Preindustrial Manufacturing

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PREINDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING

Steven A. Epstein

The industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries applied new technologies and sources of power to the traditional handicraft production of earlier centuries. In the period preceding this revolution, from the bubonic plague of 1348 to the 1770s, a sophisticated system of manufacturing had emerged in early modern Europe. This system, called preindustrial for the sake of simplicity, produced products of amazing complexity, from delicate watches and porcelain ware to printed books, pistols, telescopes, silk tapestries, and the great Spanish galleons, Portuguese carracks, and English East Indiamen that sailed across the globe. The quality and diversity of these products are a tribute to the skilled labor force that created them. Whether by 1770 this labor force constituted a true working class anywhere in Europe is one of the most important questions to answer about this phase of labor history. These centuries also witnessed the rise of the first industrial entrepreneurs and inventors who revolutionized manufacturing. How was work organized, what were the social and economic relations between employer and employee, how were specific trades conducted, and why were some parts of Europe more precocious in manufacturing than others? These are other important questions.

Social historians are primarily interested in this phase of labor history because it serves as a bridge between the agrarian and artisanal societies of the Middle Ages and the rise of modern manufacturing in the industrial revolution. These centuries merit attention in their own right because they witnessed a profound transformation in the world of work. The social relations surrounding manufacturing paved the way for rapid technological progress and the acquisition of skills fundamental to subsequent advances. The gulf between the payers and takers of wages widened and hardened long before an industrial proletariat emerged in the nineteenth century. Preindustrial manufacturing transformed European society and introduced many millions of women, men, and children to the discipline of the workplace.

The state of knowledge of this period of labor history remains behind the study of medieval agriculture and modern industry. Research on the social relations deriving from work has yielded a wealth of local studies, primarily on western European cities or specific trades. Broader syntheses of national or regional styles of organizing work remain rare. Given these limitations, this summary of preindustrial manufacturing will begin with a look at the general circumstances of manufacturing at the beginning of the early modern period. Next, a series of case studies on specific trades and issues will illuminate important features of the social history of work and enterprise. Finally, an overview of manufacturing on the eve of the industrial revolution will reveal the major trends of the period.

MANUFACTURING AROUND 1500

The periodization of labor's history remains a vexed issue, and whatever value the term "Renaissance" has in other fields, it does not apply to this subject. Early modern social history, stretching from the calamities of the plague years of the later fourteenth century to the age of revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, makes a better frame for this field.

Guilds. The most important social institution defining the circumstances of most manufacturing in this period was the guild, or métier, Zunft, gremio, arte, or the many other terms by which the institution was known. The guild, a legacy of the Middle Ages, was an organization of employers who banded together to foster the interests of their trade or profession. Guild regulations determined who could work at a trade and often prescribed standards of production that imposed measures of quality and uniformity on objects as diverse as a loaf of bread or a clock. Guilds, primarily urban institutions, controlled large areas of manufacturing, especially in staples like cloth or ironworking.

Guilds existed in nearly every city in Europe, and few trades escaped the principle that employers, and not their workers, determined the customs of the trade. Two important trends were working against the hegemony of guild-based production in the early modern period. First, guild restrictions always prompted some entrepreneurs to find ways to evade the guilds. The best-known instance of this evasion was the putting-out system of wool cloth production refined in early modern England and Germany. Instead of employing weavers in the old-fashioned, intensely regulated atmosphere of urban household production, the organizers of the putting-out system took wool or thread to rural workers who labored outside the reach of the guild system and produced thread or cloth of lesser quality but at a cheaper price. The putting-out system transformed rural society as it brought cash, new skills, and the employer/employee relationship to traditional agrarian society. This system also competed with urban weavers and spinners. Second, by the eighteenth century social and economic theorists, most notably Adam Smith, condemned guilds as medieval relics, conspiracies against the public good, monopolies that benefited only the masters and not the consumers or workers. Guilds were under sustained attack by the late eighteenth century.

The corporations (métiers) were abolished during the French Revolution as a symbol of the corrupt Old Regime, and enlightened absolutists like Leopold of Austria abolished their guilds. Hence the early modern period witnessed the last phase of guild-based manufacturing and began the legend that guilds were a kind of feudal relic—hostile to change and working people. And yet, as the naked exploitation of industrial Europe became more apparent, a certain nostalgia for guilds arose in the nineteenth century, and some of the earliest working-class organizations were proud to call themselves guilds. Hence guilds were viewed in terms of contrary stereotypes: as a grim hierarchy of masters exploiting their apprentices and journeymen and women, or as symbols of a golden age of labor before the horrors of the factory. Like all stereotypes, both of these contain measures of truth and falsehood.

Masters and workers. The masters, the men and occasionally women who were the owners of shops and the full members of the guilds, provided employment and training to the workers who did much or in some cases nearly all the labor. Being a guild master in the early modern period increasingly meant that one had inherited, purchased, or married into the position. Guilds everywhere were increasingly becoming closed cartels hostile to new members. Every city with guilds had a hierarchy of trades, with wealthy masters and merchants lording over the more humble master butchers and candlemakers. The defining principle remained that the master worked for his or her customers, and not for wages. An exception to this rule was the building trades, where master carpenters, masons, and bricklayers often worked for big contractors for wages. In practice, taking wages reduced the status of the trade, for a sharp line separated those who provided employment and paid wages from those who took jobs and wages. In many cities this line also determined who enjoyed full citizenship, with the benefits as expected going to the masters.

The social relationship between master and his or her employees was more complex than simple status might suggest. Even in this relationship among unequals, workers had some rights to bargain over pay and working conditions, and masters were expected to care for their employees, sometimes even in sickness and in health, as the work contracts stipulated. In the skilled trades like weaving, cabinetmaking, printing, and the like, journeymen and women performed most of the basic work. These laborers, having completed terms of apprenticeship, were certified as possessing sufficient skills to practice the craft. They worked for wages, often at rates customary to a particular trade, especially in the years of stable prices in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even customary wages allowed some room for bargaining, and while some trades had agreed-upon pay schedules set by the guilds, most allowed masters some flexibility to take into account age and skill.

Wages depended on two basic systems—a fixed rate of pay, usually set by the day or for longer terms of up to several years, or piece rate pay that yielded so many pennies per length of cloth or yards of yarn spun. Workers avoided wherever possible being paid in kind because such payments imposed additional costs on them and really only benefited the employers. Piece rate wages allowed the workers some control over how long and hard they worked, but contemporary observers like Adam Smith knew that they encouraged overwork and exhausted people trying to feed their families. A set daily wage, with time allowed for meals, required employers to keep a closer eye on slackers. The young men and women who worked by contract for a fixed wage had some security of employment because employers were obligated to keep them on, even on slow days when casual laborers found no daily work.

Working conditions, especially the most important one, the length of the working day, were determined by the customs of the trade. (Hourly pay scales awaited the industrial revolution, so the real issue was the length of the day.) Since working by candlelight or oil lamp was expensive and in some trades undesirable because of the possibility of errors, the amount of sunlight generally determined the length of the working day, making it longer in summers. The journeymen and women often worked in shops attached to the master's house, and in such cases meals were usually provided. Craft traditions dictated a large number of holidays in both Protestant and Catholic parts of Europe; everywhere churches frowned on Sunday work, and Saturday was usually a half holiday. Saints' days remained a feature of the work calendar in Catholic countries, where up to eighty days a year, including Sundays, were not workdays and hence not paid working days either. A worker with a weekly or annual salary usually worked in a more prestigious trade than the worker on a daily wage and hence was not so dependent, as casual laborers always were, on a day's pay for a day's work. Saturday, the traditional payday for most artisans, often witnessed bouts of relaxation that carried on into Saint Monday, the customary slack day of the workweek. Clauses in work contracts often required journeymen and women to work in good faith and without fraud, and also usually compelled workers to avoid gambling and other vices, especially under the master's roof.

Regulations hemmed in the market for labor in the early modern system of manufacturing, and traditions dictated that masters did not attempt to steal away another's workers by offering higher wages, though of course some did. Journeymen and women had pride in their skills and sometimes completed a masterpiece or objectively fine product in order to demonstrate their command of their craft, even if they would never themselves become masters. They also had strong opinions about what the just level of wages was in their particular trade. These workers, denied lawful organizations of their own, nevertheless had a strong sense of solidarity that revealed itself in informal associations discussed below. Long before the industrial revolution, a hierarchy of labor existed in which the journeymen and women in the most prestigious and highly paid trades—clockmaking, jewelry, cabinetmaking—ranked higher than their peers in the more common trades. In general workers' status derived from whether or not their trade catered to wealthy customers who purchased carriages or paintings. High-priced raw materials did not necessarily confer high status. Women, active in aspects of the silk trade and in making gold thread, did not enjoy high status or wages because they worked on expensive raw materials. The gender division of labor is a complicated subject best considered in the context of specific trades, but, generally, trades in which women predominated became lower status and poorly paid, and women earned less than men even when they did the same work. The idea of a labor aristocracy—highly paid artisans and mechanics turning out objects requiring great skills to produce—had deep roots in the early modern period. The industrial revolution did not invent a labor aristocracy; it simply upset the older order.

Social and religious aspects of guilds. The guilds in all parts of Europe retained, as part of the medieval legacy, a strong measure of spiritual and paternalistic features. The guild was usually a religious confraternity with a chapel and common ritual observances. The masters attended one another's funerals and looked out for distressed members. Their employees were often expected to attend an annual service and contribute to the guild's charitable activities. The degree of common spirituality attached to work meant in practice that the workplace, like the wider world, practiced one religion. The goldsmiths of London and Paris had similar institutions, but in the former all the members were Anglicans and in the latter all Catholics. The reliance on oaths and ritual practices generated religious conformity and as a result denied all Jews and various dissenters access to the guild, journeyman status, and often even employment.

These charitable and spiritual aspects of the trade helped to define a specific attitude toward the structure of society as a whole and to the organization of manufacturing—corporatism. According to this social theory of labor, corporatism defines the world of work not in terms of a sharp divide between employer and employee but in terms of divisions along craft or professional lines. Thus a corporatist approach to society views the right groupings as the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers. This emphasis on solidarity according to the type of work—from the richest goldsmith to his or her most humble worker—of course benefited the masters, since it encouraged their workers to identify with the interests of the trade, as defined by the employers. A corporatist vision of social organization imposed on the masters certain obligations defined now as paternalism in its most positive sense—the fatherly duty of superiors toward subordinates—as part of a reciprocal set of obligations that went beyond the simple cash nexus of employment. The preindustrial manufacturing workplace was supposed to be corporatist and paternalistic. In reality it was also intensely patriarchal, as few women ever enjoyed the full powers of a master in their trades. But a sense of reciprocal duties blunted the sharp edges of exploitation, and in some cases the workers in the new factories of the industrial age looked back with justifiable nostalgia on the working conditions of earlier centuries.

Apprenticeship. The last general aspect of manufacturing across Europe was the near universality of apprenticeship. Again, circumstances varied widely by trade, but a broad picture emerges about the experience of being an apprentice in the early modern period. Apprenticeship was vocational education, and it was by far the most widespread system of teaching and learning in Europe. Boys and girls, typically in their early teens but sometimes younger, were committed by their parents or guardians to long terms of service to a master by contract in exchange for training in a craft or trade. In order to be a full-fledged journeyman or woman, it was required to serve a term of apprenticeship, a length of time usually determined by guild statutes. Masters did not routinely employ anyone who had not been an apprentice for years, learning a craft at a master's side and often living in his or her house. Depending on the trade and city, apprentices sometimes received a small stipend like a training wage. Often in luxury trades the parents had to offer a payment to the master to take on their son or daughter as an apprentice. In these trades the term of service was typically longer, reflecting the value of the training in the years of cheap labor the master received from the apprentice.

Even when parents wanted their children to follow in the family trade, they often thought it better to have another master train the apprentice in a fostering relationship. Training assumed the right of correction, and it was perhaps easier for parents to allow another person to beat one's children into learning a craft. The main obligation of apprenticeship was for the master to teach and the apprentice to learn. By these means technological skills were passed from one generation to the next, and improvements in techniques were not lost because successful masters had pupils. This educational system also encouraged paternalism in the workplace because it was not unusual for a young person to progress from apprentice to journeyman or woman in the same shop. Only for a very few did the story end in the idyllic marriage of the apprentice to the master's daughter. But some workers retained filial attitudes toward their employers because they had been literally raised by them.

Many trades prohibited training women as apprentices, and so they were denied the technical skills necessary to succeed in some trades. Where women were allowed to work at a craft, they too took on apprentices, boys as well as girls. But the patriarchal features of the system denied technical training to women in so much skilled manufacturing like jewelry, almost all aspects of the metal crafts, printing, ship construction—the list goes on and on—that working women found themselves often confined to laborious, repetitive tasks. Of course some women escaped these male-imposed strictures and ran some businesses, but these were exceptions and a tribute to the persistence of strong individuals. These women were not yet perceived as a threat to the mainly paternalistic and patriarchal system of manufacturing.

Household production. Since, with few exceptions, most manufacturing remained small-scale, where the employer closely supervised his or her workers, preindustrial, prefactory manufacturing can be called household production. Yet few family-based operations supplied enough labor from the pool of close relatives, so successful masters were always dipping into the labor market to augment their supply of hands. Hence household production was not static or exclusively family-centered, and it often depended on people who came and went, or childless masters who passed a business on to someone else. Even this labor mobility, which included a fair measure of changing trades altogether as smiths became clockmakers and carpenters became cabinetmakers, fostered the dissemination of new techniques as new ideas from one trade found applications in another.

The guild system of masters, journeymen and women, and apprentices, surrounded by large numbers of casual laborers and those too weak or downtrodden to work, constituted the main features of preindustrial manufacturing. A labor market with an evolving system of wage labor existed. Improving technologies brought forth new trades as the clockmakers and gunsmiths formed new guilds. This system of manufacturing was producing fine silk cloth, ships, muskets, books, watches, and other items that were the most advanced in the world, granting Europeans an advantage over other cultures without steel and guns. Better technologies developed both in the guilds and in the large sector of manufacturing that remained outside their jurisdiction. An ostensibly paternalistic system of labor imposed obligations on both parties to a work contract. A fairly rigid gender division of labor denied women access to many lucrative trades, even when they comprised a substantial percentage of the workforce. These broad social realities varied by time and place, and were changing at different rates in the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution. The best way to understand the variety in the social history of manufacturing in Europe is to examine some specific issues in context.

WORKHOUSES

The attractions of being an apprentice or working as a laborer would not appeal to everyone, and there were always people by temperament not suited to the discipline of the workplace. Cities in particular needed a means to keep a supply of new workers coming to town, for early modern cities were notoriously unhealthy places with low birthrates and high death rates, thus they depended on immigrants from the countryside to maintain their numbers. So the system required a fair degree of socializing new people to the routines of work. The pull of the labor markets benefited from some push to compel people to work, because idleness set a bad example and masters needed hands.

What occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Europe was a number of experiments in forcing the able-bodied to work and not to beg or turn to charity or poor relief. Simon Schama (1987) has noted an example of how compulsion worked in practice, in the case of the Amsterdam Tughuis, a combination of prison and workhouse, which opened in 1595. Eventually, in 1614, when begging by the able-bodied became illegal in Amsterdam, violators were sentenced to the house—for a term of six months for a second offense. The overseers of the Tughuis thought it necessary to discipline and reform the sturdy vagrants and beggars by setting them to work. At first the idle were taught skills like weaving, but in 1599 the house got the monopoly for producing powdered brazilwood. This wood, the fruit of the Dutch colonial trade, yielded a dye essential to the city's cloth industry. Producing the dye required laborers to saw the wood, and the workhouse inmates seemed an ideal labor force. Sawing for fourteen-hour days to make the required number of pounds of dust gained the poor workers a meager wage that no one in a free market would accept for this kind of work. The women inmates were put to work in a similarly grueling system of compulsory spinning.

People refusing to work were put in the water house, where they were given the choice of manning the pumps or drowning in the water they refused to move. The water house of Amsterdam became a tourist attraction as people from across Europe came to witness this stark method of teaching people the value of work. The message to the workers was clear—avoid sloth, beggary, and crime, and work for the wages the market offered, or risk correction. Behind all the wonderful accomplishments of the Dutch economy in its golden age, it must be noted that there was a push as well as a pull into the labor markets. The state was training people in some rudimentary skills that would be useful to them as laborers in the cloth and ship construction trades.

The planners of these workhouses saw themselves as enlightened humanists and reformers combating sloth, a deadly sin. In 1656 the Genoese nobleman Emanuele Brignole proposed the creation of a central institution that would concentrate all the enemies of public order—the syphilitics, the insane, and especially the incorrigible beggars, orphans, criminals, and vagabonds who would not work. The city government agreed, and by 1664 over one thousand people, segregated by sex, age, disease, and crime, were inmates in the Albergo dei Poveri, where the able-bodied passed their time making useful canvas, cheap cloth, and clothing from cotton. The city purchased some slaves who had useful skills to use as instructors for teaching trades to the idle poor. This prison labor competed with some aspects of free-market production of cotton cloth in Genoa (the city whose French word for it—Gênes—became to English speakers "jeans"). The government kept the competition with free workers to the bottom of the trade, where it would serve as a check on wages, and the albergo took up work supplying menial labor and rough products for the private sector.

Some of the best-known experiments in using poor relief to discipline a workforce occurred in England. Elizabethan legislation of 1597 established overseers of the poor, unemployed, and unemployable in every parish. The overseers had the power to raise taxes, the poor rates, in part to purchase raw materials so that children not being maintained by their parents could be set to work. The idle also faced the obligation to work; it became illegal to be unemployed. The overseers also had the authority to put boys and girls into apprenticeships so that they might learn useful trades and become self-supporting. These provisions remained in effect until the late eighteenth century, when even harsher measures were taken against those who would not work. These examples from across western Europe demonstrate that behind the considerable advances in manufacturing and productivity, as well as increases in the general standard of living, lay the threat of compulsion to keep people at work.

SHIPS AND CLOCKS

Preindustrial manufacturing produced many outstanding items that were the marvels of the world—great sailing ships, fine watches, firearms of all types. Individual artisans invented the piano and turned out violins that still are played today. Entrepreneurs like Josiah Wedgwood in England developed pottery works that would soon rival the porcelains of Asia. The surviving examples of this and other crafts demonstrate the high standards and accomplishments. Two distinctive industries, the giant ocean-sailing ships and Mediterranean galleys produced in this period and the much smaller clocks and watches, are useful examples of how manufacturing evolved in the early modern period.

The Venetian Arsenal, with roots deep in the Middle Ages, became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the biggest shipyard in the world (Lane, 1973). By the 1560s the Arsenal employed between two to three thousand men in a variety of trades and was capable of constructing and maintaining a fleet of more than one hundred galleys. These fighting ships, turned out in an assembly-line fashion, were remarkable because they were constructed not as unique vessels but from interchangeable parts. This style of manufacture made it much easier to build and repair galleys. Various guilds of laborers worked on all phases of shipbuilding, but the Arsenal also anticipated modern systems of management because this large work site required vigilant and capable administrators. The Arsenal also became a rare example of a vertically integrated organization. Venice established state forests to secure regular supplies of timber. The need for sails, pulleys, cannon, and other key items involved the Arsenal with a host of suppliers. The success of the Arsenal allowed Venice to remain an international power and stave off the advances of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean, who had large shipyards of their own. But the Arsenal was a unique institution, and its size and fame demonstrated that early modern manufacturing was capable of recruiting a large, skilled workforce, managing large-scale production, and creating a class of artisans with a strong sense of work identity and a willingness to march against the Doge's palace in pay disputes.

Shipyards were plentiful along the Atlantic coasts, and while no maritime power had a centralized yard to rival the Arsenal, the great sailing vessels like the Portuguese carracks, capable of making the long sea voyage to India and carrying large cargoes, were a new style of ship requiring skills from carpenters and caulkers, among many other trades. Peter Linebaugh (1992) has studied the workers in the naval dockyards of England in the eighteenth century. These yards, some of which employed a thousand men, were the largest industrial establishments in the country. A very sophisticated scale of daily wages and overtime regulated the work in the yards. The master craftsmen were in charge of the apprenticeship system and ran it to their benefit. Wages were often in arrears, and the workers were responsible for paying for medical services and the chaplain out of their own pockets. Being in management or a supplier of raw materials to the docks was often the path to riches because of pervasive public corruption.

The yards were certainly no workers' paradise. The dockyard workers struck in 1739 partly because they were paid only twice a year, when they were paid at all, and they objected to this and the general atmosphere of corruption surrounding public contracting. Worker traditions and management clashed most forcefully on the issue of "chips." By long tradition in the woodworking trades, scrap timber and wood chips belonged to the workers. Their families, especially their wives, had by custom participated in this benefit, which was an important supplement to the stagnant and infrequently paid wages. Over the course of the eighteenth century the government continuously tried to limit the amount of wood the men could carry out of the yards and to exclude altogether the women from scavenging. The workers heated and built their houses with this wood, so they were zealous defenders of their rights. The clash between modern (if corrupt) management and the traditions of the trade shows how a workforce with a strong sense of solidarity was still capable of resisting attempts by employers to control their workplace. In this case the workers were producing warships in a century punctuated by major wars, so the threat of work stoppages was serious, and the workers were even prepared on occasion to fight the Royal Marines to defend their prerogatives. Not all workers enjoyed this self-confidence and leverage over their masters.

Social historians have been interested in the development of mechanical timepieces because these instruments changed the ways people thought about time and the working day. Great tower clocks began to appear on churches and city halls across Europe in the early fourteenth century. These earliest clocks helped to keep a standard time necessary for the cycles of monastic prayer, and their bells fixed the boundaries of the local working day. The story of manufacturing timepieces is the history of miniaturization and increased skill in assembling complicated parts that made up the most intricate machines produced by preindustrial crafts. As David Landes (1983) has described the evolution of the trade, smaller portable clocks first appeared as luxury items in the later 1300s, and jewelers and goldsmiths were active in this trade. Spring-driven clocks first appeared in the early fifteenth century, probably in Italy, and from there it was a small step to making personal watches. Shortly after 1500 very small timepieces appeared, sign of the rapid technological advances in a trade barely two centuries old.

Early modern centers of clock- and watchmaking, northern Italy and southern Germany, soon lost supremacy to English watchmakers, who by the eighteenth century dominated the international trade. By the middle of the century Swiss workers were beginning to turn out high quality timepieces that could compete with English ones. Why the most advanced sector of an industry moves from one place to another remains an important question about manufacturing in any era. The social organization of work usually provides the answer. From one point of view, guilds of clockmakers, which became common only in the sixteenth century, impeded personal ambitions and the development of labor-saving techniques that would allow watches and clocks to be produced more cheaply. The credit guilds receive for educating the next generation in technological skills in this view needs to be balanced against the technological conservatism of guild masters and their desire to divide markets rather than compete over them. Hence in places like England and Holland, where guild rules did not reach beyond the major cities, advances in manufacturing techniques were more rapid than in older centers like Augsburg and Nürnberg. In England, out-work in the unregulated Midlands produced the parts masters assembled and finished in London. Masters benefited from purchasing the cheapest possible parts manufactured by relatively unskilled labor. Soon the entrepreneurs of the Swiss valleys would challenge the English, and in the cantons the trade was completely unregulated.

The rapid advances in this trade, as opposed to preindustrial weaving, may result from the weaker role guilds played in it. This pattern of manufacturing also meant, however, that a larger gulf separated the masters and shop owners from their workers, and gradually fewer people had the chance to rise through the ranks and become self-employed watchmakers. This trade comes the closest to anticipating the effects of the factory system on other areas of manufacturing.

COMPAGNONNAGE

One of the most distinctive and revealing institutions shaping preindustrial manufacturing was the French compagnonnage. This association, explored by Cynthia Truant (1994), was a semisecret, illegal group of unmarried journeymen originating in early modern France. More than one compagnonnage existed, and it is better to think of them as social brotherhoods. The earliest signs of the compagnonnage appeared around Dijon in the fifteenth century, and as Natalie Zemon Davis (1975) has shown for Lyon, journeymen printers there in the sixteenth century were organized enough to strike. By the mid-seventeenth century these associations were common throughout France, strongest in the provinces, less so in Paris, where the powers of the métiers remained strong.

From the point of view of social history, the compagnonnages represent a movement of worker solidarity born in a corporate world of work dominated by the employers. The journeymen, though they worked alongside women in many trades, did not allow them to join the compagnonnages. Hence these movements against paternalism in work were gendered from the beginning. These journeymen were not primitive rebels or precocious trade unionists, nor were they simply emulating the medieval guild. The compagnonnages supported migrant journeymen in searching for jobs and places to stay in new cities. Journeymen took a hand in regulating the circumstances of work against the entrenched but decaying power of the masters.

The members of the compagnonnages were bound together by an oath that fostered solidarity. Initiation into the societies involved elaborate rituals, as revealed around 1645 in the customs of the journeymen shoemakers of Toulouse. Denied access to guildhalls and chapels, the journeymen usually met in taverns, so there was always a strong social and convivial component to their associations. A new member swore to obey the rules, and he received a kind of baptism with salt and water that incorporated him into the society. A sponsor, called a godfather, stood at his side as he joined. The use of religious symbols shows how compagnonnages grew out of corporate society and drew on the customs of religious confraternities. The most important feature of these rituals was that they attached the loyalty of the ex-apprentice not to his employer but to his fellow journeymen. To the extent that these workers increasingly controlled access to work in the eighteenth century by refusing to work for masters who did not honor their rules, they set the stage for legal associations of workers that developed during the industrial revolution. The secret aspects of the compagnonnages made government and guilds suspicious of them. Since the alternative might have been a more direct revolt against the status quo, the compagnonnages were usually tolerated. A closer search for these shadowy groups in other European countries may reveal how skilled workers opposed the power of their employers.

NEW TRADES—GUNS AND BOOKS

The increasing use of handheld weapons, muskets and pistols, in early modern warfare—itself a growth business—created oscillating demands for these products. Manufacturing guns was a new trade in this period, and the stages of work represent one of the most sophisticated divisions of labor in preindustrial manufacturing. Carlo M. Belfant (1998) has investigated this trade in the northern Italian city of Brescia, a renowned center of gun manufacture. Brescia had some natural advantages for this trade: iron ore was nearby, as were forests to supply fuel and streams for water power. Why the area should have so many highly skilled gunsmiths as opposed to other types of metalworkers is unclear, but early innovations in techniques probably explain this local specialization.

The stages of production were complex and reveal an advanced division of labor. First, miners had to extract iron ore and turn it over to forgers who produced the first, rough cast iron. Cast iron contains many impurities that weaken the metal, so sophisticated forges heated the cast iron, with mills providing the water power necessary to drive the hammers that literally beat the impurities from the metal. This early use of water power for forging enabled local smiths to turn out high quality sheets of forged iron. Next, the most skilled phase occurred as master gunsmiths produced gun barrels from the sheets. The barrel was the most critical part of the weapon because cheap ones exploded or quickly split, rendering the gun useless. Brescia's weapons enjoyed a high reputation because of the barrels, and the masters who made them presided over the craft. Various other specialized artisans, like borers, finished the basic barrel. The final step was burnishing, a craft dominated by women masters and apprentices.

An allied trade of skilled craftsmen produced the flint gunlocks, the firing mechanism. Other teams of artisans assembled the barrel and gunlock into a musket or pistol. This trade required skill in woodworking as well as metalworking. The early stages of production were out in the countryside, near the forges, while much of the finishing work took place in Brescia. Many allied trades, like the makers of bayonets, powder horns, and bullets, were also located in the region. This complex industrial zone was capable as early as 1562 of turning out 25,000 muskets a year. There was a continuously high level of activity till the end of the eighteenth century, when the industry was still able to make for Spain 150,000 rifles from 1794 to 1797. The market for Brescia's weapons was international and driven largely by the pace of warfare. This unpredictability of demand caused problems for the masters, who along with their workers preferred regular production and profits to bouts of overwork or unemployment.

The Venetian state governing Bresica tried and failed to introduce some regularity into the market for weapons. Hence tensions developed between the masters and artisans making the guns and the merchants who sold them in large lots to customers across Europe. The producers were frequently in debt and turned to new guilds to defend their interests against the merchants. A guild of gunsmiths, run by the barrel makers and including the borers, gunlock makers, and other crafts, emerged in the early seventeenth century, a sign that a guild still struck masters as their most sensible means of mutual assistance. Since the masters had little choice but to sell to middlemen, the social relations of markets and work were changing in ways the guilds found difficult to master. Forge owners were also important to the trade and were not in the guild. The guild masters wanted to force merchants to share big orders among the members, another typical indication that the masters were more interested in surviving in the trade than driving out their competitors. This instinct to form a cartel failed to serve the interests of all the workers and masters in the craft, so the trade in 1717 opted for one central guild including all phases of manufacturing, on a more equal footing, to confront the merchants. By the middle of the century, the masters of the lesser trades, thinking their interests neglected by the barrel makers, asked for and received their own guilds.

All these problems inside the trade led to a decline in quality. The merchants sought to evade the guild rules by engaging in out-work, but cheaper barrels from deep in the countryside hurt the reputation of guns from Brescia. Whether the gradual decline of the industry resulted from anticompetitive guild rules, an inability of the trade to deal with irregular demand, or frustrated desires of workers to rise in the craft remains unclear. Also, international competition had become stiffer as each nation thought it necessary to have a domestic, reliable supply of weaponry and people skilled at the trade. This case study of the trade around Brescia reveals that the advantages of a first mover in this craft did not guarantee a permanent, prominent position in the business of guns. The problem was that the social relations surrounding work could not keep up with the increasingly international economy of Europe.

Ever since Johann Gutenberg of Mainz used movable type around 1450 to print the first books in Europe, the printing trades had evolved and produced millions of books, pamphlets, and prints. As a new trade at the cutting edge of early modern technology, printing still adopted the guild system typical of older industries. Early printed books described new technologies, the diversity of trades, and even occupational illnesses. Printing was an unusual trade because much of its work required literate artisans in societies where overall literacy rates remained low. Also, the printing trade was exceptionally mobile, and skilled masters and workers moved across Europe looking for markets and work. Literate workers and companies left behind records that Robert Darnton (1985) has used to illuminate the craft in Paris and Neuchâtel in Switzerland. In Paris the Crown fixed the number of master printers at thirty-six in 1686, making it difficult for journeymen to rise in the craft. The most skilled workers were threatened by the cheaper work by apprentices and laborers not in the compagnonnages. Journeymen in these circumstances often moved quickly from job to job, and a fair amount of violence, drunkenness, and absenteeism characterized the workplace. The journeymen retained some solidarity in the face of all these problems. Printing too suggests that preindustrial manufacturing was no golden age for workers trapped in a rigid guild hierarchy with few prospects for social mobility.

CONDITIONS AT THE END OF THE PERIOD

Printing, a modern trade, experienced some of the first genuine industrial strikes. General strikes among the cloth workers in Leiden in 1644 and 1701 revealed that it was hard to organize against the masters and merchants who dominated the increasingly international scope of work. When the cloth workers of Salisbury revolted in 1738, the government executed the ringleaders, another sign that state authority in this period firmly sided with the employers. As the great European social historian Fernand Braudel (1982) observed about these and other revolts, the putting-out system and the guilds remained the entrenched powers in manufacturing. Where these institutions were weakest, the industrial revolution would first appear. The modern, capitalist employers originated, however, in the social relations surrounding work in the early modern period. So too did a gender division of labor that excluded women from many trades and usually paid them lower wages for the same work. This system put boys and girls to work learning a trade at young ages and forced the able-bodied idle to work. The workers, especially the journeymen and women, faced the start of the factory era in the late eighteenth century with some worker solidarity. But they were in an increasingly weak position as the reciprocity of the older system of paternalistic wage labor gave way to harsher working conditions. A working class was in the making.

CONCLUSION

It is important to remember that the dominant features of preindustrial manufacturing were changing in advance of industrialization. Guilds were under attack, though many survived in strength. Manufacturing in rural areas was gaining ground. In this system, merchants from the cities distributed raw materials and orders to workers who labored in their homes, usually with primitive manual equipment, and then manufacturer representatives picked up the finished products and paid the workers by the piece. An alternative system had workers coming into town to get materials and then later to sell products. Hundreds of thousands of rural (domestic or putting-out-system) workers were involved in textiles, shoes, and metal goods by the eighteenth century, either full-time or part-time. Finally, technological change, though uneven, also affected many branches of preindustrial manufacturing.

See alsoProtoindustrialization; The Industrial Revolutions (volume 2);Artisans (volume 3); and other articles in this section.

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