Some general reflections

Abstract

THE paradox of clothmaking in early modern England has now been laid bare. It provided an occupation for artificers of both sexes who practised their craft over wide areas of the countryside and, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were for the most part also tethered to the tasks of agriculture: yet at the same time their industry was not at all limited by the frontiers of an insular market but provided a major current in the international commodity traffic, large enough to furnish a prominent component of the world market at Antwerp. Domestically, it was now the chief engine by which the English economy was swept past its medieval station as a purveyor of raw materials for the neighbouring continent and taken to the very portals of the industrial revolution. The leading men in this movement, whether commercial or industrial, were enabled to accumulate capital surplus to their stock-in-trade needs and therefore available for investment in other fields. And so the woollen manufacture and trade in less than half-a-dozen generations made possible an accumulation of capital that was used with a multiplier effect for the transformation of agriculture, the renovation of dwelling-places of all sizes, the accelerated exploitation of domestic mineral resources, the provision of educational and other social charities all over the kingdom, and the rise of the City of London as a world-wide financial centre.103