Narratives of economic change

The production system of the period covered by this book was an economy of manufacture. It was not an industrial economy as we came to understand that term in the twentieth century. The application of machine technology and science to production, the factory as the typical worksite of the productive process, and managerial bureaucratization and hierarchy are the key elements to an industrial economy. Yet this manner of organizing the production of goods did not emerge in Britain until the end of the nineteenth century, after which it came to dominate the economy for the next hundred years. By contrast, the economy of the period 1680 to 1880 was an economy directed by customary methods rather than one driven by “modern” forms. The enormous and growing productive capacity of the economy was achieved through small-scale units of production – the workshop and the home preponderantly. It was an economy where technology continued to move at the speed determined by the hand rather than the reverse.

The economy of manufacture was, therefore, a distinct economic formation. It possessed a particular economic and historical ordering, with its own profile and dynamic. This phase of economic development should not be consigned to a “proto-industrial” form, nor more pertinently should it be situated as the precursor to the industrial state of the twentieth century. By the same token, however, the economy of manufacture was differentiated from the economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by its size and dynamism. From the late seventeenth century, consumer markets expanded more or less continuously and (a new feature, this) international linkages grew increasingly sophisticated and complete.