Merchants, Markets and Manufacture: The English Wool Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century. By John Smail. London: Macmillan, 1999. Pp. x, 198. $65.00

Pat Hudson

The Journal of Economic History, 2001, vol. 61, issue 1, 207-208

Abstract: This is a strong contribution to a cultural interpretation of the dynamics of industrialization. Critical of quantitative debates and their limited insights into the processes of change, critical too of polarized views about the primacy of supply (production) or demand (consumption), Smail's study is directed at the ways in which merchants and merchant manufacturers fought to reconcile the shape of supply with that of markets, and thus brought about fundamental changes in the processes of production and the source and scale of profitability. Smail's central thesis concerns the shift, as he sees it, from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian economy: from activity based upon the extension of operations and growing sophistication in the division of labor, to an economy founded upon continuous product and design innovation and intensive technological as well as organizational change. His concern is with the cultural and economic conditions under which producers and merchants shifted from maximizing profits by manipulating the marketing system (through niche products and niche markets) to maximizing profits by changing the mode of production. He dates this shift, in the case of the woolens sector, from the middle third of the eighteenth century. Focusing upon the interplay between production and marketing systems, he carefully documents change in the four major regions of manufacture in England: East Anglia, Devon, the West Country, and West Yorkshire. He places particular emphasis upon Yorkshire, which quickly emerged as the most responsive region and which dominated the trade in the second half of the century.

Date: 2001
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