Pottery Production and Proto-Industrialisation

Continuity and Change in the Rural Ceramics Industries of the Saintonge Region, France, 1250 to 1800

Bibliographic Data

ID12243312
AuthorsElizabeth Musgrave (0000-0002-2732-1432), Elizabeth C Musgrave (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume9
Issue1
Pages1-18
Publication date1998-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRural History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0956-7933 • E-ISSN: 1474-0656
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0956793300001412
OpenAlexW2103934982
LanguageEN
References cited10

The Upper Saintonge region of western France was one of the primary production centres for the supply of exotic pottery to Britain and northern Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The principal manufacturing sites were rural workshops in the parishes neighbouring La Chapelle-des-Pots, on the wooded, limestone plateau north east of Saintes and some fifty kilometres down the river Charente from the maritime port of La Rochelle. The expansion of rural industries, producing for extra-regional markets, was a Europe-wide phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of proto-industrialisation has been used to explain this process. It has been argued that regionally-dense, rural industries grew up as urban merchants sought cheap production methods to profit from growing overseas demand for manufactured goods, especially textiles and metals. By the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the participation of large numbers of country people in industrial work altered traditional regional demographic and agrarian regimes, resulting in population growth, land-holding fragmentation and the creation of mercantile profit. This provided labour, finance and motive for a ‘second phase’ in the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations in some regions of Europe and fully-developed industrialisation in others

Agrarian society · Agricultural economics · Agriculture · Archaeology · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Feudalism · Geography · Industrialisation · Market economy · Political science · Population · Pottery · Profit (economics · Sociology · Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis · Demography · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies

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