Rural Putting-Out Work in Early Nineteenth-Century New England: Women and the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside

Abstract

AS one reads analyses by economic and social historians, surprisingly different processes seem to be at work in European and American industrialization. Those who study European industrialization trace the phenomenon over several centuries and stress the complexity and variety of routes from the agricultural economy of the early modern period to the capitalist industry of the nineteenth century.' American historians, on the other hand, tend to focus much more narrowly on the nineteenth century and to examine the rise of factory production and the transformation of artisan crafts as the two major elements in American industrialization.2