Introduction: the Swiss experience of industrialization –a flexible craft alternative

Technical challenges and response strategies

There were two particular phases in the nineteenth-century Western industrialization process when the force of international competition and the impact of new technologies threw Swiss manufacturing milieux into disarray. The first phase was the surge of British industrialization at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the Manchester effect or the challenge of relatively standardized mechanized production of intermediate products like cotton yarn or certain finished products like printed fabrics. The second was the emergence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century of the “American system of manufactures” whose originality lay in perfecting the standardization of the semi-product, or progressing towards the interchangeability of components so as to make possible standardized fabrication of the finished product.

These important changes in production techniques and the forms of industrial organization linked to them met with a variety of responses in Switzerland: some saw in them the key to progress while others saw these foreign models as destructive of craft traditions and incompatible with the specific requirements of Helvetic industrial production.

Responses to these challenges were ambivalent. In the cotton industry at the start of the nineteenth century the Swiss spinning sections – which became an arena for intense experimentation with advanced technologies – did not imitate the English model blindly. While adopting those new techniques from abroad that had proved their effectiveness elsewhere, the country's spinners adapted English prototypes (or machines of French construction that were easier to import) to the specific needs of the domestic market – i.e. to the extremely diverse needs of sectors further on in the manufacturing chain (indigenous weaving of numerous specialities).