When production went mass: how factories changed the world

an article by Donald Sassoon published in the New Statesman



Invented in Britain, perfected in America and super-sized by the Soviet Union and China, the factory has shaped modern history.

Factories are ancient, older than capitalism. Imagine a weaver in Mesopotamia who hires workers, provides them with tools and raw material (the capital). This entrepreneur would be recognised by Karl Marx himself as a “capitalist” since he derives “surplus value” from selling the cloth. Yet no one would say that Mesopotamia was capitalist, even though there were 13,200 weavers in its main city, Ur. In 15th-century Florence, over a third of the workforce produced wool for wages. The wool would be imported from England or Spain, and then sold all over Italy, the Balkans and the Levant, but no one has ever argued that the industrial revolution started in Florence.

The typical unit of production remained the small workshop run by a single artisan helped by apprentices, using simple tools. Big factories, the “behemoth”, whose history is delineated ably by Joshua Freeman in his fine book, are a recent invention. They started in Great Britain in the 18th century, although the majority were small.

The factory system grew out of a new product, cotton, at a time when Europeans wore wool or flax, and silk if they were rich. Cotton was linked to trade because it could not grow in Europe. So large factories went together with empires, colonies and slave plantations – in other words, with globalisation. Increase in production required not only innovations such as the spinning machine but also co-ordinating the activity of dozens or hundreds of workers who were expected to start at the same time, day in, day out. And since workers did not own clocks, bells announced the beginning of the shift. In this sense the new behemoths were like churches calling the workers not to prayers, but to work.

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