Proto-industry

‘Proto-industry’ is a concept coined in 1969 by the American historian Franklin Mendels in his thesis on the linen industry in 18th-century Flanders (Mendels 1969). Taken up by others, notably by the German historians of the Göttingen group—, Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schulbohm (Medick, Kriedte, Schulbohm, 1977)—it was the subject of considerable debate among European historians in the 1980s and 1990s before becoming a term often stripped of its original precise meaning.