ABSTRACT
Research on export industries in early modern Europe has long focused on rural areas. This interest is understandable, as many economic historians have been convinced ever since the publications by Henri Pirenne1 that from the late Middle Ages industrial growth was incompatible with corporative interventions and regulations,2 i.e. with the context in which much of urban production occurred until the end of the Ancien Régime (and in some cases until well into the nineteenth century). This perspective will easily lead to descriptions of urban and rural types of manufacturing in terms of dichotomies, such as regulated versus unregulated, rigid versus À exible, monopolist versus market-oriented, medieval versus modern. In the 1970s and 80s adherents of proto-industrialization theories, following Franklin Mendels,3 reinforced such views, by attributing the superiority of the rural export industries to wage differences as well: in search of labour less expensive than the reproduction costs, merchant capital targeted the countryside, with its growing reservoir of comparatively inexpensive labour.4 Several authors readily submit that only the rural export industries achieved the dynamics necessary for structural economic change, thereby making the transition to modern types of manufacture.5
