Cottage industry

Cottage industry

A cottage industry is an industry—primarily manufacturing—which includes many producers, working from their homes, and originally was often organized through the putting-out system. The biggest participants in this system were the merchant capitalist and the rural worker. The merchant would "put out" basic materials to the cottage workers, who then prepared the materials in their own homes and returned the finished merchandise back to the merchant. The term first referred to home workers who were engaged in a task such as sewing, lace-making, wall hangings, or household manufacturing. Some industries which are nowadays usually operated from large, centralized factories were cottage industries before the Industrial Revolution. 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 locally 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. In Russia, the Kustar were rural artisans engaged in cottage industries. Such industries were very common at a time when much of the population was engaged in agriculture, because the farmers and their families often had both the time and the desire to earn additional income during the part of the year (winter) when there was little work to do in farming or selling produce.