WHY EUROPE? WHY THEN? 209thoughts to large workshops where spinners and weavers would have
to turn up on time and work the full day under supervision. That was
no small matter. Cottage industry, after all, had great advantages for the
merchant-manufacturer, in particular, low cost of entry and low over
head. In this mode, it was the worker who supplied plant and equip
ment, and if business slowed, the putter-out could simply turn off the
orders. Large shops or plants, on the other hand, called for a substan
tial capital investment: land and buildings to start with, plus machines.
Putting-out, moreover, was popular with everybody. The workers
liked the freedom from discipline, the privilege of stopping and going
as they pleased. Work rhythms reflected this independence. Weavers
typically rested and played long, well into the week, then worked hard
toward the end in order to make delivery and collect pay on Saturday.
On Fridays they might work through the night. Saturday night was for
drinking, and Sunday brought more beer and ale. Monday (Saint Mon
day) was equally holy, and Tuesday was needed to recover from so
much holiness.
Such conflict within the industry—what a Marxist might call its in
ternal contradictions—led logically, then, to the gathering of workers
under one roof, there to labor under surveillance and supervision. But
manufacturers found that they had to pay to persuade people out of
cottages and into mills. So long as the equipment in the mill was the
same as in the cottage, mill production cost more. The only operations
where this law did not hold was in heat-using technologies (fulling,
brewing, glassmaking, ironmaking, and the like). There the savings
yielded by concentration (one hearth as against many) more than com
pensated for the capital costs.* Efforts to concentrate labor in textile
manufacture, however, which went back in England to the sixteenth
century, invariably failed. They did better in Europe, where govern
ments tried to promote industry by subsidizing and assigning labor to
large hand-powered shops—"manufactories" or "protofactories." But
this was an artificial prosperity, and the withdrawal of support spelled
bankruptcy.
It took power machinery to make the factory competitive. Power
made it possible to drive larger and more efficient machines, thus un
derselling the cottage product by ever bigger margins. The hand spin
ners went quickly; the hand weavers more slowly, but surely. In spite
* The Chinese Communist regime learned this later when it tried to make a go of
backyard blast furnaces.