Alain Dewerpe, Entre histoire économique et histoire sociale : la protoindustrialisation

Abstract

Invented by Franklin Mendels in the early 1970, as a result of his PHD about the Flanders, and developped by a dynamic group of young historians working with Hans Medick at the Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte de Göttingen (Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung,1977), the word itself and very quickly the model of protoindustrialization had its period of largest success and most interesting achievements in the late 1970-early 1980. It opened the way for the historians of the transition process to identify in the mobilization of the rural labour labour forces and in the delocalization in some areas of the European countryside of a large range of mainly textile manufactures the deciding factor of a first proletarisation, alternative to the « classic » peasants expropriation. Alain Dewerpe participated actively at this time in the historical debate about this topic. First with a research on the Liri’s valley (in the Naples Kingdom) where he put in evidence « a marginal protoindustrialization » (1981). Then with his PHD (published in 1985), L’Industrie aux champs. Essai sur la protoindustrialisation en Italie du nord (1800-1880). Despite its questioning of the classic model of a late-comer industrial development accepted for Italy by a majority of scholars, this “essay” is still to-day a reference book, that analyze all the potentialities of its theoretical model. But it confirmed also his ambition to follow a new way he had already defined in 1977 : “the monography of an enterprise aiming to study the concepts of investment, technical resources, profits, wages, etc, so to have access to a broader view of the problems ». This ambition inspired his choice ot Ansaldo that will be the core of his own work up to the end of his life.

Keywords

• family
• Italy
• industrialization
• protoindustrialization
• labour
• Piemont