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Agriculture and Cottage Industry: Redefining the Causes of Proto-Industrialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Gay L. Gullickson
Gay L. Gullickson
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
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Abstract

Prevailing theory regards subsistence or pastoral agriculture as a prerequisite for the spread of proto-industry. Commercial agriculture and proto-industrialization are viewed as incompatible. The expansion of the cotton industry in the pays de Caux, a fertile cereal-producing region in Normandy, contradicts the theory and indicates that seasonal unemployment and landleness, not subsistence agriculture, were the distinguishing features of proto-industrial regions. When these regions were located near market towns, the peasants' need for off-season work complemented the growing demand of eighteenth-century merchants for a large labor supply and determined the location of proto-industries.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 831 - 850
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

She would like to thank the Georges Lurcy Foundation, which funded her initial work on the topic; the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, who gave her the time to do further work on the topic; and Louise Tilly, the other participants, and the audience at a session of the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting in 1980, for the penetrating comments on an early version of the article that helped her to formulate the argument more clearly.

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