The Economic History Review

Manufacturing quality in the pre‐industrial age: finding value in diversity

Volume 53 Issue 3
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Pages: 493-516Authors: Pierre Claude Reynard
Published online: January 22, 2003DOI: 10.1111/1468-0289.00168

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When deployed on a large and rational scale and committed to high throughput levels, early modern manufacturing methods inevitably yielded a substantial proportion of non-standard and defective items. This proportion could only increase as the pace of work accelerated in the eighteenth century. Manufacturers regained a degree of control over their marketing strategies through the more or less rigorous sorting of this output, in a pattern suited to their markets. In so doing, they forged a transitional definition of quality that moved away from the linear pursuit of excellence that motivated their predecessors towards a relative understanding of the needs of diverse groups of buyers.

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