Industiarlization before Industiarlization

Download or read book Industiarlization before Industiarlization written by Peter Kriedte and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982-01-28 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there developed in many rural regions of Europe a domestic industry, mass-producing craft goods for distant markets. This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization', and considers the question whether it constituted a distinct mode of production, different from the preceding feudal economy and from subsequent industrial capitalism, or was part of a process of continuous evolution characterized by the spread of wage labour and the penetration of capitalism into the process of production. It is a full-scale attempt to take a look at the place of proto-industrialization in the genesis of capitalism, and will interest economic and social historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and others concerned with the development of capitalism.