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Concept
Proto-industrialization
Summary
Proto-industrialization is the regional development, alongside commercial agriculture, of rural handicraft production for external markets.
The term was introduced in the early 1970s by economic historians who argued that such developments in parts of Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries created the social and economic conditions that led to the Industrial Revolution. Later researchers suggested that similar conditions had arisen in other parts of the world.
Proto-industrialization is also a term for a specific theory about proto-industries' role in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. Aspects of the proto-industrialization theory have been challenged by other historians. Critics of the idea of proto-industrialization are not necessarily critics of the idea of proto-industries having existed prominently or having played a role as social and economic factors.
Criticism of the theory has taken various forms — that proto-industries were important and widespread but not the main factor transitioning to industrial capitalism, that proto-industries were not distinct enough from other types of pre-industrial manufacturing or agrarian handicrafts to formulate a wider phenomenon, or that proto-industrialisation is actually industrialisation.
Other scholars have built and extended upon proto-industrialisation, or recapitulated its points — about proto-industry's role in the development of early modern economic and social systems of Europe and the Industrial Revolution. Outside of Europe, major examples of economic phenomena tentatively classified as proto-industrialisation by historians were in Mughal India and Song China. A proto-industrial and even partially industrial economy has moreover been suggested for the Roman Empire between the 1st and 4th centuries AD.
The term was coined by Franklin Mendels in his 1969 doctoral dissertation on the rural linen industry in 18th-century Flanders and popularized in his 1972 article based on that work.
Official source
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