Many of the growing population found work in rural areas doing tasks directly related
to agricultural production. More fi elds meant more harvesting, and greater specialization
meant more transporting of goods to market. Commercial crops such as olives,
wine, and fl ax (for linen) were very labor-intensive, as was caring for animals yearround.
Silk was even more labor-intensive, providing work in the Italian and Ottoman
countryside for women and girls who gathered leaves from mulberry trees, raised the
silk cocoons, and processed cocoons into raw silk by reeling and spinning. Silk-making
was regarded as an appropriate occupation for women, because women, or more accurately
girls, were viewed as having greater dexterity and ability to concentrate than
men, both necessary for the tedious task of unwinding silk cocoons. Girls were also
probably the only ones willing to accept the extremely low wages paid for this task,
though the life-long damage to their eyes that could result from unwinding fi ne thread
in low light made even poor girls think twice about steady work in silk-winding. Silk
producers were often forced to hire whole orphanages (without the assent of the residents,
of course) in order to have enough labor.
Landlords and more prosperous tenant farmers hired many workers for specifi c
tasks, and they also hired permanent household servants. Servants were hired annually,
often at local hiring fairs, and were supposed to stay with their employer for at
least one year. Their period of service was rarely determined by a written contract, but
instead by a verbal one sealed by a small sum of money. They received room, board,
and some clothing from their employers, and, except for very young children, also an
annual salary. This salary was paid only at the end of the year, or even held until the
servant left the household, so that servants actually lent their employers the use of their
salary during their term of service. Young people generally regarded service as a time to
save for later marriage, though they were also occasionally forced into service to pay off
their parents’ feudal dues, a practice that continued in Germany, Sweden, and Finland
into the eighteenth century.
Rural residents also increasingly engaged in handicraft production, using raw materials
provided by merchants from nearby towns and cities, especially in the production
of textiles. Such rural cottage industry developed fi rst in the Netherlands and Flanders,
where merchants sought to escape the restrictions on quantity, quality, wages, and the
nature of the workforce that guilds imposed on production in cities. Rural workers
would work for less, as they generally produced much of their own food. Merchants
purchased raw wool or fl ax, and then distributed it to peasant households to be spun
into yarn. From there the merchant would arrange for it to be taken to a different
household for bleaching, another for dyeing, another for weaving, and another for
fi nal fi nishing, “putting it out” to each household, as the expression went at the time.
Each household in this “putting-out system” would be paid for the tasks it did, but the
merchant retained ownership of the product at every stage and took the largest share
of the profi ts.
Initially cottage industry was a by-employment, done during the winter or more
regularly only by certain family members, but gradually families in some parts of Europe,
especially areas with large groups of landless people, engaged in production fulltime.
“Not only women and maids, but also men and boys, spin,” commented the German
religious reformer Sebastian Franck, after visiting some villages around Augsburg
and Ulm, going on to say, “One sees contradictions; they work and gossip like women,
yet are still vigorous, active, strong and quarrelsome people, the kind any area would
want to have.” 2 By the eighteenth century, increased demand for textiles, combined
with a growing rural population, meant that certain rural areas of the Netherlands,
Belgium, England, the Rhineland, and northern France specialized in textile production.
For residents of those areas, wages were no longer simply a supplement to their
food production, but a replacement for it, and they became completely dependent on
market conditions that might be international in scope. Economic historians refer to
this process of expanding wage labor as “proletarianization,” and note that wages were
often so low that families remained impoverished even if all family members worked
most daylight hours. The merchants and investors who hired households to spin and
weave were similarly dependent on changing styles, political circumstances, and even
the weather, but those entrepreneurs who were shrewd and fortunate could make tremendous
profi ts.
Economic historians have termed this more intensive putting-out system “protoindustrialization,”
and note that it had important social, as well as economic, ramifi -
cations. In parts of Europe where the land was poorest and the agriculture was more
or less subsistence, entrepreneurs hired whole households, and proto-industry often
broke down gender divisions. Men, women, and children who were old enough all
worked at the same tasks, as the quotation from Franck notes. Domestic industry
might also lead to role reversal, with women producing thread while, in the words of
an eighteenth-century German observer, “men … cook, sweep and milk the cows, in
order never to disturb the good, diligent wife in her work.” 3 In such areas, labor became
a more important economic commodity than property, which led to earlier marriage,
weaker parental control over children, and a faster rise in fertility rates. Some historians
have suggested that this may have given young women more power within the
family and a greater sense of independence, though these were balanced by the fact that
young men were also freer, which increased the risk of young women being seduced
and abandoned.
In other parts of Europe, proto-industrialization began in areas where there was
a high level of seasonal unemployment, especially among women. In these areas,
including parts of France, individual women, rather than whole households, were
hired, with men continuing to work at wage-paying agricultural tasks. In these areas
there was no sharing of domestic duties or reversal of roles, for the men’s tasks were
more highly paid and generally away from the household, so the women continued
to do most domestic labor. Proto-industrialization in these areas did not lead to
great improvements in women’s status, for, though the wages women earned gave the
family some disposable income, it was the men of the family who decided when and
how that income could be spent, and often gathered in taverns, and by the eighteenth
century in cafés, to spend it. This may have been one reason why female spinners
in Augsburg chose to pool their wages and live together rather than with their families
or in the house of a master weaver, though the city tried to prevent this from
happening.
In rural areas where the population was dense enough, entrepreneurs sometimes
brought together workers under one roof rather than putting work out to individual
households. They opened what are often termed “manufactories” in which workers
used hand tools or hand-powered machines – often owned by the entrepreneur, not
the worker – and were paid by the piece with frequent quality checks. Women were
favored as workers because they would work for lower wages and were thought to have
more delicate and nimble hands; the investors did not realize that these women also
did rough housework and seasonal agricultural labor, so that their hands were swollen
and scarred, which made their work uneven and led them to be fi ned for poor-quality
work.
In the eighteenth century, manufactories were also opened in towns and cities, often
in newer industries where craft guilds had not developed or in cities where the guilds
were relatively weak. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Glickl bas Judah Leib
owned just such a manufactory for stockings in Hamburg. Conditions in these manufactories
were often unpleasant and unhealthy, with cloth fi bres fi lling the air and boiling
vats causing workers’ clothes to be continually damp. Wages were low, but young
people sometimes preferred work in a manufactory over domestic service because it
did allow a small amount of free time and a greater sense of independence. City manufactories
rarely outweighed rural production in the eighteenth century, however. In the
1740s in Silesia (part of Austria), more than 80 percent of the linen was made in rural
areas, and in the 1780s nearly 75 percent of the looms in Picardy, the area north of Paris
in which there was intense proto-industrialization, were in the countryside.
The economic historians who fi rst coined the term “proto-industrialization” saw
this as a middle stage in a historical process that began with independent artisanal
production in craft guilds and ended with the mechanized factories of the Industrial
Revolution. England led the way in this process, in this line of argument, and each stage
made the previous stage obsolete, or turned areas that did not change into economic
backwaters. More recently, economic historians have emphasized the fl uidity and simultaneity
of various forms of production rather than one single line of development.
The weaving of cloth had moved into manufactories in some places by the eighteenth
century, but this cloth was then sent to individual homes to be sewn into clothing, so
that in this case manufactories increased rather than decreased the opportunities for
domestic production. Some industries, such as metal smelting, mechanized outside
factories; the machines that powered the early Industrial Revolution were made in individual
shops, often by members of craft guilds, not in factories. Toward the end of
the eighteenth century, steam-driven sawmills produced wooden planks that carpenters
used in their own shops to make furniture. In these cases, artisans were integrated
into new systems of production rather than being displaced by them, though they were
more dependent on capitalist entrepreneurs for raw materials and sales of fi nished
products than their predecessors had been.
Craft guilds remained strong in many parts of Europe throughout the seventeenth
century, and in some places, such as Sweden and Austria, they were actually at their
most powerful in the eighteenth century. City, regional, and royal governments worked
through the guilds to regulate the economy. In France, the fi nance minister Jean-
Baptiste Colbert issued hundreds of regulations about quality, price, production
processes, competition, membership, and other guild issues, a policy imitated by other
states. He also set up new guilds, particularly aimed at groups that might otherwise
need public welfare. In 1675, for example, he set up an all-female guild of dressmakers
in Paris, noting that since women were excluded from most guilds, “this work was the
only means that they had to earn their livelihood decently.” 4 Such regulations were
often diffi cult to enforce, especially in growing towns where the demand for products
outstripped the ability of guilds to provide them. Rural putting-out enterprises provided
some of the products needed to fi ll this gap, especially in textiles, and so did nonguild
artisans, who simply made clothes, shoes, bread, or other products without guild
membership and approval, selling these clandestinely or smuggling them from town to
town. The economy was thus more fl exible than the regulations envisioned, and even
within the regulatory structure there was some opportunity for individual initiative and
competition.
World History
