(^94) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
In the putting-out system, merchants went into the countryside and engaged the peas-
antry in small-scale textile production. Each month, a merchant would provide raw mate-
rial and rent equipment to peasant families. At the end of the month, he would return and
pay the family for whatever thread or cloth they had produced. Initially, peasant families
supplemented their agricultural income in this way; eventually, some of them gave up farm-
ing altogether and pooled their resources to create small textile mills in the countryside. As
the system grew, the guilds of the town were unable to compete with the mills, and cottage
industry replaced the urban guilds as the center for textile production.
The new system of rural manufacturing went hand in hand with the shift to market-
oriented agriculture; the destruction of the manorial system could not have been accomplished
if the cash flowing into the economy did not find its way into the hands of the rural popula-
tion. The creation of cottage industries provided the cash that enabled rural families to buy
their food, rather than having to grow it themselves.
However, the social change that accompanied the destruction of both the manorial
system and the guilds also brought hardship and insecurity. The enclosure movement
meant that thousands of small landholders, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers lost their
land and their social status. Forced to work for wages, their lives and those of their families
were now at the mercy of the marketplace. The destruction of the guilds produced similar
trauma for the artisans whose livelihood had been protected by the guilds and their families.
For both the peasantry and the artisans, the economic and social changes of the eighteenth
century meant the destruction of their traditional place and status in society: they were now
faced with both new opportunity and great insecurity.
Technical Innovations in Agriculture and Manufacturing
It is important to remember that technical innovations are always responses to new chal-
lenges. The people of earlier centuries did not fail to innovate because they were less intel-
ligent; they simply had no need for the innovations. The ever-growing population and
demand for food and goods in the eighteenth century created a series of related demands
that eventually led to technical innovations in both agriculture and manufacturing. Single
innovations often created a need for further innovation in a different part of the process.
The key technical innovation in the agricultural sector in the eighteenth century was
the replacement of the old three-field system (in which roughly one-third of the land was
left fallow to allow the soil to replenish itself with the necessary nutrients to produce crops)
with new crops, such as clover, turnips, and potatoes, which replenished the soil while also
producing foodstuffs that could be used to feed livestock in winter. More and healthier
livestock contributed to the creation of products as varied as dairy and leather.
In the manufacturing sector, a number of interconnected technical innovations greatly
increased the pace and output of the textile industry:
• In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which doubled the speed at which cloth
could be woven on a loom, creating a need to find a way to produce greater amounts of
thread faster.
• In the 1760s, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which greatly increased the
amount of thread a single spinner could produce from cotton, creating a need to speed
up the harvesting of cotton.
• In 1793, the American Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which efficiently removed
seed from raw cotton, thereby increasing the speed with which it could be processed and
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