We have called this collection of essays Before the Unions. What exactly do we mean by (trade) unions and what preceded them? Exactly a hundred years ago Beatrice and Sydney Webb defined a trade union as “a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment”. These permanent organizations of wage earners of the same occupation, according to most labour historians, started at a local level and tended to develop into national and sometimes even international unions and they formulated political as well as economic demands.

The paths of historical research resemble the forces in the sea. As some topics surface and rise to ever greater heights, others may be dragged to the depths of silence and cease to affect the beating of the waves. In most western European countries, research on journeymen has suffered this second fate. Along with the decline in interest in guild-based economies, the issue of whether pre-industrial journeymen associations were predecessors (or perhaps adumbrations) of modern trade unions, which had inspired widespread debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, faded from the agenda following World War II. This trend does not mean that the new generation of social historians has blithely ignored disputes involving journeymen. Nevertheless, many authors designate such events as crowd movements or view them as obvious forms of traditional resistance.

The process by which journeymen became masters and came to run printing houses of their own was seriously undermined in Europe from the sixteenth century on. As a rule, there was a concentration of a few printing presses in a handful of urban workshops. These were dominated by several fairly well-known families which encouraged the development of state control. This was a period of religious and political turmoil, particularly in England and France. Few studies on the early history of the printing industry are as thorough and illuminating as Natalie Zemon Davis's work on Lyons. In this large and prosperous French city, the rapidly expanding sixteenth-century printing industry employed many male immigrants who often spent all their adult lives as wage earners working as pressmen or compositors in a trade that was very different from that of their fathers. Both government and guild intervention contributed extensively and almost continuously to the expansion of this urban body of permanent journeymen in the capital-intensive Printing trade before the Industrial Revolution. Looking back on his career as a journeyman and foreman in the mid eighteenth-century Parisian world of printing, Restif de la Bretonne presumably articulated a widespread opinion when he wrote in his autobiographical writings that among printers “un ouvrier ne devient jamais maitre […] les maîtres engendrent des maîtres, et les compagnons des compagnons et ainsi de génération en génération.” In fact, the position of foreman in a printing establishment was the pinnacle of a lifetime of waged labour. The Dutch journeyman and overseer David Wardenaar in his manual Beschrijving der Boekdrukkunst (1801) described the journeymen (knechts) together with other wage earners as being without alternative prospects (“arbeiders […] bedongen loon […] om dat hij geen ander uitzicht heeft”) and as the workers of an unpayable craft (“gezellen de beärbeiders zijn van het nut […] door deze onbetaalbare kunst”).

There exists no such thing as a single mode for the social organization of proto-industrial iron production, but a number of alternative ways. In the following article the dominance of one or another mode is viewed as dependent on its societal context, and not least on the social relations of the rural world. Each mode of organization had its own peculiarities and generated its own contradictions and conflicts.

Many studies on proto-industrialization have followed Franklin Mendels' work, and virtually all concern cottage industries in rural areas. Occasionally, authors are also interested in urban proto-industries, which are correctly considered home industries here. This production method (aside from traditional manual labour) has certainly been decisive, both in supplying expanding markets during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in raising capital for commercial production of goods. Cottage industries were the prevailing form of industry at the start of the Industrial Revolution (and during the preceding periods) and were consequently a direct prerequisite for it.

The friend of Havelock Wilson, the founder of the National Union of Seamen, who once told him that true unity among seamen would never be achieved because seamen were like “a rope of sand”, washed away with every tide, would no longer be considered a sage. It was not only Wilson who, during his career as trade unionist, proved beyond any doubt that the “rope of sand” could indeed hold together. The seamen, too, had shown long before the rise of the new unions at the end of the nineteenth century that they possessed more cohesive power than Havelock's friend was prepared to credit them with – at least, if British employers are to be believed. One of the first occasions on which British employers appealed to the Combination Act of 1799 was during a labour dispute in December 1799, when coal merchants (through the intermediary of the Mayor of London) urged the Home Secretary to take action against an alleged combination of seamen in Shields. The Coal Trade Committee of 1800 blamed combinations of seamen for the high wages, which had reached an unprecedented level.

The emergence of wage labour in Europe has traditionally been seen as a transition from peasant agriculture to employment in urban industries involving permanent migration from rural areas to the cities. In this context migration was often depicted as a flight from the land forced by enclosure or by famine. This particular form of proletarianization-cumurbanization was indeed of major historical significance. Recently, how-ever, many historians have tried to shift the emphasis in another direction. According to one such scholar, Charles Tilly, European demographic growth from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century was caused predominantly by the proletarianization outside the cities which was induced by the modernization of agriculture and, above all, by proto-industry. Migration also plays an important role in this model. Firstly, early modern European proletarianization led to net migration losses of European proletarians who left for white settlement colonies, as in the cases of Spain, England and southern Germany. Secondly, proletarianization had major mobilizing effects on the rural population by way of short-distance and temporary or seasonal migration, followed by long-distance migration during the nineteenth century. As a rule, proto-industry caused indirect proletarianization through self-employment which brought the work to the labourers rather than causing migration.