Question

Explain what is meant by proto-industrialisation

Answer 1

Hint: Even before factories began to start on the landscape of England and Europe, there was an immense scale of industrial production for an international market. Most of the goods were assembled by hand by the trained crafts-persons for the international market.

Complete answer:
Proto-industrialization is the regional development, beside commercial agriculture, of rural handicraft production for external markets. It is the phase of industrialization which was not based on the factory system. Even before factories began to be expanded in England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for the international market. Most of the historians now refer to this phase of industrialization as proto-industrialization. It’s the phase in which large-scale production was carried out for the international market not at factories but in decentralized segments.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the merchants from Europe moved to the countryside contributing money to peasants and artisans and were requested to produce for an international market. Merchants were constricted, not to expand their production within towns because rulers permitted different guilds the right to produce and trade in specific products. In the countryside, poor peasants and artisans eagerly and happily agreed so that they could stay in the countryside and continue the cultivation in their small plots.

Many historians of that age appraise this phase of industrialization as proto-industrialization or also as the precursor to industrialization. During this period, it was a diverse way of production that used traditional methods of production and extensive low-paid rural labour to produce goods for the market, both domestic and international. The principal economic characteristics of a stylized proto-industrialization system of production are the use of Rural labour, often organising sideline activities beside agricultural work production for the market.

Note: Contrary to modern capitalist manufacturing, proto-industrialization did not hang on rising labour productivity as a source of higher profits; rather, merchants increased the scale of their businesses by expanding production to additional households and workers.