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 the first full-scale attempt to
take a new 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.
'The book ought to be a starting-point for future work in this field . .. not
only because its own argument is very clearly formulated , but because .it
surveys and critically discusses an enormous mass of earlier literature . . . It
is an important book, and an impressive one.' E. J. Hobsbawm