were dictated by the specific and complicated historical and geographic context

of the region.

The direction suggested by the Catalan study takes the shape of deeper analyses in smaller

regions, reflecting the general trend of historiography in the twenty-first century. A multiplicity of

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smaller case studies produced by Cold War-era scholars must now be re-examined by a new

generation, and the archives in various areas of Europe revisited, by scholars asking new questions

and providing new insights, the impetus for which could not have come prior to the abandonment

of the quest for laws and order as the primary goal of historical research on economic change. The

more interdisciplinarian mood of current scholarship allows for a much more dynamic and flexible

system of inquiry to predominate the field in place of stringent structure and predictive economic

theory.

The shift away from technological explanations of change may also indicate the possibility

of a broader range of comparative studies. The late-nineteenth century American South underwent

changes which could be considered from a proto-industrial perspective despite the existence of

fully industrial capitalist technologies of production and of power. The centralization of the factory

system, seen as only one facet of a complex process, could fade to the background as a predominant

theme of “modern” industrialization, allowing emphasis on social structures and living conditions

to add more value to analyses. The ways in which workers maintained or lost control of the

production process, working hours, the work conditions of women and children, may all be

examined in a more dynamic way if the quest for a precipitous moment of “modernization” recedes

to the background and the search for meaning ascends to dominance in the field as other areas of

study have done.

1 Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 no. 1 (March 1972) p. 241-261.2 Ibid, 252.3 R.A. Butlin, “Early Industrialization in Europe: Concepts and Problems,” Geographic Journal 152 no. 1 (March 1986) p. 2.4 David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (Academic Press, Inc: New York, 1977) p. 147-148.5 Joan Thirsk, review of Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism by David Levine, in William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, vol. 36, no. 3 (July 1979) p. 478-480; William H. Mulligan, Jr., review of Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism by David Levine, in The Business History Review 53 no. 1 (Spring 1979) p. 142-143.6 Mary C. Ryan, review of Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism by David Levine, in Agricultural History 53 no. 1 (January 1979) p. 410-412.7 Peter Kriedte et al., Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 8 Ibid, 6.9 Thomas Max Safley, review of Peasants, Landlords, and Merchant Capitalists in Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1985) p. 401. 10 D.C. Coleman, “Protoindustrialization: A Concept Too Many,” Economic History Review 36 no. 3 (August 1983) 435-448.11 Ibid, 444.12 Ibid, 448.13 Butlin, 6.14 Francois Crouzet, The First Industrialists: The Problem of Origins, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 20.15 Myron P. Gutmann, review of The First Industrialists: The Problem of Origins by Francois Crouzet, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 no. 3 (Winter 1988) p. 510-511.16 Michael Zell, review of European Proto-Industrialization: An Introductory Handbook edited by Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, in Economic History Review 49 no. 5 (November 1996) p. 855-856.17 Robert DuPlessis, review of The Early Modern European Economy by Peter Musgrave, in Journal of Economic History 60 no. 3 (September 2000) p. 878.18 Peter Musgrave, The Early Modern European Economy, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) p. 205.19 Francois Crouzet, A History of the European Economy, 1000-2000, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001) p. 62-63.20 Julie Marfany, “Is it Still Helpful to Talk about Proto-Industrialization? Some Suggestions from a Catalan Case Study,” in Economic History Review 63 no. 4 (2010) 942-973.21 Ibid, 969.22 Ibid, 970.