Proto Industrialisation

This collection of essays provides an up-to-date introduction to 'proto-industrialization': the growth of export-oriented domestic industries which took place all over Europe between about 1500 and 1800. Often these industries expanded alongside agriculture, without advanced technology or centralized factories. Since the 1970s, numerous theories have been proposed, arguing that proto-industrialization transformed demographic behaviour, social structure and traditional institutions, and was a major cause of capitalism and factory industrialization. European proto-industrialization summarizes the theories and criticisms, and includes a reconsideration of the original theories, and chapters written by experts on different European countries. It provides an essential guide to an important, yet often confusing, field of economic and social history.

This 1987 book broadens our understanding of the proto-industrial era and the history of women.

The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current "backward" financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream "blackboard" economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself. Contents: IntroductionKey Steps Taken by China to Set Off an Industrial RevolutionShedding Light on the Nature and Cause of the Industrial RevolutionWhy is China's Rise Unstoppable?Wha's Wrong with the Washington Consensus and the Institutional Theories?Case Study of Yong Lian: A Poor Village's Path to Becoming a Modern Steel TownConclusion: A New Stage Theory of Economic Development Readership: Academics, undergraduate and graduates students, journalists and professionals interested in economic development, the history of the Industrial Revolution, and especially China's economic transformation and industrial growth, as well as the political economy of governance.

This monograph makes a fresh contribution to a longstanding but far from exhausted debate concerning the transition to capitalism in Europe. The work investigates key aspects of this transformation: the changes on the land, the origins of the industrial revolution, the modern rise of population and the growth of markets. It does so from a new perspective, however, by focusing on an area of southern Europe, Catalonia. Catalonia's interest as an area for study lies in its precocity within a southern European context, as one of the few regions on the European periphery to industrialise in comparable ways and at the same time as areas of northern Europe. Population growth was similarly rapid. The study engages critically with several important debates in economic and social history, such as the transition to agrarian capitalism, whether or not sharecropping should be viewed as a backwards form of agricultural production, theories of proto-industrialisation and theories of population change. It also questions claims that the nuclear family of north-western Europe was a superior model for industralisation than the more extended family structures prevalent in southern Europe. Not only could the extended family be as dynamic as the nuclear family when required but, more importantly, attention needs to be paid to other institutions and factors that may have conditioned family forms and decision-making processes. The approach taken by this work is a micro-study of one community, Igualada, an important proto-industrial centre but also situated within the viticultural region. It grew rapidly over the eighteenth century from around 1,700 inhabitants in 1717 to 4,900 in 1787 and around 7,700 by 1830. Only at the micro-level is it feasible for an individual study to reconstruct networks of relationships and patterns of decision-making at the household level. At the core of the book, therefore, is a family reconstitution of 8,700 families, supplemented by a wide body of additional sources, such as landholding contracts, tax records, manorial surveys, inventories, marriage contracts and letters.