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Proto-industrialisation
Despite
its short comings, historians often stress the importance of the very significant
expansion of the domestic system in the eighteenth century as the dynamic
force propelling the economy towards an industrial revolution. The phase of
manufacturing dominated by the domestic system is often referred to as proto-industrialisation
and the term proto-industry
is generally used to refer to commercial manufacturing based in households
and geared to distant markets. The links which historians have made between
proto-industrialisation and the wider economy and society are a good illustration
of the interconnections between economic, demographic, social and cultural
change at this time. |
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Flax
Spinning in County Down. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library |
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Proto-industry
is argued to lie at the heart of regional specialisation in the countryside
which saw some areas such as West Yorkshire, South Lancashire, and the Black
Country developing into major industrial producers and others such as East Yorkshire
and East Anglia into specialised suppliers of food and agricultural materials.
Such divisions of labour are seen by many historians as creating the conditions
for urbanisation and the development of the major industrial areas of the nineteenth
century. Proto-industry also increased long distance trade and encouraged a
build-up of commercial and financial institutions such as banks, and transport
improvements (roads, navigable waterways and canals) which were important in
facilitating later, more advanced industrialisation. Finally, proto-industry
is seen to have had major cultural and demographic effects. It got workers used
to new ways of working, to mass production, to wage earning and to spending
their money on manufactures rather than producing most basic manufactures, such
as textiles, plates, candles, butter and cheese, for themselves. It also offered
young people the wages and thus the freedom and economic independence to marry
early, with less parental constraint, and to have larger families. Although
the cultural and demographic changes of the industrial revolution were by no
means confined to proto-industrial areas, rural manufacturing did play a very
varied and important social and cultural, as well as an economic, role in the
industrialisation process. |
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Industrialisation
shifted up a gear from the 1830s and 1840s with the spread of steam power across
many branches of manufacturing and in railway development. Centralised and mechanised
technologies began to develop across a broader front and were not so closely
associated with textiles. Because of the importance of coal for industrial processes
that involved heat, as well as for steam power, the location of coal fields
came to exert more influence than proto-industry in determining the success
of industrial regions of the nineteenth century. |
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Gill
Royd Mill, Morley
Source: William Smith, Rambles about Morley, with Descriptive and
Historical Sketches: Also an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Woollen
Manufacture in This Place
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