The Workplace Before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800.

The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800. Edited by Thomas Max Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993) 252 pp. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper

This collection reveals that early modern Europe witnessed an extensive proletarianization of labor, that is, workers' loss of the organization of their work to employers and merchants. This premise is not new, although it has rarely been explored in one volume with such a variety of settings. Essays of uniformly high quality address weaving, mining, shipbuilding, printing, and papermaking in France, Saxony, Upper Swabia, Tuscany, Catalonia, Venice, Antwerp, and even New …