ABSTRACT
Industrialization involved the movement of labor and resources away from primary production (agriculture, fishing, forestry) toward manufacturing and commercial and service activities. The scale of production increased and the factory replaced the household as the center of productive activity. In the terms we have been using, the industrial mode of production replaced the domestic mode of production. The process of industrialization was gradual, and it affected different groups of people at different times. Over the long run, the decline of small units of production meant a decline in the numbers of propertied peasants and craftsmen and an increase in proletarians, propertyless people working for wages. The family wage economy, which had characterized the family organization of propertyless people in the past, became an increasingly common form of family organization among the working classes. The system which organized European industrialization was capitalism.
