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What is known to economic history as the era of handicraft is for the purposes of the political historian spoken of as the era of statemaking. The two designations may not cover precisely the same interval, but they coincide in a general way in point of dates, and the phenomena which have given rise to the two designations have much more than an accidental connection. It is not simply that the development of handicraft happens to fall in the same general period of history that is characterised by the dynastic wars that went to the making of the larger states. The growth of handicraft had much to do with making the large states practicable and with supplying the material means of large-scale warfare; while the traffic of dynastic politics in that time had in its turn very much to do with bringing that era of industrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. The new industry supplied the sinews of war, and the wars ate up the substance of the industrial community.
The new industry gave rise to a growth of industrial towns and commercial centres, primarily occupied by the traffic of the itinerant traders. One of the immediate consequences of this extension of merchandising enterprise was the improvement of means of communication, both in the way of an extension and improvement of shipping—itself a technological fact—and in the way of improved routes of communication. A secondary consequence was a growth of population, coupled with its concentration in urban centres, together with a growth of wealth, in good part drawn together in the same centres. These changes enabled the powers in control to extend an effectual coercion over larger distances and over larger aggregations of population and wealth; it became practicable, mechanically, to swing a larger political aggregation and to hold it together in closer coördination than before. The physical conditions requisite to the formation and enduring maintenance of large political organisations were in this way supplied by the new industrial era as an incidental result of its technological efficiency.
More direct and obvious, though of no graver importance, is the contribution made by the new technology to the means of coercion placed at the disposal of the warlords, in the way of improved weapons and armour, defences and warlike appliances. The improvements worked out in the means of warfare during the early half of the era of handicraft exceed in material effect and in boldness of conception all the traceable improvements wrought in that line by all the warlike peoples of classical antiquity and all the fighting aggregations of Asia and Africa, from the beginning of the bronze age down to modern times. The craftsmen spent their best endeavours and their most brilliant ingenuity on this production of arms and munitions, with the result that these articles still lie over in the modern collections as the most finished productions of workmanship which that era has to show. The (unintended) result at large was that these improved appliances enabled the warlords and their fighting men to control the industrial classes for their own ends and to levy exactions on trade and industry up to the limit of what the traffic would bear, or perhaps more commonly somewhat over that limit. It was, in this way, their own technological mastery that furnished the means of their own undoing, directly (mechanically speaking) and indirectly (in the resulting growth of warlike sentiment).
That the craftsmen went so diligently into this production of ways and means for their own discomfort and abiding defeat is due not to any innately perverse bent of the sense of workmanship as it comes to expression in the spirit of the handicraft community, but rather to the exigencies created by the price system, with its principles of self-help,—a secondary, conventional product of the handicraft industry. As has been noted already, with perhaps tedious iteration, there runs through the handicraft community a high-wrought spirit of individual self-sufficiency. So soon as the petty trade has grown to effective dimensions the individual workman comes into somewhat direct relations with the market, and except for the collective interest and action embodied in the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in little else than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow craftsmen or to the community. It is the place of each to gain a livelihood by honest work through his own individual skill and enterprise. Notoriously, the craftsmen were in effect lacking in that sense of solidarity that makes an efficient organisation for defence or offence; concerted action, outside the regulative activity of the gild, was to be had only with extreme difficulty on any other basis than individual pecuniary advantage. Each worked for himself, with an eye steadily to the main chance. And the main chance, from an early date in this era, meant gain in terms of price. So the craftsman worked for such customers as would pay his price, and he spent his skill and ingenuity on such goods as were in demand. The trade in arms and weapons was good at that time. These appliances were a means of livelihood to the men at arms and a means of income and prestige to their princely employers. So the traffic went busily on, and the individual craftsmen put forth their best efforts toward enhancing the efficiency of the ruling and fighting classes, whose endeavours, without much collusion but by the inevitable drift of circumstance, converged on the subjection of the community of craftsmen at large and on the exhaustion of the community’s resources.
Through its side issue in the commercial enterprise which it fostered the handicraft industry brought to the hands of the politicians a further means of trouble. The trade brought on the price system, and so made it possible for ambitious princes to buy what they needed in their warlike negotiations; with funds in hand stores and munitions could be bought where they were needed, so enabling warlike operations to be carried on with greater facility at a greater distance than was feasible under the earlier rule of contributions in kind. The price system also enabled the warlords to hire mercenaries, and so to organise and maintain a standing force of skilled fighting men, mobile and irresponsible. But to hold one’s own in the competitive use of this new arm the prince must have funds; which led incontinently to all available manner of exactions on trade and commerce, since it was from these sources almost solely that funds could be had. But it led also and equally to an increasing traffic between the princes and the captains of industry, for the use of funds. Funds had become the sinews of war, since the handicraft industry had come to turn out goods for sale and the merchandising trade had made funds accessible in sufficient volume to be worth while. So the princes dealt with the captains of industry, selling what they could and hypothecating what they could not sell, in a competitive struggle to outdo one another at war and diplomacy. The game was then as always an emulative one, in which any advantage was a differential advantage only. Hence the princes engaged, each and several, needed all the funds they could get the use of, and their need was ever present, not to be deferred. Hence they borrowed what they could and where they could, their borrowings being floated by the help of all manner of expedients. Some of these fiscal expedients brought monopolistic advantage to the captains of industry, and so contributed to their further gain and to the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Meantime, the princely chancelries, being in debt as far as possible, extorted further loans from the captains by seizure and by threats of bankruptcy; and whatever was borrowed was expeditiously used up in the destruction of property, population, industrial plant and international commerce. So, when all available resources of revenue and credit, present and prospective, had been exhausted, and all the accessible material had been consumed, the princely fisc went into bankruptcy, followed by its creditors, the captains of industry, followed by the business community at large with whose funds they had operated and by the industrial community, whose stock of goods and appliances was exhausted, whose trade connections were broken and whose working population had been debauched, scattered and reduced to poverty and subjection by the wars, revenue collectors and forced contributions. Meantime, too, habituation to the sentiments, ideals, standards and manner of life suitable to a state of predation had swamped the handicraft spirit and put abnegation and dependence on arbitrary power in the place of that initiative and pertinacious self-reliance that had made the era of handicraft. It was from this eventuality that England in great measure escaped by favour of her insular position and the inability of her princes to draw a reluctant industrial community into the traffic of dynastic intrigue that filled the Continent.
It will have been remarked that one of the essential moves in this sequence of events, from the beginnings of handicraft in impecunious and self-reliant workmanship to its eventual collapse in exhaustion, is the gradual accumulation of commercial and industrial wealth in relatively few hands. This accumulation of wealth, or rather its segregation in few hands, appears, as already indicated, to have entered as a potent factor in the course of things that lead the system of handicraft through maturity to collapse, as on the Continent, or to decay, as in England. It will accordingly be in place to go somewhat more narrowly into the circumstances of its beginnings and growth and the manner in which it plays its part in the organisation of the handicraft industry.
It appears that this uneven distribution of wealth arises out of the technological exigencies of handicraft and of the petty trade which characteristically runs along with the handicraft industry in its early stages.[132] In its earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as known in mediæval Europe was like its congener, the manual arts of the savage and lower barbarian peoples, in that the whole material equipment requisite to its pursuit consisted of a skilled workman and an extremely slender kit of tools. The tradition countenanced by historical students says that the beginnings of the handicraft system, with its specialised industry and trained workmanship, is due to such workmen, possessed of substantially nothing but their own persons, who escaped in one way and another from the bonds of the manorial system, or its equivalent, and found shelter on sufferance near some feudal protector or religious corporation that found some advantage in this novel arrangement.[133]
On looking into this inchoate working arrangement between these masterless workmen and their patrons, and generalising the run of facts as may be permitted an inquiry that aims at theoretical presentation rather than historical description, the probable causal relation running through these obscure events will appear somewhat as follows. It happened in Europe, as it has happened now and again elsewhere, that the ownership of the soil in advanced feudal times took shape as a Landed Interest living at peace and under settled relations with the community from which they drew their livelihood and their means of controlling the community. Under these circumstances there grew up an ever-widening industrial system, under manorial auspices, in which the foremost place is taken by the mechanic arts, in the way of specialised crafts and mechanical processes and appliances. The tranquil conditions that prevail under such a settled, pacific or sub-predatory scheme of control bring out an increased volume of consumable products, particularly since these same settled conditions admit a larger and more economical use of all industrial appliances. The immediate consequence is that an increased net product accrues to the propertied class; which calls them to an intensified consumption of goods; which requires increased elaboration and diversity of products; which calls for an increasing diversity and volume of appliances and more prolonged and elaborate technological processes. The needs of the propertied class, particularly in the way of superfluities, reach such a degree of diversity that it is no longer practicable to supply these needs by specialised work within the industrial framework of the manor or its equivalent. The itinerant trade comes in to help out in this difficult passage by bringing exotic luxuries, curious articles of great price; but that is not sufficient to cover the requirements of the case, since there is much needed work of elaboration that cannot be taken care of by way of an importation of finished goods.
Here comes the opportunity of the skilled masterless workman. The growth of wealth has provided a place for him in the economy of the time, and having once got a foothold he and his followers congregate in industrial towns and find a living by the work of their hands.