Industiarlization Before Industiarlization

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.