The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made before machines, how work was organised before the factory system, how artisans and labourers perceived and lived their work are questions to which we have only hesitant and tentative answers. Hitherto, historians have been too concerned with the emerging features of the modern industrial capitalist order to seek to understand how another and different economy and community worked in its own terms. The essays in this book are intended to begin to remedy this neglect.
