The previous chapter introduced and illustrated the sorts of things that concern economic anthropologists studying production, which take into account social relations and cultural values that are ignored by the common economistic view. I now continue the exploration of that economicanthropology approach, moving away from the fairly small-scale and static focus of the preceding pages. Instead, I attend more to larger-scale, dynamic processes, while still being concerned with how they are linked to people's ordinary lives, relationships and understandings.

Those processes are the historical changes in production in Western Europe and North America. In the Preface I said that one reason for focusing on those regions is that they are likely to be familiar to most readers, so that it will be relatively easy for readers to make sense of what I write. There is another reason, however. That is to make the familiar seem strange. That means helping readers to see how the familiar things in their world are not to be taken for granted. One way to do that is to show how familiar things could be different – and, indeed, have been different. With any luck, the history described in this chapter will help to do that.

Although it is less dominant than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, mass production using the moving assembly line remains an important image of production. The development of this sort of production is commonly presented in terms of the engineers who designed new ways of making things and the technical developments that made those designs possible. The engineers and technical developments were there, and were necessary. Focusing on them, however, ignores what interests economic anthropologists: the changing relationships among producers and between producers and what they make.

I want to describe the historical development of mass production, sketching changes that began in Britain in the sixteenth century, led to the Industrial Revolution and continue into the present. An important part of this process was the appearance of industrial capitalism, and its politicaleconomic aspects are well-trodden ground. That appearance and those aspects are described in detail by analysts inspired by the work of Karl Marx (e.g. Braverman 1974), the core of whose view is laid out in Part I of The Communist Manifesto (Marx& Engels 1948 [1848]). The social and cultural aspects that I describe are less familiar.