The last chapter ended with a complementary relationship – let us pick it up again: on the one hand the putting-out industry gave people a homeland in the comprehensive sense of the term; on the other hand these people ensured that the textile industry found stability within their economic and cultural area, in spite of all crises. The ‘industrial landscape’ grew out of this complementary relationship. What do we understand by the term?

‘Industrial landscape’ is a cultural and morphological term. The cultural landscape is stamped with visible signs of the putting-out industry. We have learnt about them during our research. They are the changes to settlement, buildings and home life – changes to husbandry, use of the soil and field patterns (Chapter 4). On top of this there are the thousand and one things which spring to the traveller's eye as he journeys through the industrial regions of the Zurich landscape; it could be the spinning work place beside every village well, the rotting and abandoned weaving equipment, the broken spinning wheels near the woodpile – or it could be the yarn and cloth dealers with their packs on their backs, whom he meets on the road, the mules laden with cotton bales or the spinner-girls in their fasionable clothes. They all tell him that he is passing through a bit of country in which the putting-out system is at home.

When the putting-out system is at home in a landscape, it is clear that the term ‘industrial landscape’ involves more than just these external signs.