Eugen Schwiedland, Les formes d’industrie (1892)

Schwiedland’s article examines five forms of industrial organization through engagement with Bücher’s historical studies: household production, hired work, independent craft, domestic outwork, and factory production. The sequence describes historical transformations without implying that earlier forms disappear entirely. Its organizing distinctions concern ownership of materials and productive resources, relations between producers and consumers, and the extent of markets. Schwiedland ultimately treats changing outlets for goods, rather than technological progress alone, as the governing explanation of industrial transformation.

Household production begins with economic self-sufficiency: production serves the domestic unit, whose internal division of labor can expand through slavery and serfdom. Ancient estates, medieval domains, and extended families illustrate related organizational principles. Such arrangements also survive alongside more commercially developed forms:

De nos jours encore, nous voyons le paysan apte à tous les travaux, en Russie aussi bien qu'en Norvège et en Bukovine¹.

English translation: In our own day we still see the peasant capable of every kind of work, in Russia as well as in Norway and in the Bukovina¹.

These contemporary examples complicate a strictly chronological reading of the classification. Household production itself changes when unequal resources and material necessity draw producers into exchange:

La nécessité et l'inégalité des propriétés donnent naissance au deuxième degré de l'industrie du foyer que l'on retrouve là où elle n'a plus seulement en vue de satisfaire aux besoins domestiques, mais où elle porte au marché l'excédent dont elle dispose.

English translation: Necessity and the inequality of properties give birth to the second degree of household industry, which is found where it no longer has in view merely the satisfaction of domestic needs, but where it carries to market the surplus at its disposal.

Marketing a surplus is an intermediate development, not an immediate abandonment of domestic production. Another opening arises when dependent workers supply services outside the household. Schwiedland identifies ancient precedents:

Nous voyons que les seigneurs grecs et romains louaient leurs esclaves ou permettaient à ceux qui étaient parvenus à un certain degré d'habileté d'offrir leurs services en retour de salaires à des étrangers.

English translation: We see that the Greek and Roman lords hired out their slaves, or permitted those who had attained a certain degree of skill to offer their services to strangers in return for wages.

Hired work thus emerges through partial changes in dependence. Workers may enter customers’ households or process customers’ materials in their own workshops. The decisive distinction is not the location of work but ownership of its material. Roman legal distinctions between hiring and sale help explain why an artisan working outside a landlord’s establishment is not necessarily an independent entrepreneur.

Independent craft develops when workers acquire materials and sell finished goods. This gives artisans control over productive resources while differentiating masters with operating funds from workers employed as assistants. Economic independence therefore develops through successive changes in control, not through a single release from servitude. Direct relations with customers support small enterprises and occupational specialization, but also generate conflicts: guilds defend trade boundaries, resist competing hired workers, and protect increasingly narrow jurisdictions.

The extension of markets transforms these relations again. Domestic outwork becomes prominent as local outlets expand into national and international trade, although Schwiedland recognizes medieval precedents. Entrepreneurs supply materials and designs to dispersed workers whose products reach consumers through commercial intermediaries. The fabrique collective associated with the Le Play school joins decentralized manufacture to concentrated control of circulation. Schwiedland connects this arrangement with irregular overproduction, crises, payment in goods, usurious lending, and depressed wages. Commercial mediation becomes a source of workers’ insecurity.

Factory production instead coordinates differentiated tasks under an entrepreneur possessing the means of production. Organization, rather than machinery alone, defines the form: decomposing operations permits both mechanization and the calculated combination of different kinds of labor. Concentrated ownership also restricts workers’ prospects of establishing independent enterprises. Yet factories do not simply replace outwork. Variable demand and fashion-sensitive production encourage subcontracting, through which entrepreneurs transfer costs and risks to domestic workers.

The conclusion gathers these forms into a history of productive ownership, moving from household resources through workers’ tools and artisans’ materials to merchants’ circulating goods and manufacturers’ concentrated assets. Schwiedland draws from Bücher an inference related to Brentano’s argument: industrial organization and technique share a deeper determinant in conditions of sale. Market reach, distance from consumers, and commercial intermediaries explain the transformations. The article thereby joins industrial classification to an analysis of market dependence while preserving the coexistence of its historical forms.