Mass Production Without the Factory: Craft Producers, Guns and Small Firm Innovation, 1790–18151

Abstract

Recent attempts to redefine the role of small firms as dynamic initiators of change in production processes run counter to the conventional narratives on the growth of the factory. These narratives can be properly located within a mid-nineteenth century debate on social and political structures, in which the workshop was equated with craft restriction, low quality of output and moral laxity on the part of the workforce. The force of the contemporary discourse has obscured the capacity to innovate that was evident in the small firm in the early stages of industrialisation. This can be explored through a case study of the Birmingham gun trade. In the 1850s the low level of mechanisation used in the production of the Birmingham gun was ’exposed’ as being in sharp contrast to the factory production of guns with interchangeable parts in the United States. Craft control in Birmingham was identified at the time as the significant factor, though Habbakuk has subsequently drawn attention to differences in the labour supply in the two countries. In fact, low levels of technical application in the case of Birmingham are better explained by reference to the procurement policies of successive British governments. These debates, amongst contemporaries and historians, have served to obscure the very flexible way in which custom was ’re-negotiated’ in the small firms making gun components, to achieve dramatic increases in productivity during the French Wars.