History Publications
Manufacturing Quality in the Pre-industrial Age: Finding Value in Diversity
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2000
Volume
53
Issue
3
Journal
The Economic History Review
First Page
493
Last Page
516
URL with Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-0289.00168
Abstract
When deployed on a large and rational scale and committed to high throughput levels, early modern manufacturing methods inevitably yielded a substantial proportion of non-standard and defective items. This proportion could only increase as the pace of work accelerated in the eighteenth century. Manufacturers regained a degree of control over their marketing strategies through the more or less rigorous sorting of this output, in a pattern suited to their markets. In so doing, they forged a transitional definition of quality that moved away from the linear pursuit of excellence that motivated their predecessors towards a relative understanding of the needs of diverse groups of buyers.
