5 - Industrial Tradition and Innovation

Summary

As befit principally agrarian economies, industrial trends largely paralleled agricultural across the long sixteenth century: substantial growth in output from the mid- or late fifteenth century to at least the 1560s, followed by stagnation and (from about 1600) decline that might persist to the 1650s. As in agriculture, too, similarities and differences marked the histories of individual regions, trades, and specialties, yet if every area had flourishing as well as depressed industries, industrial primacy was shifting from the Mediterranean to the North Sea area. Analogous to the dominant role of known practices and techniques in promoting agricultural advance, so – despite several noteworthy inventions – most industrial growth was achieved by product innovation manufactured with existing technology.