ABSTRACT
In pre-industrial societies most production occurred close to, if not within, the household. Thus consumption and production cohabited in a way that would have made it impossible to separate analytically-as modern textbooks do-the activity of ‘making things’ from that of consuming them. Only after the establishment of explicitly market-societies in which people produced not goods but commodities (i.e. goods whose whole reason for being produced was so that they could be traded in some market), and the subsequent emergence of the factory (see Section 1.1), was production moved far from where people lived and slept. Indeed it took the whole might of the industrial revolution to create the distinction between the private and public spheres that we take for granted today and which encouraged economists to spend much time analysing production outside the context of the ekos (ekos, the root of the word economics emanating from the Ancient Greek which means ‘home’).
