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 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