Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

As a whole, the transformation of the petty trades into great industries goes on with a slowness which cannot fail to astonish even those who are convinced of its necessity.

Now, the advantages offered by a large factory in comparison with hand work are self-evident as regards the economy of labour, and especially--this is the main point--the facilities both for sale and for having the raw produce at a lower…

How can we then explain the persistence of the petty trades?

When I began to study the subject some thirty years ago, I never guessed, from the little attention devoted to it by the orthodox economists, what a wide, complex, important, and interesting organisation would appear at the end of a closer…

Consequently, up to the present time all the statements made by economists about the so-called “concentration” of the industry in this country, and the consequent “unavoidable” disappearance of the small industries, have been based on mere…

But it is especially in the division of the non-textile industries that we find an enormous development of small factories.

Many of my readers will probably be astonished to learn that even in the cotton industry a great number of quite small factories continue to exist up to the present day.

The great industry is thus very far from having absorbed the small one.

This could have been foreseen by everyone who has some practical knowledge of industry, but it is overlooked by the theorists, who know industry mostly from books.

In every country of the world there are by the side of the large factories a great number of small ones, the success of which is due to the variety of their produce and the facilities they offer to follow the vagaries of fashion.

In other words, in the manufacture of woollens, shoddy, hemp, hair, machine-made lace, and mechanical knitting, as also in the weaving of silks, there are, of course, large factories; but the majority of these establishments belong to the…

In the fabrication of food produce we find several great sugar, chocolate, and preserves works; but by their side we find also a very great number of small establishments, which seem not to complain of the proximity of the big ones, as…

We thus see that even in this country, which may be considered as representing the highest development of the great industry, the number of persons employed in the small trade continues to be immense.

The Sheffield cutlery--one of the glories of England--is not made by machinery: it is chiefly made by hand.

And it must be said that the triumphs of the factory were too often achieved only by means of the most fraudulent adulteration and the underpaid labour of the children.

The petty trades are thus an important factor of industrial life even in Great Britain, although many of them have gathered into the towns.

New industries thus grow up to supplant the old ones; each of them passes through a preliminary stage on a small scale before reaching the great factory stage; and the more active the inventive genius of a nation is, the more it has of…

The countless small bicycle works which have lately grown up in this country, and are supplied with ready-made parts of the bicycle by the larger factories, are an instance in point.

Besides, the large factory stimulates the birth of new petty trades by creating new wants.

The cheapness of cottons and woollens, of paper and brass, has created hundreds of new small industries.

We must not wonder, therefore, if we see so many small trades in this country; but we must regret that the great number have abandoned the villages in consequence of the bad conditions of land tenure, and that they have migrated in such…

The small village jam-makers were the precursors and the rudiments of the great factories of preserves which now employ hundreds of workers.

The most wonderful adaptations of the small industries to new requirements, and substantial technical progress in the methods of production, can be noted at the same time.

It is evident that in most textile industries the power-loom supersedes the hand-loom, and the factory takes, or has taken already, the place of the cottage industry.

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.