Early Industrialization in Europe: Concepts and Problems

Abstract

industrialization'. Both of the major accounts in English of the historical geography of early modern and modern Europe (C. T. Smith's An Historical Geography of Western Europe before 1800 and N. J. G. Pounds's An Historical Geography of Europe 1500-1840) contain whole chapters on mining and manufacturing in this critical period. The more specialized regional and national monographs, such as A. M. Lambert's The Making of the Dutch Landscape, H. D. Clout's Themes in the Historical Geography of France and Agriculture in France on the Eve ofthe Railway Age, provide evidence for and maps of the widespread occurrence of rural and urban industries. At the sub-continental scale or level of description and analysis it is difficult, if not impossible, to focus on the finer details of the interactions of social reproduction and industrial production processes, that is at sub-regional, local and even household levels. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the explanation in such larger-scale accounts tends to focus on resource bases, environmental influences (via agricultural systems), available technology, and to make fairly general references to markets, although a tighter and more overt conceptual framework could be employed, notwithstanding the bewildering complexity of types of industrial activity and organization to be found in 'pre-industrial' Europe. The question of scale (which should not need stressing to geographers) is of paramount importance for a fuller understanding of the nature of industrial pursuits in pre-industrial Europe, and needs to accommodate processes operating over a whole range of scales, from very small to very large, from the daily time-budgets and seasonal employment rhythms of peasant and artisanal households to the concept of the articulation of large-scale capital movements and influences at the level of the 'world economy'. Human and historical geographers on the whole have been reluctant to grasp this problem, and the corresponding recognition that hierarchies or nests of scales are involved. Most recent work on the theory and reality of early industrial activity in Europe has been by social and economic historians attempting to understand a major aspect of early modern and modern Europe, namely, the process of what (since 1972) -* Professor R. A. Butlin is Dean of the School of Human and Environmental Studies, University of Technology, Loughborough, LE11 3TU. This paper was delivered at a Technical Meeting held on 11 February 1985 in the Society's House, with Professor R. Lawton in the Chair.