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Proto­industrialization revisited: 
demography, social structure, and modern 
domestic industry
Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm

Continuity and Change / Volume 8 / Issue 02 / August 1993, pp 217 ­ 252
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416000002071, Published online: 11 November 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/
abstract_S0268416000002071

How to cite this article:
Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm (1993). Proto­
industrialization revisited: demography, social structure, and modern 
domestic industry. Continuity and Change, 8, pp 217­252 doi:10.1017/
S0268416000002071

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Continuity and Change 8 (2), 1993, 217-252. © 1993 Cambridge University Press

Proto-industrialization revisited:
demography, social structure, and
modern domestic industry

PETER KRIEDTE, HANS MEDICK

AND J U R G E N SCHLUMBOHM*

Ever since Franklin Mendels' seminal article on proto-industrialization

(1972)1 there has been a wide-ranging debate on the concept. In this
article, however, we prefer to discuss the rich empirical research on three
major sub-fields of proto-industrialization, rather than to argue over the
general contributions to the debate. A few words, however, are
appropriate, as far as Mager's article in this number of Continuity and
Change is concerned.
Mager's text is remarkable not least as a piece of rhetoric. His ex
cathedra style creates the impression not of furthering the discussion
through argument, but rather of setting himself in its centre as an
authority, or even closing it down by authority. This makes it possible for
him to avoid detailed engagement with the concepts of proto-
industrialization put forward by both Franklin Mendels and ourselves.2
He tries to give the impression that the rich international debate of recent
years has thoroughly done away with both Mendels' positions and our
own, claiming that 'this theory of "industrialization before
industrialization" is even less able to maintain itself against criticisms
than Mendels' concept' (p. 183).
The main point of Mager's article is to substitute a narrow, but only
apparently clearly denned, concept of 'proto-industry' for the various
existing concepts of'proto-industrialization'.3 After denning 'industry' as
'mass production of industrial products for supra-local markets to serve
a wide consumer demand', he asserts axiomatically that'industry... can

* All of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, Gottingen.

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

first be observed fully formed in the early modern industrial countrysides',

and that therefore this '"first industry" may appropriately be termed
"proto-industry"' (p. 187). He makes no attempt to explain how this
early modern 'proto-industry' differed from earlier or later forms of
industry: if 'industry' was already 'fully formed' in the early modern
period, there seems to be no difference between it and nineteenth- and
twentieth-century factory industry. As far as the late medieval period is
concerned, it is still a difficult question whether or to what extent the
earliest rural export industries should be included in the concept of proto-
industrialization.4 But Mager's definition would compel him to treat the
medieval urban export industries as 'proto-industries', as well - which he
does not, however, do. Mager's narrowing of perspective does not lead to
greater specificity, therefore, but creates new problems.
In addition, Mager's concept and typology of 'proto-industry' has the
following drawbacks. First, his typology is, despite claims to the contrary,
oriented purely toward craft-industrial history. It takes as its basis each
branch of industry or each type of product, and considers them as fixed
quantities.5 Where it goes slightly further than the German Historical
School of Political Economy, in taking agriculture more into account, it
does so very cursorily.6 Mager claims to extend the 'industrial-historical
and sectoral perspective of the German Historical School' into a 'social-
integrative approach' (p. 187), but he does not carry this out. Secondly,
Mager's allegedly 'more subtle concept of proto-industry' (p. 188) is
inherently static. It fails to say anything about the rise of proto-industry,
the transition from one product to another, or the processes leading to the
dissolution of proto-industry into factory industry or to its involution.
Although at the end of his article Mager introduces one or two references
to the ' implosion of industrial countrysides [into] urban factories and...
smelting " preserves " concentrated on coalfields' (p. 202), these contradict
the views of the decoupling of factory industry from proto-industry which
he proclaims elsewhere.7 Where Mager says anything about the
development of an industry (for example the wool industry), he interprets
it in a fashion very similar to the stage theory which he derides.
Repercussive and cyclical processes are entirely neglected.8 Thirdly,
Mager's theory of ' proto-industry' leads to a narrowing of the original
approach.9 Demography, culture, politics, and institutions are left out of
consideration. This makes it impossible any longer to take into account
the interactions among these different levels. They are sacrificed to a uni-
dimensional concept.10

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 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

I. THE DEMOGRAPHY OF PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION

Mager passes over the demographic aspects of proto-industrialization in
a few general phrases. This is surprising, since demography has been
central to the debate from the very beginning. It was Franklin Mendels
who made the relationship between rural industry and demographic
change a cornerstone of the concept of proto-industrialization and started
to discuss the issue systematically. Based on aggregative data from the
linen-weaving region of Belgian Flanders, he proposed a model of the
links between demographic behaviour and economic change: linen
producers responded to economic upswings by greater marriage fre-
quency, but did not reduce marriage frequency in economic downswings.
According to Mendels, this asymmetry lay behind population growth in
proto-industrial regions; he termed it'Malthusian short-sightedness', and
originally argued that it was caused by 'conditions of general back-
wardness and illiteracy. ' u
This is where our own arguments about 'industrialization before
industrialization' came in. We sketched out a model of the strategies of
the proto-industrial family, showing that its demographic behaviour had
its own logic and rationality.12 We described a proto-industrial 'demo-
economic system', not as a definitive result, but as a'hypothetical model'.
Our starting-point was the 'demo-economic system which regulated the
feudal agrarian societies of Europe', as sketched out by historical
demographers following Malthus and Mackenroth. Whereas in the
agrarian system population growth was restrained mainly through
marriage being linked to a 'niche' attainable only through inheritance,
proto-industrialization broke the iron 'chain between reproduction and
inheritance'.13 Three causes for this were proposed. First, early marriage
became possible because proto-industrial producers relied for a living not
on inherited property but on their own labour: thus they were not subject
to the landlord or community-control mechanisms of agrarian society.
Secondly, their typical life-cycle earnings curve meant that it was useful for
the proto-industrial worker (male or female) to marry and beget children
early. And, finally, the cottage industrial work-process made marriage and
a family a necessary prerequisite for independent production: the unit of
production was the family.
Admittedly, the longstanding debate on these theses contains some
contributions of questionable value. For example, data on communities
and regions which never experienced real proto-industrialization can
hardly falsify or support the hypothesis.14 Material from the middle or late
nineteenth century is of only limited use for reaching conclusions about
the central period of proto-industrialization. Moreover, a number of

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

contributions concentrate exclusively on one variable, and do not pay

attention to changes in its interplay with others. For example, if for
nineteenth-century France only marriage behaviour is investigated,15 this
will say little about the relationship between proto-industrialization and
population growth, because by this time birth control was already
widespread, loosening the link between nuptiality and fertility.16
Nevertheless, the debate and the fieldwork inspired by it have increased
our knowledge of the relationships between economic and demographic
change, even though the balance-sheet on the initial proto-
industrialization hypotheses is ambivalent.17 Several studies have
confirmed that population grew especially fast or population density was
especially high in proto-industrial compared to agrarian regions: this was
the case in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Switzerland, in eighteenth-
century Belgian Flanders, and in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century Ireland.18 On the other hand, it has been pointed out that agrarian
intensification could also lead to significant population growth: the
examples advanced to support this view range from areas of sixteenth-
century Switzerland to the eastern provinces of Prussia in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.19 The demand for labour
created by proto-industrialization often caused a decline in emigration
from rural regions, as is shown by the stagnation of the populations of
many towns and cities; this also emerges from investigating the places of
origin of migrant labourers.20
Wrigley and Schofield have isolated marriage behaviour as the decisive
element in population change: at least in England, the population adapted
itself to available resources through changes in fertility to a much greater
extent than through mortality, and fertility depended above all on the age
and frequency of marriage.21 This confirms an important aspect of the
demographic models of proto-industrialization, at least for the English
case. Admittedly, Wrigley and Schofield are apparently not convinced
that proto-industrialization brought a fundamental change in the demo-
economic system; all they say is that demand by external markets could
support population growth for much longer than could a closed local
system.22 But investigating regional and social differences in demographic
behaviour lay beyond the aims of their study; their stimulating model of
demographic-economic interaction was forced to rely on comparatively
scanty long-term economic series.23 Research into proto-industrialization
should pay more attention to the different reasons for, and effects of,
changes in marriage age and in the celibacy rate, for socio-economic
change could influence these two components of nuptiality in quite
different ways.24
Attempts to use Mendels' own methods to test his demo-economic

220
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

model for other regions have not confirmed the model, either for the small
ironwares and textile industry around Hagen (Westphalia) in the
nineteenth century, or for the wool industry around Verviers (Belgium) in
the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.25 Marriage age was
lower in some proto-industrial communities and regions than in agrarian
ones, for example in northern France and Ireland.26 However, in several
cases, such as Ireland, proto-industrialization appears to have caused
early marriage among men rather than among women.27 This does not
quite correspond to the hypothesis of a specific proto-industrial
demographic pattern, for only female marriage age directly and
fundamentally influences population growth, as long as birth control is
not practised. Even more important are findings such as those for the
Essex village of Terling. Here enclosures were already far advanced in the
sixteenth century; on this basis a capitalist agriculture developed, with a
polarized social structure with a few large farmers and numerous rural
labourers. Marriage age for both women and men was low from the late
sixteenth century on; for women, it fell even further at the end of the
eighteenth century, to the level reached more dramatically by the
stocking-knitting village of Shepshed in Leicestershire, which had been the
major single case study underpinning the early demographic theory of
proto-industrialization.28 David Levine, the author of these micro-
analyses, and Charles Tilly have used such results to propose that it was
not so much the special structure of proto-industrialization, but rather a
more inclusive process of proletarianization, which created the conditions
for fundamental changes in demographic behaviour and (with an
associated demand for labour) unprecedented population growth. This
process included not only proto-industrial labour, but possibly also
workers from centralized manufactories and early factories, and, after the
transition to agrarian capitalism, rural labourers.29
There are still not many studies investigating the marriage behaviour of
different occupational groups or social classes in proto-industrial regions.
In several textile communities of French Flanders in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, weavers and their brides married markedly
earlier than peasants.30 In the woollens-producing area of Verviers at the
end of the eighteenth century, weavers and their wives also married
considerably younger than other occupational groups.31 In the diversified
industrial region around Liege (Belgium), marriage age was admittedly
generally high, but in the first half of the nineteenth century men and
women among the cottage-industrial straw-plaiters married youngest;
among proto-industrial armourers, as well, men and women married
younger than among peasants. That this was also the case for coalminers
supports the proletarianization hypothesis.32

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

Demographic investigations of proto-industrialization are thus con-

tradictory and difficult to systematize when isolated empiricalfindingsare
confronted with partial elements of the model. Counting the cases which
confirm the 'rule' against the 'exceptions'33 can hardly lead further. The
most important contributions are made by detailed case studies which,
rather than investigating particular demographic variables in isolation,
analyse economic, social and demographic factors in context. This is
illustrated by a Swiss example which - like other Swiss studies from the
1970s and 1980s,34 but in contrast to the pioneering work of Rudolf
Braun35 - has been unjustifiably neglected in the international debate.
The Swiss canton of Appenzell-Ausserrhoden appears, both in its
agrarian and in its industrial development, to be a classic case of proto-
industrialization.36 As part of the Swiss 'herding land', it specialized in
animal-raising and dairying from the late medieval period, importing
grain from southern Germany.37 By the early modern period, practically
no feudal rights or commons survived. Cottage industry can be traced
back to the fifteenth century, when the rural population already spun flax
and wove linen for the St Gallen market. In the second halves of both the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, industrial trends were favourable; but
both periods were followed by more difficult times. In the course of the
eighteenth century the textile industry became diversified: besides the
traditional linen production, there arose cotton production, especially
mousseline-weaving, and then hand-embroidery. In several communities
in the 1820s, 60-80 per cent of the adult population were weavers.38 The
nineteenth century brought a transition to factories in the cotton industry.
Although the economic development of the canton seems to be a model
example of proto-industrialization, its demographic behaviour is prob-
lematic. Certainly population density was extraordinarily high: with a
population of about 40,000 in 1799, it had an average of 155 persons per
square kilometre, placing it third in Switzerland, surpassed only by the
urban cantons of Basel and Geneva.39 Population growth was rapid in the
last third of the seventeenth and the first third of the eighteenth century;
but this was followed by a long stagnation up to the end of the eighteenth
century.40 The mean age at marriage in one densely proto-industrial
community in the early eighteenth century was, at 26.5 years for women
and 28.5 years for men, on the high side by European standards; and in
the following generation it showed no tendency to fall, even though this
was precisely the period in which the cotton industry expanded greatly.41
Although the marriage behaviour thus contradicts the demographic
model of proto-industrialization, age-specific marital fertility was extra-
ordinarily high.42 But this was counteracted by enormous infant and child
mortality: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, more than

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one-third of children died in the first year of life, and less than half,
sometimes barely more than a third, of children reached the age of sixteen.
Crisis mortality also continued to be significant in the eighteenth century.43
This high mortality, coupled with considerable out-migration,44 caused
population stagnation in the eighteenth century, despite the high marital
fertility.
As a whole, this demographic system contrasts sharply with the low-
pressure English system portrayed by Wrigley and Schofield, which was
driven by fertility, or rather nuptiality. The demographic system in
Appenzell-Ausserrhoden was a high-pressure system, in which mortality
apparently dominated - very similar to the system portrayed for sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Switzerland by Markus Mattmuller.45
Investigating why Appenzell-Ausserrhoden and other proto-industrial
areas deviate in important respects from the proto-industrial model helps
us think how to differentiate and modify the model, and exploit its
heuristic value, which has never been disputed in the debate. The first
point is that the proto-industrial household was not always a production
unit with a division of labour and co-operation between family members.
In Ausserrhoden, the independent weaver did certainly use his wife and
children for reeling yarn, for warping, and sometimes also for spinning.
But most cotton-weavers were wage-weavers, who obtained the finished
warp and even the reeled weft from the putter-out, who employed
specialized workers for preparing both items. In a single household,
therefore, several persons would often be carrying out individual wage-
work side-by-side.46 Elsewhere, too, in the putting-out system there often
existed aflexibledivision of labour, in which, rather than the individual
household organizing and carrying out an all-inclusive production
process, individual cottage workers specialized in narrowly defined
tasks.47
Secondly, marriage and household formation cannot always be assumed
to have been a necessary precondition for earning an independent income.
In Appenzell-Ausserrhoden, young people often left their parents' homes
several years before marriage, obtaining board and lodging elsewhere, and
earning an independent wage.48
Although under proto-industrialization the household was where
production took place, the connection between the work-process and the
family as the reproductive unit turns out to be more complex than was
assumed by the original model. The family was initially assumed to be the
unit of production, co-operating in the division of labour; the demands of
the work-process therefore seemed to determine household structure and
demographic behaviour directly and necessarily. But this connection now
appears to have been looser - although not non-existent - on both sides:

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

the co-operative division of labour did not invariably occur within the
household, but could also occur between households; and households
could adapt to the requirements of work and survival not only through the
demographic acts of marrying and begetting children, but also through
the social acts of single children leaving home or the admission of persons
who did not belong to the nuclear family. This means that we have to
reckon with considerable variability in household structure under proto-
industrialization. The branch of industry in question, the concrete shape
of the work-process, the underlying agrarian system, and the extent and
nature of the combination of agrarian and industrial activities - all gave
rise to quite different proto-industrial household forms.49
The fact that the cottage-industrial production process did not directly
require a particular sort of demographic behaviour explains why marriage
age was not everywhere and always as low as originally expected.
Moreover, the economic incentive for early marriage would have been
weaker where young people could already earn their own wages without
marrying or forming a household, whether as lodgers in other people's
households or in loosened dependency within the parental family. In such
circumstances, it can hardly have been a strict cost-benefit analysis which
led to marriage, for the labour-consumer balance was particularly
favourable for a young person who was economically independent.50 If
young people had often already left the parental household, it was less
likely for parents that their offspring would substantially contribute to the
family income, when their own working strength declined.
Giving up the idea that the cottage-industrial work-process necessitated
early marriage abolishes any basis for assuming that a proto-industrial
population would not be able to adapt demographically to crisis
situations.51 In fact, several empirical studies suggest that proto-industrial
populations were able to react flexibly to both boom periods and crises.52
It is necessary to distinguish here, however, between different branches of
industry, different agrarian contexts, and the short and the long term.53
The nature and extent of the interpenetration between cottage industry
and agriculture also helps explain differences in demographic behaviour.
Whether, how, and to what extent cottage-industrial workers were
integrated into a social structure which was determined by the agrarian
economy had important consequences, especially for household formation
and settlement. If women were the only ones who engaged in industrial
work, and men worked as peasants or agricultural labourers, marriage
behaviour cannot be explained solely by proto-industrialization; instead,
we must analyse the combined operation of agriculture and industry on
both men and women.54 In large areas of East Westphalia, linen
production was largely a by-employment and the lower class continued to
224
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

be integrated into a rural society dominated by the propertied peasants,

through the Heuerling system; marriage conditions here differed from
those in areas where the proto-industrial population had largely freed
itself from such relations.55 Indeed, we had already mentioned this in our
book, although this has generally been ignored in its reception.56
In sum, the empirical studies show that it is impossible to establish a
single behaviour pattern for all proto-industrial populations, and that we
must take into account a whole array of differentiating factors. But this is
a fate which the demographic model of proto-industrialization shares with
its counterpart, the hypothesis of a pre-industrial agrarian demographic
system. Here the central concept is the 'European marriage pattern'; it
has attained a quasi-canonical status since Hajnal's classic essay of 1965,
but, as E. A. Wrigley has written, i t ' is better described as a repertoire of
adaptable systems than as a pattern'.57
Systems of high and low pressure can be distinguished, although these
should be seen not as a dichotomy but as extremes on a broad spectrum
of possible modes of behaviour.58 Among the immediate causes of this
distinction, infant feeding practices were certainly central: artificial
feeding of infants increased infant mortality, since sterilization was
unknown in those times, but, in the absence of family limitation, it also
increased marital fertility because it reduced the contraceptive effect of
lactation amenorrhea, and thus led to a' system of wastage of human life';
long breast-feeding, by contrast, kept fertility as well as infant mortality
moderate, leading to a 'system of conservation of human life'.59
Admittedly, the reasons underlying such contrasting modes of behaviour
still have to be investigated; they undoubtedly lie deep within economic
and social structures and long-term cultural factors. But it is already clear
that the distinction between systems of high hand low pressure is
extremely important, not only for agrarian but also for proto-industrial
populations.60
The demography of early modern Europe thus turns out to be more
complex than can be grasped through the antithesis of two models, an
agrarian and a proto-industrial. Within proto-industrialization, family
and household structures, like demographic behaviour, were differentiated
in various ways. Nevertheless, we can maintain our basic thesis that proto-
industrialization brought a potentiality of substantial population growth,
at a regional level, even though in varying forms and not necessarily in the
shape of an unconditional imperative toward earlier marriage.
Further conceptual work and the modelling of a plurality of typical
behavioural patterns will require an approach to which the theory of
proto-industrialization has substantially contributed61: the micro-level
study of demographic behaviour in the context of the life-cycle and family

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

strategies, and analysis of its logic in terms of the economic, social, and
cultural situation.

II. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND AGRARIAN-INDUSTRIAL

INTERPENETRATION

Mager's narrow perspective, focussed on craft and industrial history, also

neglects other central issues in the debate. It largely ignores, for example,
the wide variety of agrarian bases for proto-industry, and the ways in
which the two were interleaved in different 'industrial regions'. In
addition, it pays no attention to the specific social groups involved in
proto-industrialization, be it as producers and workers or as entrepreneurs
and commercial agents. Admittedly, the social structure of proto-
industrialization is still insufficiently researched, but to ignore it is to pass
over one of the most important questions.
Mager acknowledges that ' linking... rural industries with their agri-
cultural environment' is central (p. 185), but he does not explore it. On the
contrary, his 'typology of proto-industry' (p. 189) remains one-sided in
precisely this respect. Mager's attention is devoted primarily to the
organization of production and work-processes in important branches of
early modern industry, but hardly at all to the social groups engaging in
these industries, or to their interpenetration with agriculture and rural
society. Recently Jean Quataert pointed out a ' widespread perspective in
the proto-industrial literature which emphasizes industrial activities rather
than agrarian in the rhythm of rural manufacturers' lives'.62 This
statement is a very apt description of Mager's 'typology'.
For Mager, a close 'interpenetration between agriculture and industry'
(p. 193) is almost exclusively to be found in the linen industry, which he sees
as representing 'the classic pattern of rural cottage industry' (p. 189). In
the cotton and woollen industries, by contrast, he sees only a mutual
' supplementation' between agriculture and industry which never assumed
the form of an 'interpenetration' (pp. 193, 201). If one looks for the
reasons for this way of viewing this relationship, it becomes clear that
Mager views such 'interpenetration' primarily from the point of view of
the production of industrial raw materials. He sees 'interpenetration' as
occurring mainly in areas where raw materials were produced and at least
partially also processed by cottage-industrial workers: for him, the
integration of flax-cultivation, flax-spinning, and linen-weaving within a
household, typical in some regions for the production of coarse linen
cloths, is the model of ' true symbiosis' between agriculture and cottage
industry (p. 191). Rural production of raw silk, independent of
silk-weaving, is also portrayed as an example of a typical 'inter-

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 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

penetration' of agriculture and cottage industry (p. 198). But for the
woollen and worsted industries, 'interpenetration' is almost wholly
neglected. For worsted production, Mager speaks of a 'rural cottage
industry', but for the production of fine woollens he assumed that
'country-dwellers were less able to achieve the high standards required'
(p. 195). He claims, much too globally, that the woollen industry saw a
move toward bringing together all stages of production into centralized
'manufactories' (p. 195). In so saying, he maps out a linear typology, a
historical line of development, which is inappropriate for at least one
' classic' and significant rural woollen industry, that of the West Riding of
Yorkshire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the eastern
and southern part of the region, woollens were produced well into the
nineteenth century by independent craftsmen-entrepreneurs (clothiers),
who were mostly owners or tenants of small landholdings and, as such,
pursued an industrial-agrarian 'double-employment' (P.Hudson). The
production of worsted in the more hilly western parts of the region was
also a rural industry, but here a putting-out system dominated, in which
merchant putters-out, often with considerable landed property, interacted
with landless weaver-cottagers.63
In both sub-regions, the different ways in which industrial production
and marketing were organized did not arise out of technical requirements
or the local raw material base, largely irrelevant for both industries after
the eighteenth century, but rather from different agrarian preconditions.
The fact that the hilly worsted-producing zones were enclosed early and
were primarily pastoral led to the disappearance of the owners of small
landholdings and tenants who determined the social relations of
production in the woollen-producing areas (based on field-grass cul-
tivation controlled by landlords and villages) until well into the post-
proto-industrial64 phase of the transition to factory industry.
As this example shows, Mager's fixation on raw materials and technical
requirements ignores the mutual interdependence of agriculture and
cottage industry as an encompassing social nexus. This nexus was often
decisive for the rise, the spread, and the ultimate disappearance of rural
industries. It was this insight which lay at the centre of the systematic
reflections on proto-industrialization proposed by Franklin Mendels and
the present authors. Admittedly, our works were primarily conceptual:
they were not primarily formulated to deal with regional variations or the
complexity of interactions between agriculture and cottage industry.65 But
now these questions have been illuminated by numerous case studies
which have opened up the following perspectives.
The beginning of the debate on proto-industrialization was
characterized by the assumption that land-poverty and landlessness were

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not only an important cause of the rise of proto-industry, but also

determined its further expansion. The continual intensification of this
land-poverty - the increasing proletarianization of proto-industrial
groups - was seen as a necessary consequence of the expansion of
domestic industry in the countryside. This assumption lay at the basis of
the model Mendels developed from the example of the Flemish linen
industry, in which he characterized the dynamic interaction between
population growth and industrial expansion as the consequence of a
'Malthusian trap'. 66 The idea of a proto-industrial poverty trap was
extended by Charles Tilly67 and David Levine,68 who conceptually
sharpened their own earlier studies, claiming that they showed that proto-
industrialization was only part of a more inclusive and long-term
'proletarianization' of rural groups. These assumptions have in the
meanwhile shown themselves to be not altogether tenable. Local and
regional studies have shown that, at least in their classic phase from the
seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, proto-industrial develop-
ments were not necessarily 'children of poverty' or 'poverty traps'.69 Nor
is Jan Peters' argument, based on Saxony, that property and production
relations among rural industrial workers can already be viewed as those
of an 'industrial pre-proletariat' long before the nineteenth century
altogether convincing.70 This hardly accords with Peters' own research
results, which show that the' frontier between land-poverty and peasantry'
was more 'fluid' in rural industrial parts of Saxony than in areas of
peasant agriculture. Peters' thinking is still too limited by the paradigm of
early modern ' East Elbian land-poverty' as a special form of' primitive
accumulation'. Helga Schultz's argument, that it was with the putting-out
system that rural industrial producers took 'the decisive step toward
becoming a proletariat',71 also assumes historical developments which are
not generally observable, as is shown by the complex overlaying of rural
craft and proto-industry to which Schultz herself has drawn attention.72
The dispossession of rural producers and the dissolution of peasant
village social structures was not invariably a prerequisite, or a conse-
quence, of the rise and development of proto-industrial groups. On the
contrary, the social profile, property and earning relationships, and
standard of living of proto-industrial groups were determined by the
requirements and relationships of the agricultural system, which varied
across regions and localities, as much as by industrial production.
Michael Mitterauer has drawn attention to one of the extreme
possibilities, which occurred in the textile as well as the small iron goods
industry. He calls it the 'penetration of traditional peasant family
structures by cottage industry' and illustrates it using the linen and cotton
industries of the upper Waldviertel, which were carried out and controlled

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by 'weaver-peasants'.73 Here, strong control by community and landlord,

and the region's unfavourable agrarian situation, meant that the
expanding cottage-industrial textile production continued to be ex-
tensively integrated into the peasant household. A land-poor industrial
cottager stratum was not altogether prevented from working and
multiplying, but was kept within narrow limits.74 Although this case may
be untypical and unrepresentative - in the statistical sense - it does show
the broad spectrum of possible links between proto-industry and
agriculture. And it is not the only case of a rural cottage industry practised
by 'industrial peasants'.76 Other examples, especially from the linen76 and
small iron goods industries,77 manifest other agrarian and industrial
preconditions, but show no less close interpenetration between agriculture
and industry, nor any less intense participation of peasant households in
industrial production and even sometimes in organization and marketing.
In the small iron goods industry, the peasants retained control over the
raw material and its mining, smelting, and smithing; these industries'
substantial capital requirements meant that large peasant landowners and
merchant entrepreneurs became largely involved in them. The long
tradition of weapon and scythe production by peasants in the Swedish
province of Dalarna shows how the expansion of industrial production in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not necessarily lead to a
specialized division of labour between commercial grain cultivation and
industry. Both existed side-by-side within the same household, in a
compensatory relationship of varying seasonal intensity, bringing in
subsidiary wage labour. Only the agricultural revolution of the 1820s led
to peasant specialization in agriculture and the decline of rural industry to
the point that it was only any longer practised by poor owners of small
landholdings.78
But these examples should not obscure the fact that in most cases
studied so far, proto-industrial groups did not arise out of the stratum of
peasant landowners. Instead, extensive involvement in rural industry
seems to have required a process of social differentiation, leading to the
emergency of a stratum of small peasants or sub-peasants who had to turn
to cottage industry to survive. Such industrial activities were linked to the
agrarian context, which varied across regions and localities, in a wide
variety of ways. It depended not only on the agricultural 'ecotype'79 and
relations of production, but also on the property relations of the proto-
industrial groups in question, and (not least) on the demand for the proto-
industrial output.
Additional local and regional studies and further debate have revealed
how often land ownership by small peasants or sub-peasants formed the
basis for involvement in rural industry. The concepts of'rural sub-strata',

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'pre-proletarian' strata, and 'proletarian' strata can all too easily obscure
important distinctions, but to investigate proto-industrial social structure,
we must draw the distinction between the smallest landowners and the
propertyless, between 'land-poverty' and 'landlessness'. This distinction
may seem gradual, but it turns out to be essential for explaining the
sources, rise, and duration of proto-industrialization in different regions
and branches of industry.80 The prime importance of this fine distinction,
which is too often ignored in the interpretation of rural social structures,
is aptly formulated by Christoph Dipper: ' Any piece of land, however
small, raised its possessor up out of the mass of the propertyless and drew
him, at least apparently, back over the dividing line into the ranks of the
peasants. ' 81
The importance of small peasant and sub-peasant landowners for
proto-industrialization was not limited to agrarian 'frontier'-lands,82 in
which barren, low-yield soils and weakly developed landlord and
community controls eased in-migration by small peasant and sub-peasant
groups, and permitted multiplication of their holdings through partible
inheritance. On the basis of such an eco-typological model, Joan Thirsk,83
Eric Jones,84 Herbert Kisch,85 and others attempted to locate the sources
of proto-industrialization in pastoral and forest regions. In doing so, they,
like Franklin Mendels,86 remarked on a developmental dichotomy
between industrial regions with small peasant subsistence farming and
zones of commercial agriculture, and generalized too hastily. Rudolf
Braun, too, has adhered to this model, arguing that proto-industry could
not exist in the same region as a three-field system of agriculture with
compulsory common crop rotation and pasturing rights.87
Numerous more recent studies have extended and modified this view.
Revisions became necessary for Switzerland, above all because of the
research of Markus Mattmuller and his pupils.88 These revealed that
proto-industrialization could arise not only in hilly agrarian mixed zones
with a pastoral agriculture not subject to compulsory common crop
rotation (such as the cotton areas of the Zurich Highlands studied by
Braun) and the Swiss 'herding country' (such as the linen and cotton areas
of Appenzell-Ausserrhoden).89 It could also arise in some zones of the
'corn country'. For instance, the Jura region of the Basel countryside
provided the social and agrarian preconditions for the development of
intensive rural silk ribbon-weaving, beginning in the seventeenth century.
Here this industry was practised almost exclusively by a stratum of small
peasants, the 'Tauner', which had grown rapidly since the late-sixteenth-
century agrarian expansion. Their intensive exploitation of their ' dwarf
holdings' did not decline in importance as proto-industrialization
progressed. Quite the contrary: as holdings increased in number but

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mostly declined in size, agricultural intensification turned out to be a way,

admittedly often costly and crisis-ridden for the individual household, for
proto-industrial expansion and agrarian development to coexist on a basis
of small landholdings.90 The eighteenth-century wool industry of the Pays
de Herve in the Verviers countryside studied by Servais provides another
case in which a social structure distinguished by small landholdings
stabilized, based on favourable industrial demand, until the delicate
agrarian-industrial balance was disrupted by factory spinning in the early
nineteenth century.91
Many other examples show that proto-industrialization did not always
change the social structure in such a way as to put an end to agricultural
work or landownership by rural industrial groups. The effects of a proto-
industrial social structure could extend far beyond the proto-industrial
phase itself. In southern Germany, according to Schremmer, rural cottage
industry, with its link to owners of small landholdings, 'generated its own
elements of social stability',92 which remained in operation until the late
industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several of the
Wiirttemberg industrial countrysides are especially telling examples of this
pattern.93 Likewise, Jean Quataert has highlighted, especially in her study
of the textile industry of the southern Oberlausitz, the continuity and
flexibility of the modes of production and ways of life of rural industries
based on the ownership of small plots of land from the seventeenth
century until the late nineteenth century, when it helped to shape the rise
of factory industry. Indeed, the modes of life and work developed in the
context of rural industry based on small landholdings affected not just the
rural industries and their workers, but also important elements among the
urban industrial workers, which Quataert argues are therefore better
described as 'worker-peasantries' than as a 'proletariat' in the classic
sense.94
Agrarian-industrial integration could continue to be important for the
survival of proto-industrial producers and for the proto-industrial process
even without proto-industrial groups having any independent access to
agrarian resources through small landholdings. A substantial stratum of
cottage-industrial producers could easily arise below the level of the small
landowners, and nevertheless continue to depend on a close relationship
with agriculture. Several studies, one of them by Mager himself,95 show
the sort of interpenetration which could arise in this way between proto-
industry and intensive commercial agriculture, dominated by large peasant
landowners, tenants, and sub-tenants.96 Here it was above all the
seasonality of the demand for agricultural labour which meant that for the
propertyless and property-poor strata below the small peasantry a
combination of cottage industry and agricultural labour was not only

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possible but necessary. This occurred in the linen industry, but also in the
cotton industry and in the production and processing of raw silk. Under
these relations of production, often a family could earn a living only
through an extreme sexual division of labour, which aimed at attaining
maximum earning opportunities in agriculture for the men, while the
women and children did cottage-industrial and commercial work.97
Admittedly, with sustained industrial demand, proto-industrialization
could loosen or destroy the structural dependency of proto-industrial
workers on agriculture, and turn proto-industrial activity (for both sexes)
from a by-employment into a full-time job.98 This could give rise to a
social differentiation which made the social allocation of resources partly
or wholly dependent on proto-industrial earnings. But such social
differentiation did not necessarily culminate in a proletarianization
divorcing the majority of rural industrial workers from the possibility of
deriving part of their subsistence from agriculture (as is shown, for
instance, by subdivision of rural tenancies in the northern Irish linen
industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries99). Certainly such
a process could result in the disappearance of agrarian earnings and in
proletarianization, but this was by no means always its necessary
consequence.
The studies surveyed here show that the forms, functions, and historical
consequences of the relationships between agriculture and proto-industry
were extremely various, and that we cannot assume, as Mager does, that
one type of'interpenetration' will dominate. Above all, they compel us to
question the teleological assumption, which has strongly influenced the
proto-industrialization debate, that proto-industrial strata underwent a
progressive and linear proletarianization. However, really precise
investigations of the social and property structures of proto-industries and
their long-term development remain an urgent priority.

III. PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION AND MODERN DOMESTIC

INDUSTRY
The long coexistence and opposition between proto-industry (or domestic
industry) and factory industry is a distinctive trait of European
industrialization reaching into the twentieth century. Yet it is not often
recognized in the literature. When, in what follows, we use the term
'domestic industry' rather than 'proto-industry', it is because with the
coming of factory industrialization the concept of proto-industry is only
appropriate for sectors which had not yet completed the transition to
factory industry, but not for those which had newly constituted themselves
as domestic industries. In 1887, Engels sketched out a typology of

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nineteenth-century domestic industry.100 First, he described domestic

industries which, like hand-weaving, dated back to the period of proto-
industrialization. Secondly, there were domestic industries which arose in
the countryside only in the course of the nineteenth century. But there was
also a third type, the large urban domestic industries of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
The first type requires further differentiation. In cases where the sub-
system of the social organization of labour preceding in the production
process was already mechanized (either nationally or internationally),
domestic industry generally expanded very rapidly. Thus many cotton-
spinners who lost their livelihoods when yarn-production was mechanized
shifted to handloom weaving. But this no longer developed under the
conditions of the proto-industrial production system, but rather as an
integral component of the capitalist industrialization process. As a
consequence, it was subjected to the conditions prevalent in this process.
As soon as it was both technically possible to mechanize weaving, and
entrepreneurs associated this with the hope of higher profits and thus
began to set up the first power-looms, capital in the textile industry
assigned handloom weaving a fundamentally different role. Once the
industry had lostflexibilityby setting up machine weaving plants, thereby
transforming circulating into fixed capital, it instrumentalized handloom
weaving as an additional potential source of production which the
entrepreneur could pick up and put down according to how well the
economy was doing. Despite this, the day was in sight when this mixed
system would lose its advantages for the entrepreneurs, who would see
themselves compelled to bring the whole production process together into
the factory.101 The fact that it came to this point later on the continent
than in England resulted from international competition. To counter the
English cotton industry, the continental cotton industries turned to
especially labour-intensive products, where they could undercut the
English with lower wage-costs. These were produced domestic-industrially
well into the later nineteenth century.102
Where industrialization failed or got stuck, as in many linen regions,
domestic industry had a different status. After the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the linen industry faced competition from cotton, as
well as considerable technical difficulties in mechanizing spinning and
weaving. It was only able to develop like other textile industries in areas
(such as Bielefeld) where it both adapted to changes in the market by
shifting over to putting-out and then to factories and specialized in high-
quality products. At the turn of the century, the Bielefeld area no longer
had any cottage linen-weaving, while in Silesia still about a half of all linen
looms were handlooms. Only in the Landeshut region were both spinning

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and weaving mechanized to any great extent. In the Hirschberger Tal,

which had once been the centre of the Silesian linen industry (in 1795 there
were 5,641 looms in operation in the Hirschberg district), the number of
looms had fallen to 533 by 1901 and to 33 by 1924, without any
mechanization to speak of.103 In the first case, domestic industry can be
seen as a necessary transitional phase on the way to the factory, while in
the second it was the last stage before an industry disappeared. In both
cases, the fate of domestic industry was very closely linked with the
industrialization process, although with an important distinction: in the
former it was an integral component of it, whereas in the latter it became
a victim of the 'counter-effect' (in Gunnar Myrdal's phrase) which
emanated from it.
At the same time a specific strategy of flexible specialization, oriented
toward world markets, could sustain domestic industry in a sector for a
long time. This was the case not least in the Swiss clock industry, which
into the 1870s still enjoyed an indisputed quasi-monopoly in the world
market for small clocks.104 As late as 1870, some 88 per cent of its labour
force was domestic-industrial. The 'etablissage' (outwork) system, thanks
to its highly developed division of labour, enabled this industry to supply
the world market with clocks to suit almost any taste, price, or quantity
requirements.105 The challenge posed by American clock factories after
the early 1870s led to a restructuring and a drastic decline in domestic-
industrial work in the Swiss industry: in 1905 only 23.7 per cent of the
labour force was still domestic industrial workers. But the domestic-
industrial legacy was not abandoned in the transition to factory industry:
Swiss factories were still very small (in 1901, they had an average of 38
employees, compared to 529 in the United States in the preceding year).
But, above all, the Swiss industry retained its strategy of flexible
specialization, which enabled it to maintain its leading position on the
world market. In addition, 'etablissage' and factory coexisted as parts of
the same production system until the 1970s. Domestic industry was able
to survive above all in areas where unusual products, strongly subject to
fashion, were produced in small numbers.106
The second type of domestic industry mentioned above was a child of
the age of pauperism. 'Where there is any poverty among the small
peasantry, as several years ago in the Eifel', Engels wrote in 1887, 'there
the bourgeois press instantly calls for the introduction of an appropriate
domestic industry as the only remedy.'107 Thus in the villages of the
Taunus, 'filet'-knitting was implanted by a committee of assistance set up
in Frankfurt in 1852, in contrast to the much older nailsmithing and wire-
goods industries.108 The same was true of the straw-plaiting industries
which many states sought to introduce, mostly in vain, during the

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nineteenth century.109 Other such domestic industries were the production

of cigars, toys, baskets, and artificial flowers.110 All of these tended to find
niches in regions whose agriculture had very low yields, and whose earlier
domestic industries had disappeared or been thrown into crisis by
industrialization. This second type of domestic industry sometimes dated
back to the eighteenth century-and thus cannot always be clearly
distinguished from the first - but its expansion phase was unambiguously
in the nineteenth century. These industries relied on parts of the
population which had lost their traditional earning opportunities but were
not ready to seek income elsewhere. Although they tended to be organized
according to capitalist principles, they stood in the shadow, rather, of the
capitalist industrialization process.
The third type of domestic industry must be seen as a specifically
modern form of this decentralized production system. As an 'exploitation
sphere of capital built up in the background of large industry' (in Marx's
classic definition),111 this third type was primarily found in large cities.
Sombart saw these domestic industries as being characterized ' by a quite
different utilization of their labouring material'.112 Large older crafts such
as turning, shoemaking, and tailoring, which had hitherto served local
needs, were drawn into the capitalization process and transformed into
domestic industries.113 If proto-industrialization was both a prerequisite
and a result of the first phase in the rise of the modern consumer society,
modern domestic industry was part of its second phase. While the first and
second types of domestic industry lost ground in Germany around 1900
- the first long before, the second during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century - the third expanded further.
Modern domestic industry became most widespread in the clothing
trades. The number employed as domestic-industrial clothing workers in
Germany increased from ca. 108,000 in 1882 to ca. 213,000 in 1907, when
it comprised 35 per cent of all domestic-industrial workers, some 70 per
cent of them women.114 The development of modern domestic industry
can best be illustrated by the Berlin clothing industry, dating back to the
1830s. With the Franco-Prussian war, which temporarily excluded Paris,
the most important competitor, from the international markets, a rapid
growth began, based on the sewing machine as the determining production
tool. At the beginning of this century, about 90 per cent of German
women's, girls', and young children's ready-made clothing, about 75 per
cent of boys', and about 25 per cent of men's, were made in Berlin.
Production was directed by the ready-made clothing firms. They put the
material out to middlemen - 'sweaters' - who were responsible for getting
the work done, either in their own workshops or in the homes of the
female domestic workers. In 1906, about 75-80 per cent of the

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 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

labour-force was domestic-industrial, although more than half of these

people worked in the workshops of the middlemen. The remaining 20-25
per cent worked in the factories. This domestic-industrial production
system disappeared only in the 1960s, when the Berlin clothing industry
could no longer compete with the clothing industry of the Federal
Republic, and therefore had to introduce modern factory processes.116
In retrospect, it seems as if the dissolution of domestic industry was a
continual process which culminated in the complete victory of factory
industry. Thus, for example, the share of domestic industry in the number
of workers employed in the secondary sector in Germany declined from
about 8.5 per cent in 1882 to about 3.1 per cent in 1925.116 But it is
important not to take too linear a view of this process. Not all regions in
which domestic industries had put down roots managed the transition to
factory industrialization. Some regions saw their industries disintegrate. A
process of de-industrialization took over.117 Moreover, new domestic
industries arose during the industrialization process, which also casts
doubt on a linear view. Above all, there was no guarantee that domestic
industry would not win back ground, even in branches in which the
transition to manufactory or factory had already been completed.118
In the eastern Swiss embroidery industry, for instance, Otto Hintze
pointed out 'a remarkable reversal' in 1894. Originally a purely luxury
trade, after the 1820s the embroidery industry turned more intensively to
more mass-market products. Thisfinallysucceeded, beginning in the early
1850s, with the spread of the hand-embroidery machine (improved since
its invention in 1828). The machines were at first set up in factories - they
should probably be termed manufactories - but after the 1870s they
continually gained ground in domestic-industrial production. In 1890 in
the cantons of St Gallen, Appenzell-Innerrhoden, Appenzell-
Ausserrhoden, and Thurgau, more than half the hand-embroidery
machines were in workshops with one or two machines. Ten years later,
it was almost 70 per cent. The trend reached such a point that the few
factories were increasingly transformed into wage-embroidery concerns
producing for the St Gallen export trade. Domestic industrial hand-
machine embroidering only began to experience difficulties after the 1890s
when new sorts of embroidery machine, driven by water-power, steam,
and later with electricity, were introduced. Domestic industry survived
here for so long because the factory had no decisive advantage over
domestic industry. Both were enjoying the same technical improvements.
Moreover, individual embroiderers were prepared to undercut the factory,
cost what may: supported by agricultural small-holdings, they worked for
wages lower than the cost of reproduction. And domestic industry meant
that the St Gallen merchant houses could stay aloof from production,

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shifting production risks onto the individual embroiderers and seeking to

increase profits by cutting piece-rates, a process that could be achieved
most easily with individual embroideries.119
Another example of this pattern is the Solingen cutlery industry. Here,
one of the most important lines of work was the grinding of the blades.
At first, this work was carried out in workshops situated on streams and
rivers, and after the mid-nineteenth century in steam grinding plants
where up to one hundred grinders worked at rented grinding-places. They
were independent craftsmen-workers, and the grinding concerns can been
seen as collective manufactories or factories. With the transition to
electricity after the turn of the century, a reversal toward domestic
industry began: many grinders began to work in their own workshops
with electric grinding machines. These domestic-industrial grinding
concerns were only replaced by factories in the 1960s. This took place not
because of technical inferiority, but rather because there were no longer
any qualified successors to the domestic-industrial workers.120
'The home worker has one great advantage: he is cheap', declared
David Landes in 1969. Since the late nineteenth century this 'advantage'
has resulted less from the fact that domestic-industrial workers have
multiple ways of covering reproduction costs than from their poor
negotiating position. Much more dispersed than their eighteenth- and
early-nineteenth-century predecessors, and without support from neigh-
bourhood and community, they are at the mercy of the wage dictates of
the putters-out and factory-owners.121 The capacity of domestic industry
to attract capital relied on two facts: first, that' the exploitation frontier
vis-a-vis labour was extended' (in Sombart's words), resulting in a
continual decline in wages; and second, on its greater flexibility, which
approached the 'versatility of merchant capital'. In the meantime, as in
the cutlery industry, a high level of craft qualification also played a role.
These advantages of domestic-industrial production only began to wane
when labour scarcity, the problem of inability to control the work-
process, and in some cases superior factory-industrial production
methods, began enduringly to threaten their profitability.122 At first,
domestic industries survived through entrepreneurs' transforming them
into what Marx termed an 'external department of the factory',123 in
order to be able to use their workers as an industrial reserve army, and to
retain the advantages of this form of production into the new era.
Technically, as well, they repeatedly demonstrated a great capacity to
adapt, as is shown by the domestic-industrial use of the jenny, the hand-
embroidery machine, the Schiffli embroidery machine, the ribbon-maker,
and the sewing machine. In fact, it was only in extreme cases that the
factory attained the quality standards of the domestic-industrial grinding

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concerns, as occurred in the Solingen cutlery industry only after the 1950s
and 1960s.
Both the domestic industries replaced by factory industries and the new
ones which arose were production systems which were at the same time
social reproduction systems. Just as domestic-industrial embroidery was
rooted in the households of sub-peasant strata who did not want to give
up their link to the soil, so the large-city ready-made-clothing industry was
indivisibly linked to the destiny of the worker family: the earnings of the
man often did not suffice, which meant that the woman must also work;
and the ready-made-garment producer, in setting piece-rates for his
female domestic-industrial workers, could pay a starvation wage because
he knew that these were merely supplementary earnings.124 The
disintegration of the domestic-industrial sector in the Solingen cutlery
industry was closely related to the fact that the grinders ceased to work
together in steam grinding concerns, and started working independently in
their own workshops, losing the capacity to set up unions. The class
constellation shifted in favour of the factory owners. Their intervention
increasingly endangered the social reproduction of the home workers.125
In the complicated subsequent coexistence of domestic and factory
industry in the industrialization period, 'capital's striving towards
valorization' must, in Sombart's words, be seen as the 'causa movens'.126
But it must not be forgotten that these were social production systems
which gave their stamp to the historical process and could pull it in a
particular direction.
It might seem to us today that the problem of 'domestic industry' has
been solved, with the complete triumph of factory industry. But care must
be taken. In the service sectors of large cities, domestic industry has for
some time been growing anew.127 The main expansion of domestic
industry today, however, is in the less-developed world. An almost
unlimited supply of labour and violently fluctuating export markets lead
factory owners to view it as the optimal form of production.128 Domestic
industries in less-developed countries mainly produce for world markets.
The wages they pay are so low that the reproduction of labour must be
secured through ' external subsidies', not least from the rural subsistence
economy.129 Although the future of domestic industry cannot yet be
predicted in detail, it is probable that it still has a long history ahead.

ENDNOTES

1 F. Mendels, 'Proto-industrialization: the first phase of the industrialization process',

Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 241-61; see also Mendels, Industrialization and
population pressure in eighteenth-century Flanders (New York, 1981), published version
of his 1970 University of Wisconsin Ph.D. dissertation of the same title.

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2 P. Kriedte, H. Medick, andJ. Schlumbohm, Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung.

Gewerbliche Warenproduktion auf dem Land in der Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus
(Gottingen, 1977), henceforth KMS; all references here are to the English translation,
Industrialization before industrialization (Cambridge, 1982); see also Kriedte, Medick,
and Schlumbohm, 'Proto-industrialization on test with the guild of historians',
Economy and Society 15 (1986), 254-72. For example, Mager tries to introduce as 'new'
various concepts and authors (and indeed a whole 'historical school') which we had
already discussed in our book. See the concept of'differential profit', with which Mager
(p. 184) claims to refute our view of the special dynamic of the proto-industrial family
economy in capitalistic markets, but which we had already used in KMS (see pp. 5Off.);
Mager deploys arguments of the German Historical School of Political Economy on pp.
185ff., whereas we had already engaged extensively with them in KMS (see pp. 2ff.).
3 He had already introduced this notion in W. Mager, 'La protoindustrialisation.
Premier bilan d'un debat', Francia 13 (1985), 489-501, esp. pp. 500f.
4 See KMS, 23f.; W. Mager's article in this issue, p. 181; W. von Stromer,
'Gewerbereviere und Protoindustrien in Spatmittelalter und Fruhneuzeit', in H. Pohl
ed., Gewerbe- und Industrielandschaften vom Spatmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert
(Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft 78) (Stuttgart, 1986),
39—111; W. von Stomer, Die Grundung der Baumwollindustrie in Mitteleuropa.
Wirtschaftspolitik im Spatmittelalter (Stuttgart, 1978). Research on this question has
advanced in recent years, particularly for Upper Swabia: see R. Kiessling, Die Stadt und
ihr Land. Umlandpolitih, Biirgerbesitz und Wirtschaftsgefuge in Ostschwaben vom 14. bis
ins 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne etc., 1989); W. Zorn, 'Ein neues Bild der Struktur der
ostschwabischen Gewerbelandschaft im 16. Jahrhundert', Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial-
und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 75 (1988), 153-87; M. W. Paas, Population change, labor
supply and agriculture in Augsburg 1480-1618 (New York, 1981); and C.-P. Clasen, Die
Augsburger Weber. Leistungen und Krisen des Textilgewerbes um 1600 (Augsburg,
1981).
5 A more differentiated treatment of this subject can be found in W. Sombart, Der
moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 2:2 (Munich etc., 3rd edn 1919), 681-906; J. Kulischer,
Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, vol. 2 (4th edn,
Munich, 1971), 113-37, 146-63, 164-94; and KMS, 98f. with note 22, lOlf. with note
44, 109f. with notes 95-7.
6 See below, Section II; see also Sombart, Kapitalismus, 814f., and KMS, 12-33.
7 These arguments by Mager lie very close to our own, as does his thesis 'that the
industrial expansion of the early modern period, which has been termed proto-industry,
played a major role in bringing about the capitalist mode of production' (p. 203). The
fact that we have treated de-industrialization as a constantly present alternative
deprives his claim that we constructed ' a direct path...from proto-industry to factory
industry' (p. 203) of any foundation.
8 See KMS 145-54, and the 'Afterword' to the Spanish edition, Industrializacion antes de
la industrializacion (Barcelona, 1986), 299-307, here p. 301.
9 It must appear as an involuntary irony that the article in this issue by Wolfgang Mager
was originally published in a special issue of the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft on
the theme 'The broadening of social history' (Sozialgeschichte in der Erweiterung), 14,
3 (1988), 275-303. A German version of our article here was also originally published
in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992), 70-87, 231-55.
10 The whole present essay is based on the collective discussion of its three authors. The
three sections which follow were written by Jiirgen Schlumbohm, Hans Medick, and
Peter Kriedte, respectively. - See the case studies by P. Kriedte, Eine Stadt am seidenen

239
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

Faden. Haushalt, Hausindustrie und soziale Bewegung in Krefeld in der Mitte des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, 1991); J. Schlumbohm,' Lebenslaufe, Familien, Hofe. Studien
zu Bauern und Eigentumslosen in einem agrarisch-protoindustriellen Kirchspiel
Nordwestdeutschlands: Belm 1650-1860' (manuscript 1991, to be published in 1993 by
the publisher Vandenhoeck, Gottingen, in the series Verojfentlichungen des Max-
Planck-Instituts fur Geschichte); H. Medick,'Weben und Uberleben in Laichingen vom
17. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Sozial-, Kultur- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte
in den Perspektiven einer lokalen Gesellschaft Altwurttembergs' (manuscript 1992, to
be published in the same series in 1994).
11 Mendels, 'Proto-industrialization', 249ff.; quotation from his dissertation abstract in
Journal of Economic History 31 (1971), 269-71; see Mendels, Industrialization, 247.
12 KMS, 54ff., 74ff.; the quotations which follow are from pp. 75 and 77.
13 C. Tilly and R. Tilly, 'Agenda for European economic history in the 1970s', Journal of
Economic History 31 (1971), 184-98, here p. 189.
14 For this reason M. W. Flinn (The European demographic system, 1500—1820 (Brighton,
1981), 37) and R. Houston and K. D. M. Snell ('Proto-industrialization? Cottage
industry, social change, and industrial revolution', The Historical Journal 27 (1984),
473-92, here p. 481) are wrong to introduce the work of Knodel into the proto-
industrialization debate; see J. Knodel, 'Natural fertility in pre-industrial Germany',
Population Studies 32 (1978), 481-510, and Demographic behavior in the past. A study
of 14 German village populations in the 18th and 19th centuries (Cambridge, 1988), 29ff.
15 Thus F. Mendels, ' Des industries rurales a la protoindustrialisation: historique d'un
changement de perspective', Annales ESC 39 (1984), 977-1008, here pp. lOOlff. with
Tables 3 and 4.
16 J.-P. Bardel and H. Le Bras, 'La chute de la fecondite', in J. Dupaquier ed., Histoire de
la population francaise, vol. 3 (Paris, 1988), 351-401; E. van de Walle, 'Alone in
Europe: the French fertility decline until 1850', in C. Tilly ed., Historical studies of
changing fertility (Princeton, NJ, 1978), 257-88; E. van de Walle, The female population
of France in the 19th century (Princeton, NJ, 1974), 174ff.
17 See Mendels' interim balance-sheet, 'Industries rurales', 994ff., lOOlff.; Houston and
Snell, 'Proto-industrialization', 479ff.
18 M. Mattmiiller, Bevolkerungsgeschichte der Schweiz, Part 1 (Basel etc., 1987), vol. 1,
194f., 419ff., vol. 2, 684ff.; R. Braun,' Early industrialization and demographic change
in the canton of Zurich', in Tilly, Historical studies of changing fertility, 289-334;
F. Gschwind, Bevolkerungsentwicklung und Wirtschaftsstrucktur der Landschaft Basel
im 18. Jahrhundert (Liestal, 1977), 215ff., 436ff.; A.-L. Head-Konig, L. Hubler, and
C. Pfister, 'Evolution agraire et demographique en Suisse (17e-19e siecles)', in
A. Fauve-Chamoux ed., Evolution agraire et croissance demographique (Liege, 1987),
233-61, here 235ff.; C. Vandenbroeke, 'Le cas flamand. Evolution sociale et
comportements demographiques aux 17e-19e siecles', Annales ESC 39 (1984), 915-38,
here 917f.; J. H. Andrews, 'Land and people c. 1780', in T. W. Moody and W. E.
Vaughan eds., A new history of Ireland, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1986), 236-64, here p. 249; E. L.
Almquist, 'Pre-Famine Ireland and the theory of European proto-industrialization:
evidence from the 1841 census', in Journal of Economic History 39 (1979), 699—718, esp.
pp. 710ff.; but cf. J. Mokyr, Why Ireland starved (2nd edn, London, 1985), 52ff.
19 Mattmuller, Bevolkerungsgeschichte, Part 1, vol. 1, 149ff., cf. 41 Iff.; H. Harnisch,
' Bevolkerungsgeschichtliche Probleme der Industnellen Revolution in Deutschland', in
K. Larmer ed., Studien zur Geschichte der Produktivkrdfte (Berlin-GDR, 1979),
267-339, esp. pp. 287ff., 3O3ff., 310ff., 318ft; R. Lee, 'Regionale Differenzierung im
Bevolkerungswachstum Deutschlands im friihen 19. Jahrhundert', in R. Fremdlingand

240
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

R. H. Tilly eds., Industrialisierung und Raum. Studien zur regionalen Differenzierung im

Deutschlanddes 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1979), 192-229. See K. D. M. Snell, Annals
of the labouring poor. Social change and agrarian England 1660—1900 (Cambridge, 1985),
210-18. In this context, see KMS, p. 83 with note 55.
2 0 J . d e Vries, European urbanization 1500-1800 (London, 1984), 220ff., 238ff.;
J. Lucassen, Migrant labour in Europe 1600-1900. The drift to the North Sea (London
etc., 1986), 30ff., 40. However, see H. U. Pfister, Die Auswanderung aus dem Knonauer
Amt 1648-1750 (Zurich, 1987), esp. pp. 253ff.
21 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England 1541-1871. A
reconstruction (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1989), 236ff., 412ff., xxviii & f.; cf. also E. A.
Wrigley, 'The growth of population in eighteenth-century England. A conundrum
resolved', in Past and Presents (1983), 121-50; E. A. Wrigley, 'Marriage, fertility and
population growth in eighteenth-century England', in R. B. Outhwaite ed., Marriage
and society. Studies in the social history of marriage (London, 1981), 137-85. In high-
pressure systems, by contrast, adaption is achieved instead through Malthus' 'positive
check', mortality: Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, 450ff., 458ff., 478f., cf.
xxiv & f.; see, below, the example of Appenzell-Ausserrhoden.
22 Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, 463.
23 Ibid. 454-84, cf. 402ff., 638ff., xx & ff.
24 On this, see D. R. Weir, ' Rather never than late. Celibacy and age at marriage in
English cohort fertility 1541-1871', Journal of Family History 9 (1984), 340-54; R. S.
Schofield, 'English marriage patterns revisited', Journal of Family History 10 (1985),
2-20.
25 G. Hohorst, Wirtschaftswachstum und Bevolkerungsentwicklung in Preussen 1816 bis
1914 (New York, 1977), esp. 208-27; M. Gutmann, 'Proto-industrialization and
marriage ages in eastern Belgium', Annales de De'mographie Historique (1987), 143-73;
M. Gutmann, Toward the modern economy. Early industry in Europe 1500—1800 (New
York, 1988), 136ff. For a partial confirmation of Mendels' model, see U. Pfister 'Proto-
industrialization and demographic change. The Canton of Zurich revisited', Journal of
European Economic History 18 (1989), 629-62, and P. Kriedte, Stadt am seidenen Faden,
46ff.
26 P. Deyon, ' La diffusion rurale des industries textiles en Flandre francaise a la fin de
l'Ancien Regime et au debut du 19e siecle' Revue du Nord, 61, 240 (1979), 83-95, here
pp. 93f.; Almquist, 'Ireland', 71 Iff. See however, V. Morgan and W. Macafee, 'Irish
population in the pre-Famine period. Evidence from County Antrim', Economic
History Review 2nd ser. 37 (1984) 182-96, here pp. 187f., as well as the debate between
Vandenbroeke ('Cas flamand', 929f.) and F. Mendels ('Niveau des salaires et age au
mariage en Flandre 17e-18e siecles', Annales ESC39 (1984), 939-56, here 946f., 951ff.).
For an important plea for differentiation, see M. Gutmann and R. Leboutte,
'Rethinking protoindustrialization and the family', Journal of Interdisciplinary History
14 (1984), 587-607.
27 Mokyr, Ireland, 54f.
28 D. Levine, Family formation in an age of nascent capitalism (New York etc., 1977),
116-26; KMS was based on Levine's dissertation, which lacked the chapter on Terling.
On Terling, see also K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English
village. Terling 1525-1700 (New York etc., 1979).
29 C.Tilly, 'Demographic origins of the European proletariat', in D. Levine ed.,
Proletarianization andfamily history (Orlando etc., 1984), 1-85;D. Levine,' Production,
reproduction and the proletarian family in England 1500-1851', in ibid., 87-127;
D. Levine, Reproducing families. The political economy of English population history

241
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

(Cambridge, 1987). Knodel, Demographic behavior (pp. 131ff.) is not a counter-example

(contrary to his own assessment), since although his communities had land-poor and/or
landless groups, nowhere did an extended process of proletarianization take place. See
also J. Schlumbohm,' Moglichkeiten und Grenzen historischer Demographic Zu John
Knodels neuem Buch', Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung 16 (1989), 49-53, on the
methodological problems of distinguishing social groups.
30 Deyon, 'Diffusion rurale', 94; Mendels, 'Niveau', 952f. Similarly C. Vandenbroeke,
'Caracteristiques de la nuptialite et de la fecondite en Flandre et en Brabant aux
17e-19e siecles', Annales de Demographie Historique (1977), 7-20, here p. 15. On men's
marriage age, see Morgan and Macafee,' Irish population', 193f. (socially differentiated
data on women's marriage age are lacking). In Germany hardly any community
thoroughly gripped by proto-industrialization has yet been investigated for social
differences in demographic behaviour; see the survey by J. Schlumbohm, 'Social
differences in age at marriage. Examples from rural Germany during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries', in Historiens et populations. Liber amicorum Etienne Helin
(Louvain-la-Neuve, 1991), 593-607. For preliminary findings from a rural case study,
see J. Schlumbohm, 'From peasant society to class society: some aspects of family and
class in a Northwest German protoindustrial parish, 17th—19th centuries', Journal of
Family History 17 (1992), 183-99. The findings for the silk-weaving town of Krefeld fit
the original proto-industrialization hypothesis quite well: see Kriedte, Stadt am
seidenen Faden, 36ff.
31 Gutmann, Modern economy, 168ff.
32 R. Leboutte, Reconversions de la main-d'oeuvre et transition demographique. Les bassins
industriels en aval de Liege \le-2de siecles (Paris, 1988), 307ff., esp. pp. 310f.; see
Gutmann and Leboutte, 'Rethinking', 600f. Admittedly, Leboutte (Reconversions,
292ff., 336) sees a move away from the traditional European marriage pattern only in the
mid-nineteenth century. In eighteenth-century Valenciennes, the marriage age of men
and women among the rural fine linen weavers was considerably lower than among their
urban guilded fellows, but it was even lower among the mineworkers: Philippe Guignet,
Mines, manufactures et ouvriers du Valenciennois au 18e siecle (New York, 1977), 602f.,
623f., 689f. In a northern Swedish iron region, smiths and their brides married earlier
than the agrarian population: see J. Sundin, 'Family building in paternalistic proto-
industries: a cohort study from 19th-century Swedish iron foundries', Journal of Family
History 14 (1989) 265-89, esp. pp. 268f., 275f.
33 As in Mendels, 'Niveau', 946f.; see Mendels, 'Industries rurales', 995.
34 In general, see Mattmuller, Bevolkerungsgeschichte; R. Braun, Das ausgehende Ancien
Regime in der Schweiz. Aufriss einer Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschtchte des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Gottingen etc., 1984). The Basel countryside with its significant silk-
ribbon-weaving has been especially investigated: see P. Fink, Geschichte der Basler
Bandindustrie 1550-1800 (Basel etc., 1983); P. Stolz, Basler Wirtschaft in vor- und
friihindustrieller Zeit (Zurich, 1977). On demography, see Gschwind,
Bevolkerungsentwicklung; studies of the agrarian history of the Basel countryside are
listed below in n. 88. On the canton of Zurich, in addition to the classic studies of
R. Braun, see U. Pfister, Die Zurcher fabriques. Protoindustrielles Wachstum vom 16.
zum 18. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1993). On other regions gripped more or less strongly
by proto-industrialization, see: F. Kurmann, Das Luzerner Suhrental tin 18. Jahr-
hundert. Bevolkerung, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft der Landvogteien Biiron/Triengen
und Knutwil (Luzern, 1985) (linen and cotton; pp. 91 and 99 present comparative
data on marriage age and age-specific marital fertility from other regions); H. Wicki,
Bevolkerung und Wirtschaft des Kantons Luzern im 18. Jahrhundert (Luzern, 1979)

242
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

(linen, cotton, silk); S. Bucher, Bevolkerung und Wirtschaft des Amtes Entlebuch im 18.
Jahrhundert Luzern, 1974) (linen, cotton); E. Menolfi, Sanktgallische Untertanen im
Thurgau. Einesozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung iiber die Herrschaft Biirglen (TG) im 17.
und 18. Jahrhundert (St Gallen, 1980) (linen, cotton); B. Bietenhard, Langnau im 18.
Jahrhundert. Die Biographie einer Idndlichen Kirchgemeinde im bemischen Ancien
Regime (Thun, 1988) (linen); A.-M. Dubler and J. J. Siegrist, Wohlen. Geschichte von
Recht, Wirtschaft und Bevolkerung einer fruhindustrialisierten Gemeinde im Aargau
(Aarau, 1975) (straw hats); L. Hubler, La population de Vallorbe du 16e au debut du 19e
siecle. Demographie d'une paroisse industrielle jurassienne (Lausanne, 1984) (metal
industry); see on this P. L. Pelet, Per, charbon, acier dans le Pays de Vaud, 3 vols.
(Lausanne 1973-83). A comparison is provided by studies of regions which had no
cottage industry to speak of, but instead engaged in animal-raising and dairying:
U. Schelbert, Bevolkerungsgeschichte der Schwyzer Pfarreien Freienbach und Wollerau
im 18. Jahrhundert, (Zurich, 1987) (pp. 110, 162, and 179 have comparative data on
marriage age, age-specific marital fertility, and infant mortality from other regions);
A. Zurfluh, Une population alpine dans la Confederation. Uri aux 17e, 18e, 19e siecles
(Paris, 1988); J. Bielmann, Die Lebensverhdltnisse im Urnerland wdhrend des 18. und zu
Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Basel etc., 1972). For a direct comparison with Appenzell-
Ausserrhoden, see M. Schurmann, Bevolkerung, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in
Appenzell Innerrhoden im 18. und friihen 19. Jahrhundert (Appenzell, 1974).
35 R. Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben. Verdnderungen der Lebensformen unter
Einwirkung der verlagsindustriellen Heimarbeit in einem Idndlichen Industriegebiet
(Zilrcher Oberland) vor 1800 (1960; repr. Gottingen, 1979). English edition:
Industrialisation and everyday life (Cambridge etc., 1990).
36 A. Tanner, Spulen — Weben — Sticken. Die Industrialisierung in Appenzell Ausserrhoden
(Zurich, 1982), 7ff., 69ff.; H. Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse in einem friihen schweizerischen
Industriegebiet. Sozialgeschichtliche Studie iiber die Gemeinden Trogen, Rehetobel, Wald,
Gais, Speicher und Wolfhalden des Kantons Appenzell Ausserrhoden im 18. undfriihen 19.
Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Basel etc., 1979), 95ff., 127ff.: W. Bodmer, Schweizerische
Industriegeschichte (Zurich, I960), 86ff., 140ff., 183f, 203, 229f.
37 See F. Gottmann, Getreidemarkt am Bodensee. Raum, Wirtschaft, Politik, Gesellschaft,
1650-1810 (St Katharinen, 1991).
38 Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse, vol. 1, 129ff.
39 Tanner, Spulen, 25, 112f; see Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse, vol. 1, 261ff., vol. 2, 577.
40 Tanner, Spulen, 107f.; Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse, vol. 1, 206ff., 295ff.; Mattmuller,
Bevolkerungsgeschichte, Part 1, vol. 1, 117.
41 Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse, vol. 1, 325.
42 Ibid., vol. 2, 336ff.
43 Ibid., 370ff., 440ff., 471ff.; Tanner, Spulen, 138f.
44 Ruesch, Lebensverhdltnisse, vol. 1, 234ff.; see Tanner, Spulen, 141ff.
45 Mattmuller, Bevolkerungsgeschichte, vol. 1, esp. pp. 401ff.; cf. however his thesis o f ' a
first demographic transition', with falling nuptiality and fertility, ibid., 39Iff.
46 A. Tanner, Spulen, 239ff., 254ff.
47 Braun, ancien Regime, 50f.; M. Mitterauer, 'Formen landlicher Familienwirtschaft.
Historische Okotypen und familiale Arbeitsorganisation im osterreichischen Raum', in
J. Ehmer and M. Mitterauer eds., Familienstruktur und Arbeitsorganisation in Idndlichen
Gesellschaften (Vienna etc., 1986), 185-323, here pp. 259f.; B.Collins, 'Proto-
industrialization and pre-Famine emigration', Social History 7 (1982), 127-46, here pp.
130ff., 136ff. See KMS, 106f.
48 Tanner, Spulen, 257ff., see also p. 222; Tanner, 'Arbeit, Haushalt und Famine in

243
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

Appenzell-Ausserrhoden. Veranderungen in einem landlichen Industriegebiet im 18.

und 19. Jahrhundert', in Ehmer and Mitterauer, Familienstruktur, 449-94, here pp.
469ff., 479ff. Similarly, see Collins, 'Proto-industrialization', 132f., for Irish linen-
weavers.
49 Mitterauer, 'Formen', 230ff., 258ff.; A. J. Fitz, Die Fruhindustrialisierung Vorarlbergs
und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Familienstruktur (Dornbirn, 1985), 109-83, esp. 126ff.;
U. Pflster, 'Work roles and family structure in proto-industrial Zurich', Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 20 (1989), 83-105; U. Pfister, 'Haushalt und Familie auf der
Ziircher Landschaft des Ancien Regime', in Schweiz im Wandel. Festschrift fur Rudolf
Braun (Basel etc., 1990), 19-42; W. Mager, 'Haushalt und Familie in protoindustrieller
Gesellschaft. Spenge (Ravensberg) wahrend der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts', in
N. Bulst et al. eds., Familie zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Gottingen, 1981), 141-81;
Leboutte, Reconversions, 159ff.; J. R. Lehning, The peasants of Marlhes. Economic
development and family organization in nineteenth-century France (Chapel Hill, NC,
1980), esp. pp. lOOff., 130ff.; R. Wall, 'Work, welfare and the family', in L. Bonfield et
al. eds., The world we have gained. Festschrift for Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1986), 261-94;
V. Morgan and W. Macafee, 'Household and family size and structure in County
Antrim in the mid-19th century', Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 455-76; R. L.
Rudolph,' Family structure and proto-industrialization in Russia', Journal of Economic
History 40 (1980), 111-18. An interesting attempt at systematization is provided by
U. Pfister, 'The proto-industrial household economy: toward a formal analysis',
Journal of Family History 17 (1992), 201-32. The original model had already reckoned
on a certain amount of variability in proto-industrial household forms: see KMS, 54fT.,
58ff.
50 See also Collins, 'Proto-industrialization', 132f.; U. Pfister, 'Die protoindustrielle
Hauswirtschaft im Kanton Zurich des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts', in D. Petzina ed., Zur
Geschichte der Okonomik der Privathaushalte (Berlin, 1991), 71-108, esp. pp. 93f.
51 Mendels, 'Proto-industrialization', 249ff.; KMS, 86fT., 88f., but see also 85f.
52 Pfister, 'Proto-industrialization'; M. Mattmuller, 'Die Hungersnot der Jahre 1770/71
in der Basler Landschaft', Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften. Festschrift fur Ulrich Im Hof
(Bern, 1982), 271-91, here pp. 279ff.; Fitz, Fruhindustrialisierung, 93ff., 98f.;
Vandenbroeke, 'Cas flamand', 929f.; Vandenbroeke, 'Mutations economiques et
sociales en Flandre au cours de la phase proto-industrielle 1650-1850', Revue du Nord
63, 248 (1981), 73-84, here pp. 80f. See Vandenbroeke, 'Caracteristiques'; Mendels
'Niveau', 945ff.; and already Levine, Family formation, 103ff. (also not available when
KMS was written).
53 On the distinction between the long and the short term, see Gutmann, Modern economy,
144ff. The stagnant population and high marriage age in Appenzell-Ausserrhoden and
the Liege countryside during the eighteenth century can be viewed as responses to the
extraordinary concentration of population and industry already attained; see Leboutte,
Reconversions, 179ff., esp. pp. 185f., 191f., 194f.
54 J. R. Lehning, 'Nuptiality and rural industry. Families and labor in the French
countryside', Journal of Family History 8 (1983), 333-45; J. R. Lehning, Marlhes, 64ff.,
130ff.; G. L. Gullickson, Spinners and weavers of Auffay. Rural industry and the sexual
division of labor in a French village 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1986), 68ff., 96ff., 108ff.,
129ff., 198ff.; Fitz, Fruhindustrialisierung, 73ff., 94f.
55 Schlumbohm, 'Peasant society'; D. Ebeling and P.Klein, 'Das soziale und
demographische System der Ravensberger Protoindustrialisierung', in E. Hinrichs and
H. van Zon eds., Bevolkerungsgeschichte im Vergleich. Studien zu den Niederlanden und
Nordwestdeutschland(Aurich, 1988), 27-48; J. Mooser, 'Familie und soziale Plazierung

244
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

in der landlichen Gesellschaft am Beispiel des Kirchspiels Quernheim im 19.

Jahrhundert', in J. Kocka et al., Familie und soziale Plazierung (Opladen, 1980),
127-212. However, the marriage age of cottage-industrial male and female cigar-
workers, who were no longer linked into the Heuerling system, fits the original proto-
industrial model (see pp. 192f. in the Mooser article; see also Schlumbohm, 'Age at
marriage'.
56 KMS, 85ff., on the 'cottager marital age pattern'.
57 J. Hajnal, 'European marriage patterns in perspective', in D. V. Glass and D. E. C.
Eversley eds., Population in history (London, 1965), 101-43; Wrigley, 'Marriage', 182.
Wrigley and Schofield (Population history, 457ff.) differentiate the model; J. Ehmer
criticizes the whole concept of the 'agrarian population mode' (Heiratsverhalten,
Sozialstruktur, okonomischer Wandel. England und Mitteleuropa in der
Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus (Gottingen, 1991), 36rT., 40ff., 43ff., 62ff.).
58 Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, 450ff., 458ff., 478f., see also xxiv & f.;
Knodel, Demographic behavior, 44ff., 51ff., 250f., 275ff., 395ff., 447, 452, 456. See by
contrast Flinn's emphasis (System, 30) on the homogeneity of early modern European
demography.
59 The terms come from H. Muhsam, cited in A. E. Imhof, 'Unterschiedliche
Sauglingssterblichkeit in Deutschland, 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert-warum?', Zeitschrift
fur Bevolkerungswissenschaft 7 (1981), 343-82, which is stimulating, but unsatisfactory
as far as explaining the contrasts is concerned; see A. E. Imhof, Die verlorenen Welten.
Alltagsbewdltigung durch unsere Vorfahren und weshalb wir uns heute so schwer damit tun
(Munich, 1984), lOlff.
60 In comparison to Appenzell-Ausserrhoden, Shepshed turns out to be an example of a
rather moderate-pressure system, although Levine (Family formation, 80) saw a ' high
pressure reproductive strategy' at work there. This is the case for all English
communities so far investigated: see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, 'English
population history from family reconstitution. Summary results 1600-1799', Population
Studies 37 (1983) 157-84; C.Wilson, 'Natural fertility in pre-industrial England
1600-1799', Population Studies 38 (1984), 225-40.
61 G. Eley, 'The social history of industrialization. "Proto-industry" and the origins of
capitalism', Economy and Society 13 (1984) 519-39, here 529ff., 533f.; see also F. Perlin,
'Scrutinizing which moment?', Economy and Society 14 (1985) 374-98, esp. pp. 379ff.,
382ff., and G. Eley, 'Rejoinder', Economy and Society 15 (1986), 281-4.
62 J. H. Quataert, 'A new view of industrialization: "Protoindustry" or the role of small-
scale, labor-intensive manufacture in the capitalist environment', International Labor
and Working Class History 33 (1988), 3-22, here p. 11.
63 See on this H. Heaton, The Yorkshire woollen and worsted industries from earliest times
to the industrial revolution (2nd edn, Oxford, 1965); and P. Hudson, 'From manor to
mill: the West Riding in transition', in M. Berg, P. Hudson, and M. Sonenscher eds.,
Manufacture in town and country before the factory (Cambridge, 1983), 124—46;
P. Hudson, The genesis of industrial capital. A study of the West Riding wool textile
industry c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. pp. 25ff., 61ff.; and esp. Hudson ed.,
Regions and industries. A perspective on the industrial revolution in Britain (Cambridge,
1989), 69-102, here esp. pp. 72ff.
64 This concept was first used by J. K. Walton for nineteenth-century Lancashire, in
'Proto-industrialization and the First Industrial Revolution: the case of Lancashire', in
Hudson ed., Regions and industries, 41-68, here p. 68.
65 The relevant passages (KMS, 39ff., 66ff.) appear to us, however, to be much more
differentiated than in Mager.

CON 8
10 245
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

66 See Mendels, Industrialization, 5ff., 220ff.; 'Proto-industrialization', 249ff., here p. 253.

Admittedly, Mendels' pauperization thesis is not undisputed even for his own region,
e.g. by Vandenbroeke, 'Cas flamand', 915; see Mendels' reply in 'Niveau des salaires',
939-56.
67 Tilly, 'Demographic origins', 24, 26, 37f.
68 Levine, 'Production', here pp. 95ff.
69 Houston and Snell, 'Proto-industrialization?', 279. See also Quataert's criticism of the
proletarianization thesis, 'A new view', lOff.
70 J. Peters, 'Ostelbische Landarmut. Sozialokonomisches tiber landlose und landarme
Agrarproduzenten im Spatfeudalismus', Jahrbuch fur Wirtschaftsgeschichte 3 (1967),
255—302; ' Ostelbische Landarmut — Statistisches fiber landloses und landarme
Agrarproduzenten im Spatfeudalismus', Jahrbuch fur Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1970),
97-126, here esp. pp. 112ff.; the same data are interpreted in the light of
'proletarianization' in Tilly, 'Demographic origins', 30ff.
71 H. Schultz, 'Zur Vorgeschichte des Proletariats in der Epoche des Ubergangs zum
Kapitalismus', Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 20 (1978), 34-45, here
p. 40.
72 H. Schultz, 'Die Ausweitung des Landhandwerks vor der Industriellen Revolution.
Begunstigende Faktoren und Bedeutung fur die " Protoindustrialisierung', Jahrbuch fur
Wirtschaftsgeschichte 3 (1983), 79-90, esp. pp. 88ff.; '"Protoindustrialisierung"
und Ubergangsepoche vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus', Zeitschrift fur
Geschichtswissenschaft 31 (1983), 1079-91, here esp. pp. 1088f.; Landhandwerk im
Ubergang vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus. Vergleichender Uberblick und Fallstudie
Mecklenburg-Schwerin (Berlin, 1985).
73 Mitterauer, 'Formen', here esp. pp. 230ff.
74 See on this, in addition to Mitterauer, A. Komlosy, An den Randgedrdngt. Wirtschafts-
und Sozialgeschichte des Oberen Waldviertels (Vienna, 1988), 37ff., and L. Berkner,
' Family, social structure and rural industry. A comparative study of the Waldviertel
and the Pays de Caux in the eighteenth century' (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard, 1973),
esp. pp. 121ff., 282ff., 288f.
75 A. Hoffmann, 'Die Agrarisierung der Industriebauern in Osterreich', Zeitschrift fur
Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 20 (1972), 66-81.
76 J. Schlumbohm, 'Agrarische Besitzklassen und gewerbliche Produktionsverhaltnisse:
Grossbauern, Kleinbesitzer und Landlose als Leinenproduzenten im Umland von
Osnabriick und Bielefeld wahrend des friihen 19. Jahrhunderts', Mentalitdten und
Lebensverhdltnisse. Beispiele aus der Sozialgeschichte der Neuzeit (Gottingen, 1982),
315-34; Collins, 'Proto-industrialization', 130ff.; M.Isaacson and L. Magnusson,
Proto-industrialization in Scandinavia. Craft skills in the industrial revolution
(Leamington Spa, 1987), 22, 25.
77 See D. Hey, The rural metalworkers of the Sheffield region. A study of rural industry
before the industrial revolution (Leicester, 1972), 18ff., 31ff. Frequently guild craft
structures dominated, as for instance in the iron industry of the Berg countryside. See
on this G. Wagner, Bauer und Schmied. Die Hagener Sensenarbeiter und die
Eisenindustrien des Suderlandes 1760-1820 (Bielefeld, 1993); and G. Wagner,
'Protoindustrialisierung in Berg und Mark? Ein interregionaler Vergleich am Beispiel
des neuzeitlichen Eisengewerbes', Zeitschrift des Bergischen Geschichtsvereines 92
(1986), 163-71.
78 Isaacson and Magnusson, Proto-industrialization in Scandinavia, 5Iff.
79 See Mitterauer, 'Formen', 188, n. 5; O. Lofgren, 'Peasant ecotypes: problems in the
comparative study of ecological adaptation', Ethnologia Scandinavia (1976), lOOff.

246
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

80 Braun makes this distinction in Industrialisierung und Volksleben, 59ff.

81 C. Dipper, 'Landliche Klassengesellschaft 1770-1848. Bemerkungen zu dem
gleichnamigen Buch von Josef Mooser (i.e. Landliche Klassengesellschaft 1770-1848.
Bauern und Unterschichten, Landwirtschaft und Gewerbe im ostlichen Westfalen
(Gottingen, 1984))', Geschichte und Gesellschaft 12 (1986), 244-53, here 249.
82 On the 'frontier' concept (derived from F. J. Turner), see H. Kisch, From domestic
manufacture to industrial revolution. The case of the Rhineland textile districts (New
York, 1989), 24ff.
83 'Industries in the countryside', in H. J. Fischer ed., Essays in the economic and social
history of Tudor and Stuart England in honour of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge, 1961),
70-88.
84 'Agricultural origins of industry', Past and Present 40 (1968), 58-71.
85 Domestic manufacture, 24ff.
86 'Aux origines de la proto-industrialisation', Bulletin du Centre d'Histoire Economique
et Sociale de la Region Lyonnaise 2 (1978), 1-27.
87 See the conceptual and general passage in Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben, 53;
and Braun, Ancien Regime, 34f., lOOff.
88 M. Mattmiiller,' Bauern und Tauner im schweizerischen Kornland um 1700', Schweizer
Volkskunde 70 (1980), 49ff.;' Die Landwirtschaft der schweizerischen Heimarbeiter im
18. Jahrhundert', Zeitschrift fur Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 31 (1983), 41-56,
and ' Kleinlandwirtschaft und Heimindustrie in protoindustriellen Gebieten der
Schweiz', Studia Polono-Helvetica (Basel, 1989), 79-94. See also Gschwind,
Bevolkerungsentwicklung; S. Huggel, Die Einschlagsbewegung in der Basler Landschaft.
Griinde und Folgen der wichtigsten agrarischen Neuerung im Ancien Regime, 2 vols.
(Liestal, 1979); Fink, Basler Bandindustrie; V. Abt-Frossl, Agrarrevolution und
Heimindustrie. Ein Vergleich zwischen Heimarbeiter- und Bauerndorfern des Baselbiets
im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Liestal, 1988).
89 See A. Tanner, Spulen (a Braun pupil); and Ruesch, Lebensverhaltnisse (a Mattmuller
pupil).
90 Mattmuller takes a rather optimistic view of improvements in cottage-industrial living
conditions caused by agricultural intensification, whereas Abt-Frossl {Agrarrevolution,
esp. p. 272) is more pessimistic.
91 P. Servais, 'Les structures agraires du Limbourg et des pays d'Outre-Meuse du XVIIe
au XIXe siecle', Annales ESC 37 (1982), 304-16; 'Industries rurales et structures
agraires: le cas de l'Entre-Vesdre-et-Meuse aux XVIIIe et XIXe siecles', Revue Beige
d'Histoire Contemporaine (1982) 179—206; La rente constituted dans le ban de Herve au
XVIIIe siecle (Brussels, 1982), 233ff.; see also the review by G. Heitz, 'Eine meisterhafte
Untersuchung tiber Rentenverschreibungen im spatfeudalen Belgien (Rez. v. Servais,
La rente constitutee)', Jahrbuchfiir Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1988), 175-8.
92 E. Schremmer, 'Proto-industrialisation: a step towards industrialisation?', Journal of
European Economic History 10 (1981), 653-70, here p. 670.
93 See R. Flik, Die Textilindustrie in Calw und in Heidenheim 1705-1870. Eine regional
vergleichende Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Friihindustrialisierung und
Industriepolitik in Wurttemberg (Stuttgart, 1990), which, however, takes an excessively
short-term view of the relationship between agriculture and proto-industry.
94 J. Quataert, 'Combining agrarian and industrial livelihoods: rural households in the
Saxon Oberlausitz in the nineteenth century', Journal of Family History 19 (1985),
145-62; Quataert, ' A new view', 8ff.; J. Quataert and D. Holmes, 'An approach to
modern labor: Worker peasantries in historic Saxony and the Friuli region over three
centuries', Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1986), 191-216; Quataert and

10 2
247 -
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

Holmes, 'A new look at working-class formation. Reflections on the historical

perspective', International Labor and Working Class History 27 (1985), 72-6, which is
a criticism of Braun, Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in einem landlichen Industriegebiet
(Zurcher Oberland) unter Einwirkung des Maschinen- und Fabrikwesens im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert (Erlenbach-Zurich, 1965).
95 W. Mager, 'Protoindustrialisierung und agrarisch-heimgewerbliche Vernechtung in
Ravensberg wahrend der Friihen Neuzeit. Studien zu einer Gesellschaftsformation im
Ubergang', Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8 (1992), 435-74.
96 On the Ravensberg linen industry, see Mager, 'Verflechtung'; J. Mooser, Ldndliche
Klassengesellschaft 1770-1848. Bauern und Unterschichten, Landwirtschaft undGewerbe
im ostlichen Westfalen (Gottingen, 1984). On cotton, see Gullickson, Auffay;
'Agriculture and cottage industry: redefining the causes of proto-industrialization',
Journal of Economic History 43 (1983), 832-50; see also the earlier study by Berkner,
'Rural industry', 232ff. On raw-silk processing, see A. Dewerpe, L'industrie aux
champs. Essaisur la proto-industrialisation en Italie du nord (1800-1880) (Rome, 1985),
esp. pp. 221ff.
97 G. Gullickson, 'The sexual division of labour in cottage industry and agriculture in the
Pays de Caux. Auffay, 1750-1850', French Historical Studies 12 (1981), 177-99, and
Auffay, esp. pp. 68ff.; A. C. Bull, 'Proto-industrialization, small-scale capital ac-
cumulation and diffused entrepreneurship. The case of the Brianza in Lombardy
(1860-1950)', Social History 14 (1989) 177-200, esp. pp. 182ff.
98 See Berkner, 'Rural industry', 267ff., 387ff.; Mooser, Ldndliche Klassengesellschaft,
61ff.; Mager, 'Verflechtung'; Collins, 'Proto-industrialization', here pp. 131ff., 136ff.
99 See Collins, 'Proto-industrialization', and M.Cohen, 'Peasant differentiation and
proto-industrialization in the Ulster countryside: Tullylish 1690-1825', Journal of
Peasant Studies 17 (1990), 414-32. Cohen's own findings (e.g. p. 427) contradict her
desire to demonstrate proletarianization.
100 F. Engels, 'Vorwort' [to the second, revised edition 'Zur Wohnungsfrage'], in K. Marx
and F. Engels, Werke, vol. 21 (Berlin, 1972), 325-34, here p. 329; W. Sombart,
'Verlagssystem (Hausindustrie)', in Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, vol. 8
(3rd edn, Jena, 1911), 233-61, here pp. 236f., and W. Sombart and R. Meerwarth,
'Verlagssystem (Hausindustrie)', in Handworterbuch, vol. 4 (4th edn, Jena, 1923),
179-207, here p. 182. These distinguish only between older and modern cottage
industries. For bibliographies of contemporary literature on domestic industries, see:
Bibliographie generate des industries a domicile. Supplement a la publication: Les
industries a domicile en Belgique (Brussels, 1908); R. Meerwarth, 'Neuere Literatur und
Gesetzgebung auf dem Gebiet der Hausindustrie und Heimarbeit', Archiv fur
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 28 (1909), 278-332; and Sombart and Meerwarth,
'Hausindustrie', 205-7.
101 E. J. Hobsbawm, 'History and the "dark Satanic mills'", in Labouring men. Studies in
the history of labour (London, 1964), 105-19, here p. 116; see also D. Bythell, The
handloom weavers. A study in the English cotton industry during the industrial revolution
(Cambridge, 1969), and R. Kossler, Arbeitskultur im Industrialisierungsprozess. Studien
an englischen und sowjetrussischen Paradigmata (Minister, 1990), 124-34. The product
involved was also important, as is shown by M. Berg, The age of manufactures,
1700-1820 (London, 1985), 257f.
102 M. Levy-Leboyer, Les banques europe'ennes et I 'industrialisation internationale dans la
premiere moitie du XIXe siecle (Paris, 1964), 65f, 169-75, 409-11, and now see
especially B. Veyrassat, Ne'gociants et fabricants dans I 'Industrie cotonniere suisse
1760-1840. Aux origines financieres de I'industrialisation (Lausanne, 1982), 36-54. This

248
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

type of 'catching-up' industrialization could further entrench itself where, as in Italy,

the link between agriculture and rural cottage industry increasingly became the socio-
economic model favoured by the country's governing class, if only because of their
grave doubts about industrialization; see V. Hunecke, Arbeiterschaft und industrielle
Revolution in Mailand 1859-1892. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der italienischen Industrie
und Arbeiterbewegung (Gottingen, 1978), 27-63.
103 K. Ditt, Industrialisierung, Arbeiterschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Bielefeld 1850—1914
(Dortmund, 1982), 60-70, 161-7; R. Wilbrandt, Die Weber in der Gegenwart.
Sozialpolitische Wanderungen durch die Hausweberei und die Webefabrik (Jena, 1906),
42-66; O. Schumann, Die Landeshuter Leinenindustrie in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.
Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der schlesischen Textilindustrie (Jena, 1928), 61-74, 86-95,
117-23; E.Michael, Die Hausweberei im Hirschberger Tal (Jena, 1925), 51-62;
B. Gondorf, 'Zur wirtschaftlichen Lage der schlesischen Hausweber zu Beginn des 20.
Jahrhunderts', Vierteljahrschriftfur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 72 (1985), 175-92.
104 There are clear parallels between the Swiss clock industry and the Swiss cotton industry,
but the strategy of 'flexible specialization' was more marked in the clock industry. For
a recent view of the Swiss industrialization model, see U. Menzel, Auswege aus der
Abhdngigkeit. Die entwicklungspolitische Aktualitdt Europas (Frankfurt, 1988), 31-158.
Another example of a domestic industry surviving to the present day (owing to a high
degree of specialization) is the ribbon-weaving of Mark-Berg; see S. Schachtner,
Markische Hausbandweber. Arbeit und berufsbezogene Einstellungen 'selbstdndiger
Lohnarbeiter'(Munster, 1986). On'flexible specialization', see M. J. PioreandC. Sabel,
The second industrial divide. Possibilities of prosperity (New York, 1984), and C. Sabel
and J. Zeitlin, 'Historical alternatives to mass production: politics, markets and
technology in nineteenth-century industrialization", Past and Present 108 (1985),
133-76, here pp. 142-56 - although these two studies are questionable in a number of
ways: in addition to being wholly unspecific concerning forms of production, their
counter-model to factory 'mass production' is simultaneously 'post-Fordist' and
social-romantic (e.g. Sabel and Zeitlin refer to ' a technologically dynamic form of the
ancient smallholder democracies', p. 174). They totally ignore the fact that in industrial
areas such as these, it was only after considerable social conflict that social equilibrium
and prosperity were attained; and that for such harmony to endure required constant
readiness for further conflict on the part of the workers.
105 A. Pfleghart, Die schweizerische Uhrenindustrie, ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und
Organisation (Leipzig, 1908), 87-108, 127-49; M. Fallet-Scheurer, Le travail a domicile
dans I'horlogerie suisse et ses industries annexes (Berne, 1912), 286-343; D. S. Landes,
Revolution in time. Clocks and the making of the modern world (Cambridge, Mass.,
1983), 302-7.
106 Landes, Revolution, 308-26; J.-M. Barrelet, 'Les resistances a l'innovation dans
l'industrie horlogere des montagnes neuchateloises a la fin du XIXe siecle',
Schweizerische Zeitschriftfur Geschichte 37 (1987), 394-411, here pp. 407-9; F. Jequier,
'Le patronat horloger suisse face aux nouvelles technologies (XlXe-XXe siecles)', in
M. Levy-Leboyer ed., Le patronat de la seconde industrialisation (Paris, 1979), 209-34,
here pp. 211-18; F. Jequier, De la forge a la manufacture horlogere (XVIIIe-XXe
siecles). Cinq generations d'entrepreneurs de la vallee de Joux au coeur d'une mutation
industrielle (Lausanne, 1983), 324-43; T. Scheidegger, De la dure'e d'existence de
I 'entreprise, en particular de I 'entreprise horlogere dans le Jura (Diss. jur., Bern, 1947),
86f.; 90f. On the production of large clocks in the Black Forest where the factory
established itself more quickly, see H. Kahlert, 300 Jahre Schwarzwalder Uhrenindustrie
(Gernsbach, 1986), 144-223.

249
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

107 Engels, 'Vorwort', 329.

108 G. Schnapper-Arndt, FilnfDorfgemeinden aufdem Hohen Taunus. Eine socialstatistische
Untersuchung iiber Kleinbanernthum, Hausindustrie und Volksleben (Leipzig, 1883),
79-94; W. Fuchs, 'Uber Hausindustrie und verwandte Unternehmungsformen aufdem
Taunus', in Hausindustrie und Heimarbeit in Deutschland und Osterreich, vol. 1
(Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, 84) (Leipzig, 1899), 105-42, here pp. 116-19.
109 U. Troitzsch, 'Staatliche Bemuhungen um die Einfuhrung der Strohflechterei in
Kurhessen in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts - ein Beispiel fur verfehlte
Nebenerwerbsforderung', in H. Kellenbenz ed., Agrarisches Nebengewerbe undFormen
der Reagrarisierung im Spdtmittelalter und 19./20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1975),
155-75.
110 See W.H.Schroder, Arbeitergeschichte und Arbeiterbewegung. Industriearbeit und
Organisationsverhalten im 19. undfruhen 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt etc., 1978), 120-41;
Mooser, Landliche Klassengesellschaft, 158f.; E. Sax, Die Hausindustrie in Thiiringen.
Wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studien, Parts 1-3 (2nd edn, Jena, 1885,1884,1887), here Part
1, 5-70; P. Ehrenberg, 'Die Spielwarenindustrie des Kreises Sonneberg', in
Hausindustrie und Heimarbeit in Deutschland und Osterreich, vol. 3 (Schriften des
Vereins fur Socialpolitik, 86) (Leipzig, 1899), 215-78; K. Biicher, 'Hausindustrie auf
dem Weihnachtsmarkt', in K. Biicher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft. Vortrage
und Aufsdtze, vol. 2 (8th edn, Tubingen, 1925), 161-94; H. Bilz, Die gesellschaftliche
Stellung und sociale Lage der hausindustriellen Seiffener Spielzeugmacher im 19. und
Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (3rd edn, Seiffen, 1988); Sax, Hausindustrie, Part 3, 3-69;
K. Guth, 'Korbmacher und Korbmacherei in Oberfranken um 1900. Versuch einer
Analyse handwerklicher Heimarbeit in Bayern', Archivfur Geschichte von Oberfranken
61 (1981), 227-42; B. Schier, Die Kunstblume von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart.
Geschichte und Eigenart eines volkstumlichen Kunstgewerbes (Berlin, 1957), 60-77,
105-20; H. Jahn-Langen, Das bohmische Niederland. Bevolkerungs- und Sozialstruktur
einer Industriedorflandschaft (Bad Godesberg, 1961), 50-6.
111 K. Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. 23), (Berlin, 1965), 489.
112 Sombart, 'Verlagssystem', 236f.
113 G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London. A study in the relationship between classes in
Victorian society (Oxford, 1971), 22-3,106-11; D. Bythell, The sweated trades. Outwork
in nineteenth-century Britain (London, 1978); J. A. Schmiechen, Sweated industries
and sweated labor. The London clothing trades, 1860-1914 (London etc., 1984); R. Beier,
Frauenarbeit und Frauenalltag im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Heimarbeiterinnen in der
Berliner Bekleidungsindustrie 1880-1914 (Frankfurt etc., 1983); F. Lenger, 'Handwerk,
Handel, Industrie. Zur Lebensfahigkeit des Dusseldorger Schneiderhandwerks in der
zweiten Halfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts', in U. Wengenroth ed., Prekare
Selbstandigkeit. Zur Standortbestimmung von Handwerk, Hausindustrie und
Kleingewerbe im Industrialisierungsprozess (Stuttgart, 1989), 71-91; from a feminist
perspective, see M. H. Blewett, Men, women, and work. Class, gender, and protest in the
New England shoe industry (Urbana, IL, etc., 1988).
114 Beier, Frauenarbeit, 36; A. Weber, 'Die Entwicklungsgrundlagen der grossstadtischen
Frauenhausindustrie', in Hausindustrie und Heimarbeit in Deutschland und Osterreich,
vol. 2 (Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, 85) (Leipzig, 1899), xiii-lx. The absolute
figures given above are not very reliable; see Sombart and Meerwarth, 'Hausindustrie',
185-9. For England, see Schmiechen, Sweated industries, 37f.; for France, F. Caron,
'Dynamismes et freinages de la croissance industrielle', in F. Braudel and E. Labrousse
eds., Histoire economique et sociale de la France, Part 4:1 (Paris, 1979), 261f.
115 Beier, Frauenarbeit, 26-40 and passim; K. Hausen 'Technischer Fortschritt und

250
 PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION REVISITED

Frauenarbeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Nahmaschine', Geschichte

und Gesellschaft 4 (1978), 148-69, here pp. 159-69; R. Dasey, 'Women's work and the
family: women garment workers in Berlin and Hamburg before the First World War',
in R. J. Evans and W. R. Lee eds., The German family. Essays on the social history of
the family in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany (London, 1981), 221-55, here
pp. 232-49; J. Krengel, 'Die Arbeiterschaft der Berliner Bekleidungsindustrie. Versuch
einer sozialstatistischen Analyse (1870-1914)', in H. Pohl ed., Forschungen zur Lage der
Arbeiter im Industrialisierungsprozess (Stuttgart, 1978), 118—31 (although he over-
estimates the decline of cottage industry); K. Ditt, 'Die Wasche- und
Bekleidungsindustrie Minden-Ravensbergs im 19. Jahrhundert', in A. Lasotta and
P. Lutum-Lenger eds., Textilarbeiter und Textilindustrie. Beitrage zu ihrer Geschichte in
Westfalen wdhrend der Industrialisierung (Hagen, 1989), 103-21.
116 F. Voigt, 'Heimindustrie', in Handworterbuch der Socialwissenschaften, vol. 5
(Gottingen, 1956), 103-11, here p. 109.
117 See on this KMS, 292-309.
118 W. Stieda, Litteratur, heutige Zustdnde und Entstehung der deutschen Hausindustrie (Die
deutsche Hausindustrie, vol. 1 = Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, 39) (Leipzig,
1889), 108-10; another example is the tobacco industry, see Schroder,
Arbeitergeschichte, 123-9.
119 O. Hintze, 'Die Schweizer Stickereiindustrie und ihre Organisation', Schmollers
Jahrbuch N F 18 (1894), 1251-99, here pp. 1254-66; A. Swaine, Die Arbeits- und
Wirtschaftsverhaltnisse der Einzelsticker in der Nordostschweiz und Vorarlberg
(Strasbourg, 1895), 14-36, 152-60; Tanner, Spulen, 54-68; 344-74; L. Specker, 'Vom
Leben und Arbeiten der Ostschweizer Sticker', Stickerei-Zeit. Kultur und Kunst in St.
Gallen 1870-1930 (St Gallen, 1989), 35-49; M. Mader, Drei Generationen Saurer
(Meilen, 1988), 23-38. On a similar development in the Vogtland embroidery industry,
see L. Bein, Die Industrie des sdchsischen Voigtlandes. Wirthschaftsgeschichtliche Studie,
Part 2 (Leipzig, 1884), 392-8; R. Illgen, Geschichte und Entwicklung der Stickerei-
industrie des Vogtlandes und der Ostschweiz. Eine vergleichende Darstellung (Annaberg,
1913), 11-13, 21-40, 71-84, 109-17; and W. Hopf, Die Strukturwandlungen in der
vogtldndischen Spitzen- und Stickereiindustrie seit der Jahrhundertwende (Diss. rer. pol.
Leipzig, 1938), 33-56.
120 R. Boch, Handwerker-Sozialisten gegen Fabrikgesellschaft. Lokale Fachvereine,
Massengewerkschaft und industrielle Rationalisierung in Solingen 1870-1914 (Gottingen,
1985), 35-43, 74-8, 94-106; J. Putsch, Vom Ende qualifizierter Heimarbeit. Entwicklung
und Strukturwandel der Solinger Schneidwarenindustrie von 1914-1960 (Cologne, 1988),
47-54. See also S. Pollard, A history of labour in Sheffield (Liverpool, 1959), 202-8,
289-97.
121 D. S. Landes, The unbound Prometheus. Technological change and industrial development
in western Europe from 1750 to the present (Cambridge, 1969), 118; and Schroder,
Arbeitergeschichte, 141-5.
122 Sombart, 'Verlagssystem', 234; Bythell, Sweated trades, 175-88; Kossler, Arbeitskultur,
134-40; see also A. Weber, 'Die volkswirtschaftliche Aufgabe der Hausindustrie',
Schmollers Jahrbuch N F 25 (1901), 383^05, here pp. 396-401 (on control of the work-
process).
123 Marx, Kapital, vol. 1, 485.
124 Hausen, 'Technischer Fortschritt', 162f.; Beier, Frauenarbeit, 61-83; Dasey, 'Women's
work', 246-8; Schmiechen, Sweated industries, 66-72.
125 Putsch, Heimarbeit, 339-44.
126 Sombart, 'Verlagssystem', 236.

251
 P. KRIEDTE, H. MEDICK AND J. SCHLUMBOHM

127 International Labour Office, 'Home work', Conditions of work digest 8, 2 (1989), 6.
128 Cf. ILO, 'Home work', 5f.; an example is in D. A. Swallow, 'Production and control
in the Indian garment industry', in E. N. Goody ed., From craft to industry. The
ethnography of proto-industrial cloth production (Cambridge, 1982), 133-65.
129 The terminology is that of F. Frobel, J. Heinrichs, and O. Kreye, in Umbruch der
Weltwirtschaft. Die globale Strategie: Verbilligung der ArbeitskraftjFlexibilisierung der
Arbeit/Neue Technologien (Reinbek, 1986), 469-71, here also pp. 251-60 on the
renaissance of putting-out relations (foreign production without capital investment) in
the context of the ' new international division of labour'; see also F. Frobel,
J. Heinrichs, and O. Kreye, Die neue Internationale Arbeitsteilung. Strukturelle
Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieldndern unddie Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsldnder
(Reinbek, 1977), 144.

252