10 - Conclusions: the causes and consequences of proto-industrialization

Summary

By 1850, the cottage textile industry, hence, the proto-industrial period in the pays de Caux, was about to collapse. Every slump in the cotton industry drove more hand-loom weavers out of the craft and produced more power-loom operators until finally, in the 1870s, the bottom dropped completely out of the hand-weaving industry, and the rural exodus that had begun in the 1840s became a mass migration. The changes wrought by the spread of the cotton industry paled beside those created by its demise. The Caux bcame more purely agrarian and much more sparsely populated than it had been in at least a century and a half. Farmers found it more and more difficult to hire laborers as virtually everyone who did not own property pulled up stakes and moved to the city. Weaving families who did not move found themselves forced into agricultural day laboring.

Because of its drama, factory building and urbanization have a much more extensive history than does the eighteenth-century expansion of cottage industry. But no study that assumes that the process of industrialization was a purely urban phenomenon paints an accurate picture of the transition from cottage to factory production. The current research on proto-industrialization thus provides an important corrective to what has often been an oversimplified and inaccurate view of the industrialization process.