With a bit of bluing already added to the pulp, the lustrous, faint blue paper furnished by the Dutch proved irresistible. Lalande celebrated this ban, since he believed that there is nothing easier in the making of paper than to do a great deal of work and do it badly.Footnote 93 On the Auvergnat industry, see Gazel, Anciens Ouvriers, 7071. Would the pulp turn or congeal in their absence? As John Hatcher wisely observed, it is much more likely that favourable movements in wage rates and prices would lead to an increase in both leisure and consumption, an outcome which helps to explain the paradox that the poor in times of high wages and plenty were accused both of refusing to work and consuming more goods. See By considering how masters and men managed the hours of labor, expectations about output, and diligence that characterized Old Regime papermaking, this essay returns the shopfloor pressures and the experience of work itself to the core of the issue of industriousness. Their new hands remained in their employ for years, a pattern of stability rare in the industry. 2019. International Labor and Working-Class History. Stedman, Ebenezer Hiram, Bluegrass Craftsman: Being the Reminiscences of Ebenezer Hiram Stedman, Papermaker: 18081885, ed. It stripped French papermaking of its workday advantages of elegance and long experience, although the market for distinctive handmade sheets never disappeared. 47. On this point, see Gazel, Anciens Ouvriers, 70, note 1. Hayami's views were reduced to a simple path toward industrialization that was, however, intentionally complicated by individuals. 28. The Industrial Revolution begins in Great Britain. But when scholars turned to probate records, they discovered that Europe's lower ranks enjoyed an ever-widening array of consumer goods and, most notably, that these items were not manufactured by the consumers themselves. On the break, see 56. The papermaking machine, however, was geared to produce good quality paper in massive quantities. Learn where and when the Industrial Revolution started, and the inventions that made it possible. But rags rotting in the pourrissoir, the promise of seasonal rains, and the journeymen's successful efforts to limit their numbers sometimes compelled papermakers to cling to their core hands. Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 12601850", "Was there an 'Industrious Revolution' before the industrial revolution? 5. Ashworth, William J., Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 16401845 (Oxford, 2003), 24752CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even the fortunate worker's time with a congenial employer ended abruptly with a flood or a rag famine. The governor of the beaters sounded the bell at 3:45 a.m. and work began at four, a departure from convention that the producers of Thiers could only envy. 35, Even the producers of cheap wrapping paper depended on nimble vatmen and sober sizermen. 3 Balston, Thomas, James Whatman, Father and Son (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Feature Flags: { Evidently, maintenance costs continued to be higher for these French engines as well. The purchasing power of these households grew as men, women, and children chose to work more to consume more. The shift from laboring to produce goods for household consumption to laboring to earn wages C. Men working harder to support their households so that wives and children did not work D. The use of new tools in agricultural work 19. That said, historians generally agree that the Reformation reduced the number of English workdays lost to religious observance and thereby enhanced production and profits. Shorter, A. H., Paper Mills and Paper Makers in England, 14951800 (Hilversum, 1957)Google Scholar; Jean V. Stirk, Industrial Relations in a Craft Trade: The Original Society of Papermakers, 18001948 (Ph.D. 56. On the usefulness of considering wage systems and forms, see Like Josiah Wedgwood, they dreamed of making such Machines of the Men as cannot Err.Footnote "corePageComponentGetUserInfoFromSharedSession": true, Since printers and stationers demanded many types of paper, the number of sheets in each post was the subject of careful consideration. Even the first machines did the work of eight vat crews. 51. 14. XL, 814. Moreover, plebeian families increasingly pursued new employments beyond the household to pay for these objects. Wood and his family narrowly escaped drowning, ye house and mill being almost destroyed. This perch and its waters, however, were too tempting to abandon easily; it was only in 1753, when Part of the Paper Mill house fell during a great flood that the site stopped furnishing paper.Footnote Here was an echo of Whatman's world of personal arrangements between master and man. de Vries, Jan, Great Expectations: Early Modern History and the Social Sciences, Review 10), the term 'industrious revolution' was originally invented, prior to de Vries, to describe change within the rural household economy of early-modern Japan, but its implications for consumption and the long-term conditions for Japanese industrial growth have not been examined and the significance for the Great . Nevertheless, paper production in England increased fourfold from 17381800, while the number of mills only doubled, probably as a result of the virtues of the Hollander beater and the furnishing of more mills with two and even three production vats. 18 On the industrious revolution, see also A typical French mill housed only one production vat but consumed three hundred quintals of rags every year. 116 For this new disposition, see de Vries, Industrial Revolution and Industrious Revolution, 262. Coleman, British Paper Industry, 142. 107. Hayami's major contributions include the application of historical demography methods to early-modern Japanese data, the finding of fresh facts made possible by the methodological breakthrough, which in turn emancipated early-modern Japanese historiography from a "dark age" imagery, and the coining of the term "Industrious Revolution." In Spanish papermaking, apprentices squeezed around the stamping hammers and troughs from midnight to 3:00 a.m. to gather soiled, caked fibers before the start of the vat crew's toil.Footnote Voth, Hans-Joachim, Time and Work in England, 17501830 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1962)Google Scholar. [4], Hayami introduced the concept of Industrious Revolution in a Japanese-language work published in 1967. Thus, a Protestant ethic of industriousness did not distinguish English papermaking from its cross-Channel rival; instead, it was a set of material, financial, institutional, and political advantages that spanned the workyear. 49 David, Paul and Thomas, Mark (Oxford, 2003), 4371 Google Scholar; Economic Growth before and after the Industrial Revolution: A Modest Proposal, in Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 14001800, ed. In fact, their nineteenth-century heirs, the tenders of papermaking machines, worked longer hours than the journeymen who had once sweated around the vats. In order to put a brake on the journeymen's creativity, the master papermakers resorted to the document, or blacklist. Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopdie, 17751800 (Cambridge, MA At the close of the eighteenth century, English manufacturers even depicted themselves as the guardians of the status quo, denouncing the workers adoption of a regular system of constant encroachment on the fair and established customs and usages of the trade.Footnote Since France had about nine hundred paper mills in 1788, its national industry required a mind-numbing amount of cast-off linen and other fibers.Footnote 66. 85. For de Vries's most influential articles on the industrious revolution, see Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Judging by the scale used by Robert Fogel, this level of nutrition was likely ample for a full day of papermaking. 1979), 193Google Scholar. And stimulant beverages, tobacco, and other perishable items from abroad hardly figured in the inventories of goods. Just to be sure, the Montgolfiers computed the precise hours of candlelight needed in their mill from mid-August to the end of April; December, for example, required six hours and forty-five minutes worth of candles.Footnote Although certain hands still exercised some control over the rhythm of their toil, the lowly apprentice who failed to stir the pulp at the base of the vat at regular intervals put the quality of the paper at risk. In contrast, they mention the threshing industry. Google Scholar. Valls I Subir, History of Paper in Spain, explained that the work day in France was twelve hours, 17. Nevertheless, most Old Regime paper manufacturers operated-to-failure. They were slow to refurbish their equipment, and often failed to remedy problems until the imminent sale of the mill compelled repairs. Quoted in For Dutch papermaking, see 41 Too often the study of early modern European industrial worktime and productivity turns on consideration of metaevents and metathemes. During Whatman's early years in the craft, the printer and publisher T. C. Hansard explained in 1835, each individual [paperworker] stood singly; no associations were then in existence; and the employer could exact from the labourer a just return for the wages paid him.Footnote In 1766, a Swiss calico printer considered the place of England in technological change and refinement: [T]hey cannot boast of many inventions, but only of having perfected the inventions of others; whence comes the proverb that for a thing to be perfect it must be invented in France and worked out in England.Footnote (Enterprising manufacturers were quick to send quires and even reams to printers and stationers for inspection, and it is these unmarked sheets that collectors of fine paper seek today.) As late as 1858, a departing worker in England left behind a gold guinea, or a producer bent on dismissing him put one in his pocket. Though highly skilled, French workers in 1788 still broke ten percent of the sheets they turned out, especially if a clumsy layman was afoot. For their part, the manufacturers turned to states everywhere during the eighteenth century for aid in governing these ungovernable journeymen. Rosenband, Leonard N., Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 17611805 (Baltimore, 2000)Google Scholar. So the English advantage of lengthier workyears probably continued, though diminished, during the long eighteenth century. To make the Empire independent of the seemingly indispensable foreign types and qualities of papers, he founded a large mill in Klein-Neusiedl in 1793. Small wonder, then, that in early modern European papermaking, the manufacturers and journeymen always put a premium on the command of work, its time, and its compensation. Thus, the state's attention increasingly turned to remaking the technology of France's paper mills. Just before Christmas in 1697, the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations declared: We humbly conceive it is also a very usefull Manufacture deserving all incouragement, and that we may improve to make as good as what comes from abroad.Footnote 72 36. 42. 11 He even imagined that the work of operating the machine can be done by children.Footnote Brugger, Eva 89. These technological changes introduced novel ways of working and living and fundamentally transformed society. And while they bargained for increased wages, they gave no ground on their customary day's work. In France, England, and elsewhere, the industry had traveled separate roads to the same point. 45 In many ways, the customary practices of early modern European paperworkers resembled those depicted by These behaviours, when combined constitute an Industrious Revolution. Briggs, Asa and Saville, John (New York, 1967), 11339Google Scholar. [25] This is also seen within the context of the Industrial Revolution, where women would often find small jobs to help supplement their husband's wages.[26]. Here, then, was the precise connection between demand- and supply-side industrial revolution that de Vries sought. Additionally, the Dutch practice of preserving some dampness in the drying sheets and shuffling them under the press did not disturb the grain as much as French trip-hammers and smooth stones. When the journeymen paperworkers of south Lancashire demanded a wage hike, their employers turned to print. The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris. As Denis Woronoff suggested, this neglect may have served as a functional equivalent to obsolescence, opening space for fresh tools and techniques. Protoindustrialization entailed the decentralized production by agrarian households of market-oriented manufactured goods, especially but not exclusively linen and woolen textiles. Unlike the lumber sawing business, this industry shows "clear downward movement"[15] in threshing rates, after which there are no longer any trends. If the Montgolfiers had not quite transformed their workshops into living Encyclopdie plates, the mill had assumed more of the mechanical nature of these illustrations. In England, a fund insulated the journeymen who had to leave for wages or customs.Footnote 110. 72. 80 95 Across the Channel, the masters cartel of Kent recommended in 1803 that their brethren permit no day's work of paper to be executed in less than 10 hours.Footnote Prak, Maarten (London, 2001), 17794Google Scholar; and The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, Journal of Economic History Most of what was produced by these households were things that involved cloth- textiles, clothing, as well as art,[19] and tapestries. The division of labor and basic manipulations of handicraft papermaking were alike in mills throughout Europe. They took advantage of their scarce skills to secure higher wages at a time of heightened demand for paper, just as French workers had during the good times of the seventeenth century and even occasionally during the hard times in between. Ever fearful that papermaking profits (and the government's revenues) would be compromised by journeymen on strike, on the move, or merely asleep at a tavern, the French state issued a sweeping edict in 1688. several couples and their children sharing a log cabin. Doubtless, these practices sometimes mutated as they migrated across the Atlantic, the Channel, or even regional boundaries within France. In 1718, it was said that much the best Printing Paper in England is made at Southampton by a Frenchman, probably Daniel Roussillon.Footnote 24. Quoted in Pierre Lon, Morcellement et mergence du monde ouvrier, in Histoire conomique et sociale de la France, ed. Early American Papermaking: Two Treatises on Manufacturing Techniques, reprinted from ). The everyday mathematization of the killing work of hand papermaking and its industrious demands took shape within a fabric of durable, customary measures. 53. Like their husbands and brothers, these women were discarded as soon as the need for their skills ceased. 62. 22 They were capital-intensive production sites, housed a considerable number of tools and small machines, and depended on journeymen, women, and children playing their parts in extensive divisions of labor. Quoted in C.-M. Briquet, Associations et grves, 184. "coreDisableSocialShare": false, See also the classic article by Briquet, C.-M., Associations et Grves des ouvriers papetiers en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles, Revue Internationale de Sociologie Now they knew better. getting more slaves to do work necessary for prosperity. After this accord, the master papermakers around Paris limited their hands to eight days of worship, including Sainte-Croix, the fte patronale of the trade.Footnote Once the truce had been reached, whichever side called the meeting provided beer for all.Footnote As Robert put it, It has been my dream to simplify the operation of making paper by forming it with infinite less expense, and, above all, in making sheets of an extraordinary length without the help of any worker, using only mechanical means. Quoted in Hunter, Papermaking, 34445. But he concluded that the reams produced in the early morning by the light of flickering candles or the burning of soot-laden woodchips were inferior. To control their ranks, English paperworkers, like their French counterparts, labored to maintain a balance of one apprentice per vat. There was little available production time for the extensive coercion emphasized by Hobsbawm or the lengthier hours of labor that de Vries claims newly industrious workers increasingly chose. 120 In his 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states in the entry for "Industry": "The idea of a new social order based on major industrial change was clear in Southey and . New International Evidence of Worktime, 18701913, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe, in, The Industrious Revolution and Economic Growth, 16501830, in, The Economic Future in Historical Perspective. The virtuous circle of demand- and supply-side explanations in the coming of large-scale industrialization, as de Vries described it, failed to take shape in papermaking. and England's producers remained both proud and uncertain about the competitiveness and quality of their reams. Few manufacturers could count on all these assets for very long. de Vries, Jan, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To anchor their key men, the manufacturers coughed up a few sous and hoped for the speedy end of a drought or the quick repair of a cracked vatand as soon as the papermaking season closed, they sent the rest of the journeymen packing. The European Origins of British Technological Predominance, Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 16881815, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the, The Paper-Mills of Berne and Their Watermarks, 14651859, The Ancient Paper-Mills of the Former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Their Watermarks, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 10001700. CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Weavers, Wage-Rates and the Measurement of Work in Eighteenth-Century Rouen, Les Moulins papier d'Annonay lre pr-industrielle, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 17002100: Europe, America, and the Third World, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 17001850, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Considering the challenges the manufacturers faced in gathering all the resources required for the production of paper, the workers strikesand even the threat of a walkoutwere highly effective. 44 Wedgwood's outburst reminds us that formal holiday calendars conceal as much as they reveal. Small wonder that so many paper mills proved to be disastrous investments and that both ownership and leases on mills rapidly changed hands. Thompson, Customs in Common, 185351; and Brewer, John and Trentmann, Frank (Oxford, 2006), 1Google Scholar. Une Question (re)devenue central: Le temps de travail, Les temps du travail: Normes, pratiques, volutions (XIVe-XIXe sicle), Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 15501780, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. 65 He introduced the idea of an "Industrious Revolution" to describe the Japanese developmental trajectory, which exploited the benefits of increasing labour absorption due to the lack of capital that made the Industrial Revolution in Britain possible. 102, At the bottom line of persistence and productivity, the Montgolfiers obtained much of what they desired. [24] At the same time, the women became more than likely to hold jobs outside of the household. On taxation and protection, see Coleman, British Paper Industry, chapter 5, and Brewer, John and Trentmann, Frank, Introduction: Space, Time and Value in Consuming Cultures, in Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, ed. Quoted in Stirk, Industrial Relations, 84. Nor did these revolutions transform the imperatives that shaped productivity in the craft. Les Grves d'ouvriers papetiers en France au XVIIIme sicle jusqu la Rvolution, Papers of the Twelfth International Congress of the International Association of Paper Historians. But this circle remained open and unfinished in one of early modern Europe's most prominent and widely diffused production sitespaper mills. In England, the customary day's work was also twenty posts. So, too, had the hours for the start of workmidnight to 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. in most places, with English journeymen alone beginning at 6:00 a.m. Downtime and overtime payments, as well as the number of reams in a standard day's labor, were also woven into the craft from El Paular to Kent, and from Ambert to Rannersdorf.Footnote [2]:122 The term was originally coined by the Japanese demographic historian Akira Hayami to describe Japan during the Tokugawa era. The hog, the colorfully named mechanical agitator, also appeared in English mills first. "coreDisableEcommerce": false, 79 These producers feared that an Act that destroyed all Emulation among the Workmen for personal gain would harm their efforts to tame the journeymen's association.Footnote 82. The workers on both sides of the Channel were of another mind. Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500. Fanfani, Amintore, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism (New York, 1936)Google Scholar and 91 England's distinctive practices and institutions of technological reception, from the rapid integration of Huguenot masters and journeymen to the remarkably open membership of the Royal Society of Arts, improved the processes and products of the industry. 22 (1999): 1 10. Also see the extraordinarily detailed production schedule that Demarest provided for a considerable number of different sorts of paper, 511. 54. Few French producers, however, tried to emulate the Montgolfiers complex new regime. This distinction did not loosen the bonds within the national paperworkers combination; instead, it encouraged paperworkers throughout England to seek Kentish wages and customs. In practice, the grievances between masters and men were settled in a bull ring. The manufacturer sat on a box surrounded by his workers, and the circle was not broken until the dispute was resolved. The term "industrious revolution" refers to. The Statutes at Large, 36 George III, c.111, vol. There was money to be made in the manufacture of paper. 38. De Vries discusses also the intellectual reaction to changing consumer patterns, stressing the Enlightenment emphasis on commerce and social interactions as a civilizing force. After all, papermaking families had always fashioned reams for markets near and far rather than for their own use and depended on wages for the goods they purchased and consumed. In his justly famous essay on the persistence of customary workloads, E. J. Hobsbawm concluded that Old Regime employers trusted in extensive exploitation in the form of increased hours and fixed or even lower wages to secure greater output. In 1713, a very great floud devastated the holdings of John Wood, a papermaker in Uffculme. To the delight of manufacturers everywhere, the pursuit of overtime premiums may have prompted the journeymen to complete their routine day's work. This incentive, however, had its dangers. 75 Hayami noted that these saw Industrious Revolution and Industrial Revolution as a continuum while the original idea considers the two revolutions as opposing concepts. They were not about to sacrifice the goods of access to employment for their sons and themselves or familiar customs and quotas for the pleasures of tea and razors. But the rising demand for paper during much of the long eighteenth century allowed the journeymen to defend both familiar pleasures and patterns of productivity. The Economic History de la Escosura, Leandro Prados (Cambridge, 2004), 11126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Briefly, he claimed that workers during the period 1650-1800 chose to labor longer hours, often at greater intensity, in order to consume novel manufactured goods and imported commodities. They invested countless hours in the creation of mill codes, incentives, and deterrents. The trade's distinctive piece rate, with rewards for quota-making as well as overwork, reflected the need to both hurry up and take it easy in the course of production. This quota was so widely ingrained in the English trade that the Combination Act of 1796, which called into question much of the industry's contested custom, still specified that twenty of which posts shall and do make a day's work. Over time, the seasoned vatman learned how often per minute he had to dip his mold in the pulp to build a proper post. Dugan, Frances and Bull, Jacqueline (Lexington, KY, 1959), 35Google Scholar, 38. 74. Furthermore, these English wages, along with those of the Dutch laboring poor, were the highest in eighteenth-century Europe. 71 But the journeyman exiled by a manufacturer as a result of his loyalty to the workers customs would likely find his swagger rewarded and his fear assuaged by work elsewhere. Pollard, Sidney, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (Cambridge, MA These merchants would bring the raw materials to the workers, who would then, using the supplied materials, make the goods. Still, as late as 1738, the Commissioners of Excise affirmed that at least three-quarters of England's mills furnished coarse reams.Footnote Surprisingly, the Languedocian manufacturers litany of complaints did not include the usual grumbling about footloose, irresponsible journeymen. 31. Lis, Catharina and Soly, Hugo, An Irresistible Phalanx: Journeymen Associations in Western Europe, in Before the Unions: Wage Earners and Collective Action in Europe, 13001850, International Review of Social History, 39 (Supplement 2) (1994): 51 English papermakers likely enjoyed Gerschenkronian advantages, the openness and the desperation of the latecomer, in their relatively rapid adoption of this machine.Footnote Whether they depended on skilled or unskilled hands, he claimed, these employers had to turn laborers accustomed to bouts of irregular toil and the sustenance it provided into persistent, regular producers who sweated for greater purchasing power. For the manufacturers, best practice was to stimulate paperworkers to hurry up and take it easy while fashioning easily ruined sheets.Footnote Gachet, Henri, Les Grves d'ouvriers papetiers en France au XVIIIme sicle jusqu la Rvolution, in Papers of the Twelfth International Congress of the International Association of Paper Historians (Haarlem, 1972), 128Google Scholar. Their countrymen's advanced metalworking skills were also critical in the successful embrace of the beaters, while the disturbances in international trade caused by the midcentury wars strengthened the position of England's papermakers in the home market. 8 56 While direct information on the number of days worked per year in pre modern times is scant, indirect estimates of annual labour inputs support the idea of increased industriousness in England. 12. 93. Once his pile of woolen felts, each now bearing a moist sheet of paper, reached a certain height, it was known as a post. But no convincing, comprehensive argument has been made to explain why the journeymen commenced their toil in the middle of the night. A warped waterwheel yielded less power, and molds with loose and broken wires harmed infant sheets. At a more intimate level, writing tables turned up more frequently in post-mortem inventories in pre-Revolutionary Paris.Footnote 90. 68. 61. Certainly, emphasis on a particular sphere of manufacture courts the historiographical risk of obscurantism, of building explanatory mountains out of molehills. 57 21. While the perpetual measure of productivity, the day's work of twenty posts, remained the same in France and England, the rest of the trade's custom evolved along distinct as well as intertwined paths. Robert Allen and Jacob Weisdorf inferred the length of the historical working year by dividing the costs of supporting an average family by the daily wage rate at the time. An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 13001830, Economic History Review