Putting-out system

Historian David A. Hounshell writes: In 1854, the British obtained their military small arms through a system of contracting with private manufacturers located principally in the Birmingham and London areas ...

It served as a way for employers and workers to bypass the guild system, which was thought to be cumbersome and inflexible, and to access a rural labor force.

Workers were working remotely, manufacturing individual articles from raw materials, then bringing them to a central place of business, such as a marketplace or a larger town, to be assembled and sold.

Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt" (1843) describes the wretched life of a woman in Lambeth labouring under such a system.

In what was, at that time, common practice, she sewed trousers and shirts in her home using materials given to her by her employer, for which she was forced to give a £2 deposit.

He contracted up to 200 domestic workers, who came to his house to get the raw material and returned after a couple of weeks with textiles, which local pedlars from the city of Borås then bought and went out to sell, among other things, around Sweden and Norway.

[5] The term originally referred to home workers who were engaged in a task such as sewing, lace-making, wall hangings, or household manufacturing.

Business operators would travel around the world, buying raw materials, delivering them to people who would work on them, and then collecting the finished goods to sell, or typically to ship to another market.

One of the factors which allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place in Western Europe was the presence of these business people who had the ability to expand the scale of their operations.