Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production
- Part I The modernity of tradition
- 1 Fashion as flexible production: the strategies of the Lyons silk merchants in the eighteenth century
- 2 The fate of collective manufactures in the industrial world: the silk industries of Lyons and London, 1800–1850
- 3 The rise and decline of flexible production: the cutlery industry of Solingen since the eighteenth century
- 4 Manufacturing flexibility in nineteenth-century Switzerland: social and institutional foundations of decline and revival in calico-printing and watchmaking
- Part II The battle of the systems
- Part III The resurgence of flexible production
- Index
2 - The fate of collective manufactures in the industrial world: the silk industries of Lyons and London, 1800–1850
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production
- Part I The modernity of tradition
- 1 Fashion as flexible production: the strategies of the Lyons silk merchants in the eighteenth century
- 2 The fate of collective manufactures in the industrial world: the silk industries of Lyons and London, 1800–1850
- 3 The rise and decline of flexible production: the cutlery industry of Solingen since the eighteenth century
- 4 Manufacturing flexibility in nineteenth-century Switzerland: social and institutional foundations of decline and revival in calico-printing and watchmaking
- Part II The battle of the systems
- Part III The resurgence of flexible production
- Index
Summary
In 1822 a Lyonnais who was worried about how his own silk industry would cope with the threat of the British industrial revolution composed an imaginary debate on its future. In this work the case for the inevitability of concentration in factories is put forward by an American visitor, while the essential soundness of the Lyons homeworking tradition is argued by a merchant from the city. The two protagonists visit a famous factory, La Sauvagère, the first real large-scale silk-weaving establishment to be established in Lyons: does some inexorable law of progress mean that this is a foretaste of the fate in store for the whole silk manufacture?
The American: I have been visiting England, Germany, Prussia, Holland, Russia, and Italy with the intention of making a special study of silk manufacturing in all those countries: I was particularly keen to find out more about the situation in Lyons […] I had heard of the La Sauvagère factory: it has the same highly impressive method of administration and distribution of work that you find in big factories in Germany and England. […] But I was astonished to find that this factory is the only one of its kind in Lyons, and that the work of the Lyons manufacture is spread over a whole quantity of small workshops.
The Lyons merchant: It is a very old tradition in our town for manufacturing work to be carried out by workmen who are independent of the heads of the manufacturing businesses, who negotiate the prices of the pieces with them. […]
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- World of PossibilitiesFlexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization, pp. 75 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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