Superseding the Apprentice System

This is from How the West Grew Rich, pp. 173ff:

2. Superseding the Apprentice System

To evaluate the impact of the factory on Braudel's "sub-proletariat" or, in current terms, the least-advantaged members of eighteenth-century society, it is necessary to consider the part played by the antecedent apprentice system in the antecedent artisan industry. There it was customary to train workers through a long apprenticeship. Access to an apprenticeship was frequently restricted at the outset by the necessity of paying the master a substantial sum in advance, both for the support of the apprentice and for the master's instruction. Access was also restricted by guild rules limiting the number of apprentices a master might teach at one time.

An even more fundamental restriction was the practice of prolonging the apprenticeship. The usual term of the medieval apprenticeship was seven years. One purpose was to teach the apprentice all aspects of the craft. In some crafts, this meant acquiring skill in every step of producing the final product. In crafts where there was no specific product to be produced repetitively, it meant acquiring a range of skills defined in some other way, perhaps by the material being shaped (gold, silver, wood, leather, for examples). A second purpose of the prolonged apprenticeship was to give the master the benefit of the apprentice's labor for a period of time. This unpaid labor was rationalized as part of the master's compensation for instructing the apprentice.

The apprentice system restricted access to employment and it also restricted the production of goods. Its effect on the prices exacted of those outside the system -- often buyers poorer than the guildmasters -- was monopolistic, resulting from the restriction of access to the guild trades and the consequent restriction of the supply of goods. Secondarily, it reflected the wastefulness of unnecessarily prolonged training. Its persistence can be attributed to the fact that the guilds exercised combined political and economic functions, and so had the power to enforce uneconomic arrangements highly beneficial to themselves and highly injurious to the other members of society, including the very poor. Happily, the guilds were typically municipal political agencies, so that their writ did not run to the countryside. When factories were introduced, the legal power of the guilds was evaded by locating them in areas outside the guilds' jurisdiction. The medieval flight to the cities to escape the oppression of the manors ended as a return to the countryside to escape the oppression of the guilds.

There were, in the eighteenth century, a numerous subproletariat who had no funds to buy tools, no skills in their use, no possibility of supporting themselves through the years of an apprenticeship, none of the personal influence needed to obtain an apprenticeship, and no money to buy one. It was from this subproletariat that the early factories often drew their labor, even to the point of emptying an occasional poorhouse en masse.

Neither the entrepreneurs who built the factories nor anyone else supposed that they were engaged in a work of charity or an exercise of social conscience. But whatever the moral quality of their intentions, their actions advanced the interests of a down-trodden subproletariat -- a subproletariat in part, perhaps, characteristic of pre-industrial societies and, in part, drawn from an agricultural work force hard pressed by the enclosure movement and a high rate of growth in agricultural productivity.

The reaction of the English middle class to all this remains a fascinating case study in social pathology. Having for centuries seen no better use for the poor than supplying an opportunity for their betters to exercise, with due moderation and modesty, the virtues of charity and compassion, much of middle-class England perceived the factory system not as a significant social advance, but as a ruthless exploitation of the poor. Just below the middle class were the artisans, whose guild rules had long blocked all but privileged access to much of the everyday world of work. They did not think of themselves as monopolists at long last caught up with, but as victims of a new and highly unfair form of competition. Literary England, by and large, shared the opinion of both the middle class and the artisans. The reality could hardly have been more absurdly caricatured.