ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the depictions of hand paper-making in that characteristic form of enlightened publication, the multivolume, technical encyclopedia. Both the texts and illustrations in Old Regime encyclopedias offered highly rationalized and idealized versions of paper production. If technological curiosity and Diderot’s vision contributed to Robert’s pursuit of a paper-making machine, he made it clear that he was driven by his desire to expel the autonomous journeymen along with their skill. As a result, the master paper-makers faced nineteenth-century demand with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century output schedules. In practice, Joel Mokyr’s industrial Enlightenment was at once a set of institutional transformations and a campaign that exposed “tacit artisanal savoir-faire” and its supposedly inflexible nature to the sunlight of scientific inspection. Neither Thompson’s moral economy of the marketplace or Jan de Vries’ account of a new market orientation in worker households captures the trade’s social relations of production.
