HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The factory is easily identified as the central symbol of industrial modernity. William Blake's description of "dark satanic mills" from the poem "And did those feet in ancient times," published in 1808, made its way into everyday English. In this way, the new location of production was construed as an essential aspect of the social problems that were connected with the new economic system. Historical research reinforces the notion that factory work marked a caesura. Two novel elements can be identified: a mechanization of work on a previously unknown scale, and the spatial division of family life from work.

The factory required that human activity be adapted to the working of machines, which in turn entailed time and work discipline. Both have been described as a culture shock for the new factory workers, who had previously been employed in cottage industry and agriculture. In his classic essay on the introduction of time discipline, the British historian Edward P. Thompson even called these changes in work practices an overthrow of human nature. The break between modes of working was especially radical in the textile sector, which accounted for the majority of the new factory openings during the industrial revolution. In other sectors such as mechanical engineering, however, change was gradual, and artisanal skills and the largely traditional work modes and relationships that attended them remained vital for a long time.

The second essential, novel aspect that took hold in the wake of factory work was the division of everyday life into separate spheres: one for work and another for home and family. With the increase of factory work, which in parts of Europe only arose a good century after developments began in Britain, family ties gradually dissolved. This process did not begin with the opening of new factories, as centralized production based on the division of labour had already played a significant role in the putting-out system. Nevertheless, this development reached a new dimension with the new forms of production. The spread of the factory system is understood to be the origin of the Social Question and the central political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The location of the factory itself was central for the genesis of the working class and its class consciousness. One's identity as an industrial worker depended not only on social standing but also to a certain extent on one's experience working in a factory.

There thus seems to be good grounds for thinking that the factory, as a new place of production, marked a break between one age and another. From the point of view of economic and conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), however, there are important arguments that speak against a clear break and instead emphasize continuity with early modern forms of production. Down into the nineteenth century, hardly any distinction was made between the terms "manufactory" and "factory". Both denoted a workshop with a relatively large number of workers. Especially in the early textile factories in Great Britain around 1800, the word "factory" denoted an extremely wide range of forms: at one pole mechanized, large-scale operations in new, multi-story structures, at the other converted cottages with one or two spinning machines and not even a dozen employees.

In addition, there are many indications that it is more fruitful to assume a broad and slow period of transition before the capitalist economic system prevailed. Cottage industry on the putting-out model played a fundamental role for the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in large parts of Europe far into the nineteenth century. With regard to the number of employees, it long remained more important than the new factories. Depending on the basic definition of "factory" they use, scholars emphasize elements of change or continuity more. Taking as a standard the notion of a large-scale manufacturing operation based on spatial centralization and the division of labour, then continuities between older manufactories and modern factories indeed seem striking, and the former appear as predecessors to the latter. Yet if, in addition, one identifies the coordinated use of engines and production machines as the essential element of a factory, then the radical nature of the technological break comes to the fore.

In order to distinguish the factory from other production forms like manufactories and workshops, it helps to emphasize the technological nature of production and the special role to be played by human beings within it. From the beginning of industrialization, the history of the factory was linked with the vision of automation, which ultimately aimed at the idea of a factory without people. It is characteristic of this way of thinking, however, that from the first automated spinning machines, to Taylorism, to the numerically controlled (NC) machines of the post-war period, the possibilities for automation brought by innovations were always overestimated. This perception of technology, and the vision for technology that went with it, had very real consequences for the thinking and choices of companies, businessmen, and even organized labour, since the notion of technological progress strongly influenced management and industrial policy. The idea of the automated factory gained early recognition, with Andrew Ure and then Karl Marx. In his Philosophy of Manufactures, Ure coined the term "factory system," by which he meant the replacement of qualified manual labour with the use of machines, i.e. an "automatic" factory. Marx largely subscribed to this definition, albeit attaching to it an entirely different political value, as is well known.

A further peculiarity of the factory crops up in the twentieth century: the problematization of the factory as a work and living space. The focus of this multifaceted debate about the rationalization and humanization of work was the question how workers' potential could be meaningfully harnessed in a technologized production process. The spatial conditions of the factory were taken into special consideration: ergonomics specialists, architects, engineers and entrepreneurs set themselves the problem of devising a factory space designed according to both rational and "human" standards. They viewed the specifically modern, matter-of-fact form as problematic, since older operating modes were believed more amenable to human relationships.

In what follows, the development of spaces devoted to manufacturing in Europe from the early modern period to the mid-twentieth century will be described, including workshops, manufactories and factories. As already noted, this history cannot be traced in the form of a linear progression, as a variety of types existed side by side over long periods of time, especially in the nineteenth century. Transfer processes will be explained in an excursus. The first section will deal with the earliest textile factories and the second phase of industrialization beginning around 1870, with mechanical engineering as a new leading sector. Thereafter the Americanization of European factories under the influence of Taylorism and Fordism will be considered, using the example of a Swiss company with multifarious European relationships.

Source: Karsten Uhl, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/crossroads/technified-environments/karsten-uhl-work-spaces-from-the-early-modern-workshop-to-the-modern-factory
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