ABSTRACT
One segment of the economy that was of considerable importance throughout the district was the handicraft trades. Unfortunately, not a great deal of information is available about it, partly because of its diversity. No single one of its branches was particularly significant by itself in the economy of a given area. Possibly shoemaking is not a representative trade. There are, after all, still cobblers about today. But the point is that the handicraft trades in general are still in existence. It is, of course, primarily on the level of the well-being among artisans that any decision as to extent or even existence of a crisis in the handicraft trades must be based. Some artisans were not simply in circumstances of reasonable comfort for the time but were positively affluent. Artisans also constituted a sizeable proportion of those on poor relief. In Duisburg, for example, at some unspecified date in the 1880s 24% of those on the poor list were handicraftsman.
