Operations of high finance represented the future of capitalist Europe. The economy as a whole was still closer in most respects to the Middle Ages. Midland and northern England, a belt along the Urals, Catalonia, the Po valley, and Flanders were scenes of exceptionally large-scale operations during the 18th century. The mines, quarries, mills, and factories of entrepreneurs such as Josse van Robais, the Dutch industrialist brought in by Colbert to produce textiles in Abbeville, only emphasized, by contrast, the primitive conditions of most manufacturing enterprise. Technology relied on limited equipment. Peter the Great saw it at its most impressive when he visited Holland in 1697. In villages along the Zaan River were lumber saws powered by 500 windmills and yards equipped with cranes and stacked with timber cut to set lengths to build fluitschips to a standard design.

The typical unit of production, however, was the domestic enterprise, with apprentices and journeymen living with family and servants. The merchant played a vital part in the provision of capital. When metalworkers made knives or needles for a local market, they could remain their own masters. For a larger market, they had to rely on businessmen for fuel, ore, wages, and transport. In textiles the capital and marketing skills of the entrepreneur were essential to cottagers. This putting-out system spread as merchants saw the advantages of evading guild control. When the cotton industry was developed around Rouen and Barcelona, it was organized in the same way as woolen textiles. In the old industrial order, output could be increased only in proportion to the number of workers involved. In England the new order was evolving, and ranks of machines in barracklike mills were producing for a mass market. The need to produce economically could transform an industry, as in Brabant, where peasants moved into the weaving side of the linen trade and then established bleaching works that ruined traditionally dominant Haarlem. It also altered the social balance, as in electoral Saxony where, between 1550 and 1750, the proportion of peasants who made most of their living by industry rose from 5 to 30 percent of the population. With such change came the dependence on capital and the market that was to make the worker so vulnerable.

Inevitably the expansion of domestic manufactures brought problems of control, which were eventually resolved by concentration in factories and by technical advances large enough to justify investment in machinery. Starting with the Lombe brothers’ silk mills, their exploitation of secrets acquired from Italy (1733), and John Kaye’s flying shuttle, British inventions set textile production on a dizzy path of growth. Abraham Darby’s process of coke smelting was perhaps the most important single improvement, since it liberated the iron founder from dependence on charcoal. The shortage of timber, a source of anxiety everywhere except in Russia and Scandinavia, proved to be a stimulus to invention and progress. Technical development on the Continent was less remarkable. The nine volumes of the Theatrum Machinarum (1724), Jakob Leupold’s description of engineering, records steady development reflecting the craftsman’s empirical outlook. Improvement could be modest indeed. A miller could grind 37 pounds (17 kilograms) of flour each day in the 12th century; by 1700 it might have been 55 pounds. In some areas there were long intervals between theoretical advances and technological application. Galileo, Evangelista Torricelli, Otto von Guericke, and Blaise Pascal worked on the vacuum in the first half of the 17th century, and Denis Papin later experimented with steam engines; however, it was not until 1711 that Thomas Newcomen produced a model that was of any practical use despite the great need for power. Mining, already well advanced, was held back by difficulties of drainage. In the Rohrerbuhel copper mines in the Tyrol, the Heiliger Geist shaft, at 2,900 feet (886 metres), remained the deepest in the world until 1872; a third of its labour force was employed in draining. Increases in productivity were generally found in those manufacturing activities where, as in the part-time production of linen in Silesia, the skills required were modest and the raw material could be produced locally.

Specialized manufacturing, evolving to meet the rising demand generated by the enrichment of the upper classes, showed significant growth. Wherever technical ingenuity was challenged by the needs of the market, results could be impressive. Printing was of seminal importance, since the advance of knowledge depended on it. Improvements in type molds and founding contributed to a threefold increase between 1600 and 1700 in the number of pages printed in a day. The Hollander, a pulverizing machine (c. 1670), could produce more pulp for paper than eight stamping mills. The connection between technical innovation and style is illustrated by improvements in glassmaking that made possible not only the casting of large sheets for mirrors but also, by 1700, the larger panes required for the sash windows that were replacing the leaded panes of casements. Venice lost its dominant position in the manufacture of glass as rulers set up works to save expensive imports. A new product sometimes followed a single discovery, as when the Saxons Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus and Johann Friedrich Böttger successfully imitated Chinese hard paste and created the porcelain of Meissen. A way of life could be affected by one invention. The pendulum clock of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens introduced an age of reliable timekeeping. Clocks were produced in great numbers, and Geneva’s production of 5,000 timepieces a year was overtaken by 1680 by the clockmakers of both London and Paris. With groups of workers each responsible for a particular task, such as the making of wheels or the decoration of dials, specialization led to enhanced production, and in these elegant products of traditional craftsmanship the division of labour appeared.