International workshop and EURHO Round Table; Organisers: Tim Soens, Peter Stabel, and Jim van der Meulen, Center for Urban History, University of Antwerp

Time: September 2017
Venue: Antwerp and Louvain/Leuven, Belgium
Proposals by: 10 October 2016

Textile production was one of the major industries in many parts of pre-industrial Europe. During the urban take-off of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, large-scale textile production became concentrated in towns, but from the thirteenth century onwards, the mass-production of textiles shifted (back) to the countryside. Between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries, market-oriented textile production became the main industrial activity on the countryside in many European regions. While some forms of textile industry clearly remained a form of by-employment, closely linked to the seasonal cycle of agricultural labour, other regions saw a real specialization in textile production.

Based on this process, Franklin Mendels coined the term “proto-industrialization”, the fast growth and specialization of traditional industry, mainly in the countryside, which he considered a phase that preceded and facilitated the factory industrialization of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. Read more and source … (Web)