Published 2019-05-07
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Abstract
In The Formation of the Working Class in England, Edward Thompson (1963; 1989: 251) stated that as late as 1830, "the characteristic industrial worker did not work in a factory or factory, but (as an artisan or" manual laborer ") in a small workshop or in his own house, or (as a pawn) in more or less eventual street jobs, in building lots, in the docks ". And in the Working Class and industrialization, John Rule (1990: 21-26) argued that "most of those who worked in the industry in 1851 did not yet do it in factories, or in any form of establishment that employed a large number of workers. under one roof or in one place ", to suggest" that in England until the mid-nineteenth century the finished consumer goods industry was mostly small-scale and unmechanized ".
If the establishment of the factory and the industrial workers was not yet hegemonic in 1850 in the cradle of the industrial revolution, historians are obliged to investigate the persistence in the rest of Europe of both productive forms and of the workers themselves. that were behind them. In this line, already Thompson and Rule put on the table the importance of the study of the craftsmen to be able to include / understand how the industrial revolution took place that finished turning to England in the factory of the world. Historians have been slow to assume that challenge. And it was not until the eighties of the twentieth century that a body of research was started to tend to value the role of artisans not only during the nineteenth century, but also in the preceding period.