Traditional European manufacturing was carried on in 2 different systems. Gild and cottage industry. Gild was placed in towns and cities, cottage in largely rural areas.
The gild was a professional organization of free artisans skilled in a particular craft. The skills passed from generation to generation through an apprenticeship system. A boy served as a apprentice, for example, copper or potter worked a few years as helper and at the end the young men demonstrated his skills before an examining board composed of members of the particular gild.
Many relicts of the guild system remained till today as for a membership typical standards.
A much more common traditional system of manufacturing, cottage industry, remained confined to European farm villages, generally practiced as a sideline to agriculture.
In Britain during the 1600 century some skilled craftsmen begin to move to rural areas to escape confining, formal character of the urban guilds, which acted to keep membership and production low, while the quality of goods and prices remained high. By fleeing to the villages and small towns they had the freedom to increase output and cheapen products and so to enlarge the market.
In cottage industry, the outputs began to increase and they sold in a larger territory, abandoning farming all together.
All this happened in small corners of England and let to manufacturing innovations occurred in the 1700 forever changing England, Europe and the entire world.
Both primary and secondary industry, both gild and cottage manufacturing systems were fundamentally altered by the industrial revolution.
The inventions that have been made represent the most rapid and pervasive tech. change in the history of human race.
First machines replaced human hands in extracting primary resources and fashioning products. Through machines the job could be done faster and more economically.
The second change involved the rise of inanimate...