The concept

The theoretical construct of a proto-industrial phase of European development, preceding and paving the way for industrialisation proper, has opened up a new perspective on development in early modern Europe. At its best the proto-industrialisation thesis represents an attempt to consider ‘total’ history: economic, socio-cultural and political development together. The model focusses on the manifold implications of the spread of rural domestic industry. This is related to the expansion of extraregional trade and associated with distinctive and dynamic social and demographic changes. By applying the model as much to the failure of some areas to develop from proto-industry to centralised production as to the success of others, stress is also placed on exogenous and endogenous socio-political and economic variables acting on and within a particular region to determine its possibilities of transition or retrogression.

Intimately connected with the concept of proto-industry is the emphasis placed upon the ‘region’ as the most viable unit of analysis for the study of industrialisation. The areas of Europe where the spread of rural commercial industrial production was most marked generally exhibited a juxtaposition of contrasting zones which maintained different ecological systems. Zones of small peasant farms producing food below subsistence requirements, but supplementing this with a money income earned from the sale of craft goods, emerged as the concomitant of the specialisation of adjacent areas in large-scale commercial farming. Some historians see proto-industrialisation as a regional process of economic specialisation dependent upon the gradual evolution of comparative advantage in the production of either craft or agricultural commodities.