Study On The Western European Merchant Capitalists And Putting-out System In The Transition Period

Since the late Middle Ages,a series of changes have taken place around industrial production in Western European society,especially in British society.In this process,merchant capital and industrial production are closely intertwined,and merchants began to pay more attention to all aspects of production and living,and to maintain close ties with markets.The merchants who act as a bridge between the small producers and the market are called merchant capitalists.Merchant capitalists took the step by step to take away the sales ability and production tools of the original independent producers and achieve their comprehensive control of industrial production,resulting in a gradual transformation of the production relations to capitalist employment forms,thereby promoting significant changes in the form of social production organization.In the early modern period,the system of production operated by merchant capitalists with capital of continuous circulation developed and the capitalist mode of production matured.This paper focuses on the origin of the merchant capitalists and their activities of organizing production,that span is from the medieval period their appearance in Western European society to the 16 th and 17 th centuries their general development in the handicraft industry in rural areas of England.It tries to analyze the specific operation mode of handicraft production under the putting-out system,and finally tries to find out the basic laws of social production development from the phenomenon that the merchant capitalists are involved in industrial production.The introduction part mainly clarifies the main issues to be studied in this paper,the reasons and basis for choosing this topic,and the analysis of the concepts of“merchant capitalists” and “the putting-out system” which is involved.The first chapter focuses on introducing Marx’s classic theories in a series of great works like“Capital Theory”.Western scholars have successively started research about capitalist production of Western European society before the Industrial Revolution with the solid theoretical basis since the beginning of the 20 th century.The exploration ofmethods has subsequently been joined by Chinese scholars.The second chapter first examines the emergence of merchant capitalists in major cities in Western Europe since the Middle Ages.It elaborates on the gradual release of handicraft production in the early British cities from the feudal guild system and the renewal of the capitalist production system dominated by the capital-carrying merchants or successful craftsmen.At the end of this chapter,it also describes the organizational activities of merchant capitalists in the textile industry in the areas where the putting-out system developed earlier in Britain.The third chapter shifts the perspective to British rural industry that has the most developed putting-out system.It analyzes merchant capitalists in the woolen textile industry in West Riding of Yorkshire,in the small metal manufacturing industry in West Midlands and in the cotton textile industry in Lancashire,as well as the “New Draperies” manufacturing in East Anglia,and pertinently explains the continuous improvement of rural industries in various regions in Britain driven by the merchants and the needs of market.Based on the analysis of the special group of merchant capitalists and the phenomenon of their involvement in industrial production,this paper attempts to clarify the important role of merchant capitalists in the innovation of industrial production system in Western Europe,and to reveal the inevitable path of Western European society first shifting from feudal production to capitalist machine production.