HY 106 Lecture 30: The Growth of the Cottage Industry - ch 19
The Growth of the Cottage Industry
1. Introduction
1. The growth of population contributed to the development of industry in
rural areas; manufacturing with hand tools in peasant cottages and
workshed grew—peasants had always made clothing, processed some
food, and constructed some housing
2. A new system emerged called “cottage industry” or “domestic industry”
that distinguished it from the factory industry and scholars have preferred
to speak of “protoindustrialization,” by which they mean a stage of rural
industrial development with wage workers and hand tools that preceded
the emergence of factory industries
3. Putting-out system is used by contemporaries to describe the key
features of eighteenth-century rural industry (new form of industrial
production)
2. The Putting-Out System
1. The two main participants in the putting-out system were the merchant
capitalist and the rural worker—the merchant loaned, raw materials to
several cottage workers, who processed the materials in homes and
returned the finished product to the merchant
2. The system was a kind of capitalism and grew because it had
competitive advantages
1. Since countryside was unregulated, workers and merchants could
change procedures and experiment but they did not need to meet
rigid guild standards
2. Textiles: all manner of knives, forks, and housewares; buttons and
gloves; clocks; and musical instruments could be produced in the
countryside
3. Rural manufacturing did not spread across Europe at an even rate, first
appearing in England and by 1500, half of England’s textiles were being
produced in the countryside and in France, Colbert revived the urban
guilds and used them to control
4. In 1762, the government encouraged the growth of cottage
manufacturing and thus in France, as in Germany and other areas, the
later part of the eighteenth century witnessed the remarkable expansion
of rural industry in certain populated regions
