ABSTRACT
In the early stages of the industrial revolution in England, as every child knows, the leading actresses were home-based workers, for whom a modest livelihood was first made and then broken by technical changes in textilemaking and its transfer out of the hands of homeworkers into those of large capitalist factories. Since that time 200 years ago the role of homebased workers has expanded, diversified and globalised, to the point that it is impossible to understand either the process of technical change, or the possibilities for global poverty reduction which are the subject of this volume, without a consideration of that role. In this chapter we examine the manner in which that role has been transformed by processes of globalisation, its implications for the evolution of global poverty and the policies by which that poverty can be reduced.
