Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds., European Proto-Industrialization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xi + 274 pp. $59.95 cloth.

Abstract

In European Proto-Industrialization, Ogilvie and Cerman give us a handy guide to this important theory of economic and social development, and to its fate as scholars tested its precepts in the early modern history of western Europe, eastern Europe, and the Nordic countries. The book's brevity is a great asset for students and scholars alike, since it outlines intelligently the basic themes and mutations of proto-industrialization. Franklin Mendels originated this idea, which describes the early stages leading to the modern Industrial Revolution, when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. His theory drew a direct link from the cottage crafts produced in the European countryside to the nineteenth-century factory industry organized by modern entrepreneurs. In the early modern period—the late fifteenth century to the late eighteenth century—merchant capitalists began to orient their resources toward the new mercantile frontiers across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.