The subject of industry is part of the general pattern of economic development in the early modern period. This development had three basic phases: the first, a period of expansion running from the middle of the fifteenth century through to the very end of the sixteenth; the second, a long stagnation during the seventeenth century that lingered well into the eighteenth; the third, an upswing beginning no earlier than 1730 and perhaps as late as 1750.
The first period began with signs of recovery from the long recession associated with the Black Death (1348–1350) and its recurrent visitations. Among the most significant of those signs were population growth and overseas expansion, particularly the influx of precious metals from the New World. The stagnation of the seventeenth century was marked by the disruption of markets in central Europe by the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), and by the continued decline of the Mediterranean region. Nevertheless, England and Holland enjoyed continuing economic growth during this period, especially in manufactures, which held significant implications for the future. The upturn of the eighteenth century was sustained by the breaking of the vicious circle of uncertainty created by war, famine, and plague in the preindustrial era. The eighteenth century is the only one to which the term industrialization may reasonably be applied, and then perhaps only to the machine tool inventions and eventually the steam power that were beginning to change the processes of production in Britain.
It is also vital to take careful account of fundamental continuities throughout the period in order to keep the scale of industrial activity in proper proportion. An industrial sector did not exist in its own right but was part of a complex network linking the needs of people in different regions. Villagers needed their cobbler, smith, miller, and butcher. The workshops of the towns were much smaller in scale than the industries of the mountains—mining, smelting, and quarrying. Some urban merchants employed and thus controlled large numbers of workers in rural areas. Throughout the following discussion, it is essential to remember that industry cannot be viewed in isolation from the gradual unfolding of commercial and agricultural circumstance or from social and political evolutions, both planned and unplanned, for industry was in part shaped by these and in turn helped to shape them.
Rural Economy
In seeking to locate industry in the early modern economy, therefore, several observations must be made. First, whatever the signs of industrial growth, it was the condition of the rural economy that most affected everyday life. Moreover, concentrations of labor on a truly "industrial" scale were to be found not in the cities but in the serf-based manorial estates of the landlords of eastern Europe. Harvest failure was the trigger of social unrest—as was to be proved in 1789 and 1848. Even in the nineteenth century, something like 70 percent of the urban wage was spent for bread. Second, industrial activity must be seen in relation to the predominance of commerce at the international level and to artisan manufacture in urban workshops. Put another way, the possibilities of "mass production" were very limited. The only goods produced mechanically in identical form were coins and printed books. Third, evidence of "industrialization" was patchy and confined to specific regions and cannot be seen as a truly European phenomenon until well into the nineteenth century.
In turn, this means that the idea of "the rise of the bourgeoisie" as a social phenomenon in the early modern period must be used with great caution—if at all. The social structure fundamentally lacked the plasticity that began to manifest itself only in eighteenth-century Britain. Put more directly, society was still essentially composed of estates, and the old feudal vision of the three orders—clergy, nobility, and those who lived by their labor—still prevailed. Those who prayed (oratores) sanctioned the social predominance of those who fought (bellatores), while those who worked (laboratores) owed their masters labor in return for protection and prayer. The overthrow of this model was the aim—very imperfectly achieved—of the revolutionaries of 1789. Even at that late date, there seemed to be little room in the recognizable social hierarchy for the towns, the state, or the women. Status was a question of function or of birth rather than of money. The church was suspicious of profit, and nobles disdained commerce and handicrafts as unworthy. It is essential to be aware of the social matrix as resistant and often overtly hostile to capital and manufacture. This overrides—and in many ways overwhelms—any scattered examples of the confrontation of capital and labor. By this reasoning, any connection between the "Protestant ethic" and the "spirit of capitalism" must be set in the context of a world in which something approaching 90 percent of the population were peasants.
The Role of the State
There is also a fundamental paradox in the subject. While industrial activity is usually linked to capitalist free enterprise, the concentration of human and material resources on an unprecedented scale in the early modern period was usually the work of the state. The growth of European armies in the period was staggering, and the state's monopoly on the means of destruction is far more noticeable than the ownership of the means of production by a capitalist entrepreneur. In their scale and power, the new militarized states of the early modern era dwarf any industrializing tendencies in manufacture at that time. Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–1715) had something like 400,000 men under arms in 1700. The unit of manufacturing production, the urban workshop, rarely exceeded a dozen members. When Louis's minister Jean Baptiste Colbert sought in 1673 to reform manufactures with an edict and with policies often described as "mercantilist," armaments and gun foundries began to employ hundreds of workers. Even so, they did not form anything approaching an industrial proletariat. Instead, they were a privileged category of labor subsidized by the state.
The theme of paradox may be extended and strengthened. Too often, and for too long, historians have sought the seeds of the industrial world in the early modern era, and terms such as preindustrial and proto-industrialization imply some sort of primitive rehearsal for the real thing, which is unhelpful. When considering industrial activity before the industrial revolution, it is essential to be aware of two abiding problems: teleology and anachronism. The teleology insists upon the gradual but inevitable development of a capitalist "world system" and a capitalist civilization, ideas that identify the early modern period as marking a "transition from feudalism to capitalism" in the European economy. Instead, industry in the early modern era should be understood in relation to precedents, precocities, false dreams, and blind alleys. The Middle Ages had experienced its own "industrial revolutions": in the smelting of base metals in the later twelfth century, for instance, and in the introduction of the fulling mill in textile manufacture at about the same time. Moreover, the great cloth towns of Flanders and Italy had witnessed, in the later fourteenth century, startlingly "modern" confrontations of the labor force and the bosses as wage laborers and owners of the means of production clashed in conflicts that bore the features of "class war." Anachronism—the application of terminology and concepts inappropriate to the early modern period—is a common fallacy in our own "post-industrial" era. The modern tendency to describe virtually any economic activity as an industry—for example "farming industry," "food industry," "tourism industry," "music industry," or "film industry"—has no relevance to the early modern era and can prove very misleading. In the early modern world, "industry" was a quality, not a sector of the economy. In the Renaissance, an ingegnere was not so much an "engineer" in the modern sense as someone marked out by their ingegno, which meant "talent" or "genius."
Large-Scale Industry
With those qualifications in mind, "industry"—meaning a large-scale enterprise concentrating a numerous work force that is dependent on the owner of the means of production—is applicable in the early modern era to three major economic activities: mining, building (including shipbuilding), and textiles. These were not exclusively urban activities: mining and some processes of textile production were carried out in rural areas, and the workforce often consisted of peasants. Indeed, concentrations of peasant labor—as in the case of the millions of serfs in the great manorial estates of central and eastern Europe—often seem to provide the prototype for the exploitation of labor on a truly "industrial" scale. More starkly still, the mines in the New World, where millions of people from the indigenous population were literally worked into the ground at the will of their Spanish lords, set a pattern for factory production that was perhaps reexported to Europe via the plantation.
Both in eastern Europe and in the New World, therefore, large-scale enterprises were run by essentially "feudal" lords. Somewhat surprisingly, in western Europe at the same time, industrial activity involved the state in a central coordinating role. The most precocious example of this pattern is to be found in the Arsenal of Venice, which concentrated resources on a scale impossible for private enterprise. The Arsenal was the largest industrial complex in the preindustrial era. It employed some five thousand workers (some estimates are three times that figure) as carpenters, caulkers, and makers of sails (many of whom were women), rope (in a factory of some one hundred workers), and oars. Rather than being a repressed proletariat, the workers known as the Arsenalotti were highly skilled and were something approaching an "aristocracy of labor." They formed the personal bodyguard of the doge on ceremonial occasions. The shipyards produced more than half the Christian fleet of more than two hundred galleys that defeated the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Three years later, the workforce demonstrated that they could fit out a galley in the time it took for the Republic's honored guest—on his way to being crowned Henry III of France in 1574—to dine.
Venetian warships protected and advanced the material interests of the republic in a precocious colonial empire run along mercantilist lines in the Middle Ages. However, the first phase of economic expansion in the early modern period, sometimes referred to as the "long" sixteenth century, witnessed significant developments in patterns of demand that had new implications for manufacture. The increase in population was especially marked in towns, and city-dwellers were, in some important ways, the material beneficiaries of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Luxury Goods
The mercantile wealth of cities and the new educational opportunities for the laity brought about a considerable increase in demand for inessentials—goods that went beyond the fundamentals of food, clothing, and shelter. There were new delights in household furnishings and the embellishments of the interior: compare the cool and simple lines of an interior in fresco by Giotto from the fourteenth century with the swaggering opulence of a Holbein from the sixteenth. From the fifteenth century onward, tapestries, furniture, tableware, paintings, porcelain, and metal goods were symptoms of changes in material culture, which scholars now see as significant generalized manifestations of the cultural achievements of the Renaissance. In Florence, a wedding chest for the bride or a birth tray for the newborn child might be decorated by Ghirlandaio or Botticelli, and the fireplace or the dining room might be graced with majolica inspired by the designs of Andrea and Luca della Robbia. Candelabra, lanterns, locks, scales, and weights, along with warming pans and scissors, were the specialist wares of Nuremberg. Moreover, as the period unfolded, such developments were not confined to towns. As the power of the state advanced, the country house came to replace the fortress in the lifestyle of the nobility. In terms of demand and manufacture, we might ponder the significance of replacing defensive walls with glass windows.
Guilds
Whatever the changes in taste and demand, it is essential to bear in mind that the processes of production remained in traditional patterns associated with medieval guilds and the workshops that they regulated. The complexity and rigor of a workshop training ensured passage from apprenticeship to mastery through the submission of a "masterpiece" for examination, using materials inspected by the officers of the guild. This was an assurance of the quality of workmanship. Thus, in Nuremberg, clockmakers had to produce a standing timepiece that struck the quarters and the hours with different rings, with mobile representations of the Sun and Moon along with the date and the positions of the heavenly bodies, as well as a watch that was worn round the neck and operated as an alarm clock. Each master had to be able to practice a trade with his own hands. Handicraft training thereby acted as protection against overconcentration of labor in dependence on a single capitalist. Day laborers worked as "journeymen" within the workshop. Their position was more vulnerable than that of the apprentice, and they could easily join the ranks of the poor in the event of a sudden downturn in demand. In Lyon and in Venice, however, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that journeymen had their own robust organizations and social networks.
The traditional structures of guilds and workshops were not as hostile to technical innovation as once supposed. Nuremberg provides a fascinating case history of technological changes in the production of metal goods and the development of new possibilities in the making of scientific instruments and weaponry, still very much within the traditions of the corporate structures of guilds. However, the printing of books marked the beginning of a revolution in communications that has persisted through the industrial and postindustrial eras. In the workshop of Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515) in Venice in the early sixteenth century, artisans rubbed shoulders with great writers such as Erasmus in an extraordinary combination of the refinedly learned and the strictly practical. Manutius's invention of the elegant italic script made possible the pocket edition with important implications for price and accessibility. The revolutionary quality of book production demanded a new organization of labor. Market forces began to intrude on the workshop. In Lyon in the 1560s fierce competition between groups of journeymen drove wages down as each group sought to outdo the other. Their conflicts were exacerbated by religious differences, a feature that sets them firmly in their time, but there was a clear pointer to the future in the recasting of relations between workers and bosses.
While the printed word is rightly seen as crucial to the spread of the Reformation, one should also bear in mind the significance of the press in spreading new techniques and ideas. Among the most notable works in this category were the De Re Metallica (Concerning metals) of Georgius Agricola (1494–1555), and Vannoccio Biringuccio's (1480–1539) studies of industrial chemistry in Pirotechnia (1540; The art of fireworks). This influential work included studies of gunpowder technology and typecasting, which can still be regarded as the symbols of a new age. Other works spread knowledge of precision instruments: one thinks here of Galileo's writings on telescopes.
Patterns of Production
However, most such treatises were not strictly instructional manuals but aimed to flatter their princely dedicatees. There is no simple causal connection to be made between the new ideas of the seventeenth century and changing patterns of production. Indeed, it should be emphasized that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century occurred in a period of economic stagnation and had little immediate impact on production processes. Moreover, in some places, traditional structures took on a new social and political significance. Guilds were organizations that could offer young, unattached males (a group vulnerable to natural decrease) shelter, training, and work. That work might be shared, a further safeguard against abject poverty. In Nuremberg in 1556, eleven workshops of cloth shearers deposited their profits with the Sworn Master who divided up the total "in such a way that the highest producer and the lowest producer get each an appropriate share." In seventeenth-century Leiden, guild structures remained buoyant and vital during the city's growth from twelve thousand people in 1582 to seventy thousand by 1660. By that time, its workshops were producing 130,000 pieces of cloth per year. The provision of work and forms of social insurance took considerable pressure off the limited welfare available from the city authorities. Within the age of economic stagnation, demand for luxuries continued to expand. A vast concentration of labor and materials produced Versailles for Louis XIV, and Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was to remark that scarcely a surface could be found in the palace that did not support some decorative object. The extraordinary project, far from looking forward to a new age, looks back to the two thousand or so workers on site for the building of the new St. Peter's in Rome in the mid-sixteenth century. Versailles itself was to become a symbol of the ancien régime.
At a much more humdrum level, many of the most important changes in patterns of production in the seventeenth century are summarized by the term proto-industrialization. This is a term to be used with caution, since its explicit sense of being a rehearsal for industrialization "proper" is strongly tinged with the teleology mentioned above. However, it is a concept that takes careful account of new forms of the organization of production associated especially with "putting out" or the "domestic system" in the manufacture of cloth. This is helpful to an understanding of early modern industrial activity because it seeks to trace economic change over the broad long term rather than in relation to technological invention. The new organization of production took shape roughly in the following manner. As economic conditions tightened, merchants sought ways to avoid the overheads—particularly high wages—that guilds jealously protected in towns. Instead merchants offered work—especially spinning and weaving—to people who worked at home in rural areas, where such work was a welcome source of supplementary income. The decline of certain urban centers was sometimes startling. In 1612 Augsburg had more than three thousand master weavers, but barely four hundred by 1720. However, there were clear logistical limitations to putting out work in this way. Quality was difficult to control (a serious disadvantage when compared with urban workshops and guild regulation), pilfering was widespread, and the coordination of the delivery of raw materials and the collection of finished products over relatively long distances was slow and difficult.
Nevertheless, "putting out" was an important underpinning of the production of the so-called "new draperies" in England and the United Provinces. These cloths were light kerseys and worsteds that proved much cheaper than the heavier traditional broadcloths and enabled northern merchants to penetrate the markets of the Levant, to the detriment of centers such as Venice. In fact, Venetian broadcloths remained competitively priced throughout the seventeenth century—but for the tax that the government imposed upon them. That said, during the early modern period, the Venetian economy experienced a huge shift (which its guild system seems to have fostered) from manufacture to retail and services. In terms of production, the balance of economic predominance moved to the north.
The emergent capitalism of seventeenth-century Amsterdam was tied to the extension of the vast serf estates in all the lands that might send grain to Gdańsk (Danzig) in the willing barges of the Dutch. Having thrown off the yoke of the Spanish monarchy in 1648, the Dutch developed the most enterprising, tolerant, "bourgeois" society of the early modern era. And—within the context of their times—they were great industrialists. Peter I the Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725) visited Amsterdam to find out how to build his ships. Leiden was one of Europe's leading centers of textile production. Dutch entrepreneurs organized the exploitation of the copper mines and iron foundries of Sweden. Dutch printing presses produced some of the seminal works of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and Dutch telescopes and maps furthered overseas commercial interests.
However, the interiors painted by the great Dutch artists show a cultivated taste for comfort—clothing, drapes, tiles, wall hangings, musical instruments, furniture and glass—that only the highest standards of manufacture could sustain. Workshops continued to depend on the appropriate guild's stipulations for training, and the units of production remained small: a workforce as large as fifty people in a glassworks was quite exceptional. In some ways, then, the expansion of the Dutch economy in the seventeenth century may be seen as the culmination of the "material Renaissance" rather than a foreshadowing of the industrial world. The United Provinces played no significant role in the launching of the industrial revolution. The chief reason for this appears to be environmental accident. The Dutch had plenty of peat, but no coal, and peat cannot generate sufficient heat to smelt iron. In England, by contrast, albeit from a very small initial base, domestic coal output rose by 1,400 percent between 1560 and 1690. This was the basis of what is sometimes known as "carboniferous capitalism."
The Eighteenth Century
Many more statistics and data are available from the eighteenth century than from the preceding period. It is important, therefore, not to exaggerate the nature and scale of change in the era because in reviewing the evidence we may not always be comparing like with like. Yet some cautious generalizations are possible. First, wars became more disciplined, and a clearer distinction developed between military and civilian spheres. Climatic conditions marked a distinct improvement over the "Little Ice Age" of the seventeenth century, making for fewer disastrous harvests. Plague made its last visitation (though no one could have known that it would not return). The chances of survival were greater, and the resultant population expansion known as the "vital revolution" has continued into modern times. There were new concentrations of demand for products, and again the political dimension is essential here since urban growth was particularly marked in the case of capital cities. Following its foundation in 1703, St. Petersburg grew to 220,000 people by 1789, Berlin grew from 8,000 people to 180,000, Paris had more than 500,000 inhabitants by the late eighteenth century, and by then perhaps 900,000 people lived in London. Such expansion dramatically increased the available labor force, and challenged guild monopolies (which were often limited in jurisdiction to the area within the old city walls). Considerable improvements were made in communication and distribution between such centers, too, brought about in Britain in particular by vast programs of canal building and road construction. The broader potential of expansion was boosted by the underpinning of state banks—in England in 1694, Scotland 1695, Prussia 1765, and France 1776.
However, the new concentrations of labor in the same workplace provide the most potent signs of industrialization. Whether we cite the two thousand people who worked for the Wilkinson foundry at Bersham, or the 300,000 workers in the mines and forges of the Urals, such numbers are considerably higher than what was usual in the earlier part of our period. However, it is in textile production that the reorganization through concentration was most marked. Nowhere was it especially sudden, and it is important to acknowledge its beginnings in the seventeenth century in regions such as northeastern France, Westphalia, Silesia, Saxony, Flanders, and the West Riding of Yorkshire in England. The rural dimension of production remained highly significant. Even in the 1780s, 73 percent of all the looms in Picardy in France were located in rural areas. In 1748 in Silesia, 81 percent of all the linen produced was made in the countryside. By mid-century in Sedan, twenty-five merchants were employing around 15,000 people. In 1765, one Prussian Manufaktur employed more than 750 workers in the same place. In Abbeville, after Anne Robert Jacques Turgot's abolition of France's old corporations in 1776, the Van Robais Company had ten thousand employees in domestic industry, but also eighteen hundred working under one roof.
Striking evidence can be found of dramatic increases in textile production. French cloth production rose 126 percent between 1700 and 1785, and Scottish linen production increased sevenfold between 1730 and the end of the century. While the production of English woolen cloth doubled, it soon became clear that cotton would be king. Britain imported a million pounds of it in 1700, and 15 million in 1780, a figure that had doubled to 30 million by 1789. Cotton cloth was to be the first sizeable industry of the industrial revolution, depending as it did on mechanical inventions, notably James Hargreaves's spinning jenny (c. 1764; patented 1770), Richard Arkwright's waterframe (patented 1769), and Samuel Crompton's mule-jenny (1779). However, the china factories of Dresden prove that new patterns of production were not entirely confined to textiles in Britain, and signs of the development of industrial regions can be found not just in the north of England, but also in Biscay and in Catalonia.
Soaring production was accompanied by falling prices. It is appropriate to quote Adam Smith, who remarked in Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) on the price of a watch, for it seems to symbolize a reshaping of the relationship between time and money. At the beginning of the early modern period, merchants were still hemmed in by church teaching—and laws—on usury. Traditionally, time belonged to God, and to make money over time was to appropriate what belonged to God. Such action was an expression of pride, the capital sin of Lucifer. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, trade and manufacture, with the profit and prosperity they generated, were celebrated as an expression of humanity's control over the world and its resources. This in turn was the result of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century with its new emphasis on direct observation and material demonstration. In the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, these ideas began to find more extensive application. Smith wrote, "the diminution of price has, in the course of the present century, been most remarkable in those manufactures of which the materials are the coarser metals. A better movement of a watch, that about the middle of the last century would have been bought for 20 pounds, may now perhaps be had for 20 shillings."
This confidence in the direction of things seemed to be reflected in the physical environment. Apothecaries' shops and candlemakers continued in their traditional ways in Shropshire, but they now stood in the shadow of a coal mine and close to Europe's first iron bridge—which gave its name to the town (Ironbridge). However, as the new era of mechanical progress opened, abrupt changes in the workplace and in the natural landscape made the new mills—at least to Luddites and saboteurs—look dark and satanic.
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—RICHARD MACKENNEY
