Cottage Industry Industrial Revolution

Cottage industry involved thousands of individual manufacturers.

Cottage industry industrial revolution. Cottage industry in the industrial revolution the factory system is a term that historians use to refer to the development of centralized factories or mills that produced goods on a mass scale. Throughout the 1700s inventors such as richard arkwright eli whitney james hargreaves and edmund cartwright developed machines and techniques that helped improve production especially in terms of the textile industry. This was common before the industrial revolution as a means to produce textiles clothing furniture and housewares.

And in times of periodic trade depression or slack seasonal demand and most of these industries were subject to one or other of these risks if not indeed to both of them it was the worker not his employer who suffered when plant and equipment were standing idle. Historically cottage industry was a system of subcontracting manufacturing work to families. The cottage industry helped to prepare the country for the industrial revolution by boosting the english economy through the increase of trade that occured as the country became well known overseas for its high quality and low cost exports.

We think of factories belching out coal smoke this was true in the later part of the revolution. Some industries which are usually operated from large centralized factories were cottage industries before the industrial revolution. When we think of the industrial revolution we think of coal and steam power.

After the industrial revolution many goods that were formally produced using cottage industry were moved to factories which benefited from a division of labor and a steady workforce. A cottage industry is a small scale decentralized manufacturing business often operated out of a home rather than a purpose built facility. Merchants used cottage industries as a method capital in bricks and mortar and in machinery.

It still generates lively debate. At the beginning of the revolution if you look at richard arkwright you will see differently. 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.

Cottage industry and the factory system the industrial revolution was one of the greatest discontinuities in history. With different regions specialising in different products metal production in the midlands for example and coal mining in the north east.