Putting-out system

Last updated December 17, 2024

The putting-out system is a means of subcontracting work, like a tailor. Historically, it was also known as the workshop system and the domestic system. In putting-out, work is contracted by a central agent to subcontractors who complete the project via remote work. It was used in the English and American textile industries, in shoemaking, lock-making trades, and making parts for small firearms from the Industrial Revolution until the mid-19th century. After the invention of the sewing machine in 1846, the system lingered on for the making of ready-made men's clothing.^[1]

The domestic system was suited to pre-urban times because workers did not have to travel from home to work, which was quite unfeasible due to the state of roads and footpaths, and members of the household spent many hours in farm or household tasks. Early factory owners sometimes had to build dormitories to house workers, especially girls and women. Putting-out workers had some flexibility to balance farm and household chores with the putting-out work, this being especially important in winter.

The development of this trend is often considered to be a form of proto-industrialization, and remained prominent until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.

At that point, it underwent name and geographical changes. However, bar some technological advancements, the putting-out system has not changed in essential practice. Contemporary examples can be found in China, India, and South America, and are not limited to the textiles industry.

Firearms

Historian David A. Hounshell writes:

In 1854, the British obtained their military small arms through a system of contracting with private manufacturers located principally in the Birmingham and London areas ... Although significant variation occurred, almost all of the contractors manufactured parts or fitted them through a highly decentralized, putting-out process using small workshops and highly skilled labor. In small arms making as in lock production, the "workshop system" rather than the "factory system" was the rule.^[2]

All of the processes were carried out under different cottage roofs. It was replaced by inside contracting and the factory system.

European cloth and other trades

The domestic system was a popular system of cloth production in Europe. It was also used in various other industries, including the manufacture of wrought iron ironware such as pins, pots, and pans for ironmongers.

It existed as early as the 15th century, but was most prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries. It served as a way for employers and workers to bypass the guild system, which was thought to be cumbersome and inflexible, and to access a rural labor force. Having the workers work in their homes was convenient for both parties. Workers were remote worker, manufacturing individual articles from raw materials, then bringing them to a central place of business, such as a marketplace or a larger town, to be assembled and sold. In other cases travelling agents or traders would tour the villages, supplying the raw materials and collecting the finished goods. The raw materials were often provided by the merchant, who received the finished product, hence the synonymous term "putting-out system". The advantages of this system were that workers involved could work at their own speed, and children working in the system were better treated than they would have been in the factory system, although the homes might be polluted by the toxins from the raw materials. As the woman of a family usually worked at home, someone was often there to look after any children. The domestic system is often cited as one of the causes of the rise of the nuclear family in Europe, as the workers' earnings made them less dependent on their extended family. This often led to more prosperity among workers, with more furniture, and better food and clothing than they had had before. It was mostly centralized in Western Europe and did not take a strong hold in Eastern Europe.

Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt" (1843) describes the wretched life of a woman in Lambeth labouring under such a system. It was written in honour of a woman who is known only as Mrs. Biddell, a Lambeth widow and seamstress who lived in a state of poverty. In what was, at that time, common practice, she sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer, for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit. In a desperate attempt to feed her starving infants, Mrs. Biddell pawned the clothing she had made, thus accruing a debt that she could not repay. Biddell was sent to a workhouse, and her ultimate fate is unknown; however, her story motivated those who actively opposed the wretched conditions of England's working poor, who often spent seven days a week labouring under inhuman conditions, barely managing to survive and with no prospect of relief.^[3]^[4]

Anders Jonsson (1816–1890) was a famous Swedish entrepreneur who continued a putting-out business at Holsljunga. He contracted up to 200 domestic workers, who came to his house to get the raw material and returned after a couple of weeks with textiles, which local pedlars from the city of Borås then bought and went out to sell, among other things, around Sweden and Norway.

Cottage industry

A cottage industry is an industry—primarily manufacturing—which includes many producers, working from their homes, and was often organized through the putting-out system. The biggest participants in this system were the merchant capitalist and the rural worker. The merchant would "put-out" basic materials to the cottage workers, who then prepared the materials in their own homes and returned the finished merchandise back to the merchant.^[5] The term originally referred to home workers who were engaged in a task such as sewing, lace-making, wall hangings, or household manufacturing. Some industries which are nowadays usually operated from large, centralized factories were cottage industries before the Industrial Revolution. Business operators would travel around the world, buying raw materials, delivering them to people who would work on them, and then collecting the finished goods to sell, or typically to ship to another market. One of the factors which allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place in Western Europe was the presence of these business people who had the ability to expand the scale of their operations.^{[ citation needed ]} In Russia, the Kustar were rural artisans engaged in cottage industries.^[6] Such industries were very common at a time when much of the population was engaged in agriculture, because the farmers and their families often had both the time and the desire to earn additional income during the part of the year (winter) when there was little work to do farming or selling produce.

Related Research Articles

The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a period of global transition of the human economy towards more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes that succeeded the Agricultural Revolution. Beginning in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution spread to continental Europe and the United States, from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the increasing use of water power and steam power; the development of machine tools; and the rise of the mechanised factory system. Output greatly increased, and the result was an unprecedented rise in population and the rate of population growth. The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and capital invested.

Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products, or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers.

Mass production, also known as flow production, series production, series manufacture, or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch production, it is one of the three main production methods.

A factory, manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. They are a critical part of modern economic production, with the majority of the world's goods being created or processed within factories.

Francis Cabot Lowell was an American businessman for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named. He was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States.

The spinning jenny is a multi-spindle spinning frame, and was one of the key developments in the industrialisation of textile manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution. It was invented in 1764–1765 by James Hargreaves in Stan hill, Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire in England.

The water frame is a spinning frame that is powered by a water-wheel.

Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution was centred in south Lancashire and the towns on both sides of the Pennines in the United Kingdom. The main drivers of the Industrial Revolution were textile manufacturing, iron founding, steam power, oil drilling, the discovery of electricity and its many industrial applications, the telegraph and many others. Railroads, steamboats, the telegraph and other innovations massively increased worker productivity and raised standards of living by greatly reducing time spent during travel, transportation and communications.

The factory system is a method of manufacturing whereby workers and manufacturing equipment are centralized in a factory, the work is supervised and structured through a division of labor, and the manufacturing process is mechanized. Because of the high capital cost of machinery and factory buildings, factories are typically privately owned by wealthy individuals or corporations who employ the operative labor. Use of machinery with the division of labor reduced the required skill-level of workers and also increased the output per worker.

Light industry are industries that usually are less capital-intensive than heavy industries and are more consumer-oriented than business-oriented, as they typically produce smaller consumer goods. Most light industry products are produced for end users rather than as intermediates for use by other industries. Light industry facilities typically have a smaller environmental impact than those associated with heavy industry. For that reason, zoning laws are more likely to permit light industry near residential areas.

The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, during the rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century.

The textile industry is primarily concerned with the design, production and distribution of textiles: yarn, cloth and clothing.

The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. By 1840, at the height of the Textile Revolution, the Lowell textile mills had recruited over 8,000 workers, with women making up nearly three-quarters of the mill workforce.

Manufacturing engineering or production engineering is a branch of professional engineering that shares many common concepts and ideas with other fields of engineering such as mechanical, chemical, electrical, and industrial engineering. Manufacturing engineering requires the ability to plan the practices of manufacturing; to research and to develop tools, processes, machines, and equipment; and to integrate the facilities and systems for producing quality products with the optimum expenditure of capital.

A weavers' cottage was a type of house used by weavers for cloth production in the putting-out system sometimes known as the domestic system.

The Calico Acts banned the import of most cotton textiles into England, followed by the restriction of sale of most cotton textiles. It was a form of economic protectionism, largely in response to India, which dominated world cotton textile markets at the time. The acts were a precursor to the Industrial Revolution, when Britain eventually surpassed India as the world's leading textile manufacturer in the 19th century.

In Pakistan, cottage or household industries hold an important position in rural set-up. Most villages are self-sufficient in the basic necessities of life. They have their own carpenters, cobblers, potters, craftsmen and cotton weavers. Many families depend on cottage industries for income.

Manufacturing in Hong Kong consists of mainly light and labour-intensive industries. Manufacturing started in the 19th century after the Taiping Rebellion and continues today, although it has largely been replaced by service industries, particularly those involving finance and real estate.

The cotton industry was the first and leading industry of Catalan industrialisation which led, by the mid-19th century, to Catalonia becoming the main industrial region of Spain. It is the one Mediterranean exception to the tendency for early industrialisation to be concentrated in northern Europe. The Catalan cotton industry, in common with many European countries and the United States, was the first large-scale application of modern technology and the factory system.

The textile industry in Aachen has a history that dates back to the Middle Ages. The Imperial city of Aachen was the main woolen center of the Rhineland. Certain kind of woolens made there were illustrated as "Aachen fine cloth". These high-quality fine woolens have a plain weave structure using carded merino wool yarns, and a raised surface. The production of high-quality, fine cloth required fine foreign wool and skilled craftsmen and was reserved for town craftsmen. It involved regulated steps including sorting, combing, washing, spinning, fulling, dyeing, shearing, and pressing the wool. The finished products were inspected and authorized with a town trademark before being sold and exported. Fine cloth was a major export in the Middle Ages.

References

↑ Taylor, George Rogers (1989) [1951]. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rinehart & Co. (reissued: Sharpe). ISBN 978-0-87332-101-3.
↑ Hounshell 1984, p. 17.
↑ Shea, Victor; Whitla, William (2014). Victorian Literature: An Anthology. Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. ISBN 9781405188654. Archived from the original on February 7, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2022.
↑ Hunter, Clare (2019). Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. ABRAMS, Incorporated (Ignition). ISBN 9781683357711. Archived from the original on February 7, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2022.
↑ Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., McKay, John P., Perry, Joe., Crowston, Clare Haru. A History of Western Society, Value Edition, Combined Volume. N.p.: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2019.
↑ Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (1898). The Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century . St Petersburg.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Bibliography

Hounshell, David A. (1984), From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-0-8018-2975-8, LCCN 83016269, OCLC 1104810110
Williamson, Oliver E. (1985), The Economic Institutions of Capitalism, New York: The Free Press, ISBN 978-0-684-86374-0

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[Taylor_1951-1] Taylor, George Rogers (1989) [1951]. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rinehart & Co. (reissued: Sharpe). ISBN 978-0-87332-101-3.

[2] Hounshell 1984, p. 17.

[3] Shea, Victor; Whitla, William (2014). Victorian Literature: An Anthology. Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. ISBN 9781405188654. Archived from the original on February 7, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2022.

[4] Hunter, Clare (2019). Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. ABRAMS, Incorporated (Ignition). ISBN 9781683357711. Archived from the original on February 7, 2023. Retrieved September 15, 2022.

[5] Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., McKay, John P., Perry, Joe., Crowston, Clare Haru. A History of Western Society, Value Edition, Combined Volume. N.p.: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2019.

[Russian_Factory_Tugan-Baranovsky-6] Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (1898). The Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century . St Petersburg.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

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