PhD candidate Industrialization and household textile production in the UK and China: a diachronic comparison, 1750-1990 (1.0 FTE)

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The Department of History and Art History seeks to appoint a PhD candidate for the project “Race to the bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of global cotton manufacturing, ca. 1750-1990”, funded by means of an ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Prof. dr. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk.

The PhD candidate will be working on the following sub project:

PhD project 1: Industrialization and household textile production in the UK and China: a diachronic comparison, 1750-1990

One of the most intriguing questions in global economic history is why western European industries quickly embarked on a capital-intensive mode of production, whereas in other parts of the world, a more labour-intensive route has been taken. The comparison of England and China regularly features in this debate. Recent research has suggested that to solve this question, “it is necessary first to understand the nature of the household economy and its relationship to commercial markets and merchant capital” (Cliver 2010, 107). This project aims to make such an analysis, by making a comparison between the early stages of textile production in the United Kingdom in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the early stages of British industrialization, household production of textiles remained important next to factory production, but at a certain point in time this disappeared. Conversely, in China small-scale production integrated with large-scale industrialized production and has remained so up to the present. This project aims to make a diachronic (i.e. at different points in time) comparison between both regions of the world.

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