State Corporatism and Proto-Industry focuses on an industrial countryside in south-west Germany, where a dense worsted industry dominated the rural economy from 1580 to 1800. This is an example of 'proto-industry', the dense, export-oriented rural manufacturing which arose throughout Europe before factory industrialization. But although the Württemberg worsted industry possessed all the features of a classic proto-industry, closer scrutiny throws doubt on basic assumptions about European proto-industrialization. In this book, Sheilagh Ogilvie shows that proto-industries did not break down traditional society. Instead, corporate institutions such as guilds, merchant companies, village communities and manorial systems retained enormous power. This was a result of 'state corporatism': the expanding early modern state granted privileges to favoured groups in return for fiscal and regulatory co-operation. As Ogilvie shows, these corporate privileges profoundly constrained both individual decisions and economic development.

Joint winners of the highly prestigious Gyorgi Ranki prize of the Economic History Association for the best books in European Economic History published in 1997 or 1998

‘… [this is] a work of rigorous scholarship which locates the evidence from the Black Forest within a broader European framework. It is only on the basis of studies such as this that the institutional determinants of long-term growth in Continental Europe will be understood more clearly.’

Source: Labour History Review