Proto-Industry, Political Economy and the Division of Labour

The putting out or domestic system, once a traditional subject ofresearch among students of the origins of the Industrial Revolution, has recently been revitalised and transformed into a supposedly new subject with the new name of 'proto-industrialisation>' Detached from its earlier mercantile and urban associations and its traditional place in the historians' analysis of the breakdown of guild restrictions, the phenomenon has recently been placed in the context of the study of demographic and agrarian change. Proto-industry, or rural industry practised in conjunction with agricultural pursuits, has by its very name been identified as the source of industrialisation, and has been described as the great organisational innovation of the pre-industrial period. Great marvels of industrial organisation might have been achieved in the large urban and state enterprises of the seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. And certainly the navel shipyards and arsenals, royal textile and tapestry works, glass and paper works became known for their size, division of labour and industrial discipline. But the increases in productivity and mass production in these exemplary pre-industrial works were still, it is claimed, as nothing beside the remarkable effects of the modest but all pervasive domestic industries.