The inhabitants of trading cities, by importing the improved manufactures and expensive luxuries of richer countries, afforded some food to the vanity of the great proprietors, who eagerly purchased them with great quantities of the rude produce of their own lands.The commerce of a great part of Europe in those times, accordingly, consisted chiefly in the exchange of their own rude for the, manufactured produce of more civilised nations.Thus the wool of England used to be exchanged for the wines of France and the fine cloths of Flanders, in the same manner as the corn in Poland is at this day exchanged for the wines and brandies of France and for the silks and velvets of France and Italy.
A taste for the finer and more improved manufactures was in this manner introduced by foreign commerce into countries where no such works were carried on.But when this taste became so general as to occasion a considerable demand, the merchants, in order to save the expense of carriage, naturally endeavoured to establish some manufactures of the same kind in their own country.Hence the origin of the first manufactures for distant sale that seem to have been established in the western provinces of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire.No large country, it must be observed, ever did or could subsist without some sort of manufactures being carried on in it; and when it is said of any such country that it has no manufactures, it must always be understood of the finer and more improved or of such as are fit for distant sale.In every large country both the clothing and household furniture of the far greater part of the people are the produce of their own industry.This is even more universally the case in those poor countries which are commonly said to have no manufactures than in those rich ones that are said to abound in them.In the latter, you will generally find, both in the clothes and household furniture of the lowest rank of people, a much greater proportion of foreign productions than in the former.
Those manufactures which are fit for distant sale seem to have been introduced into different countries in two different ways.
Sometimes they have been introduced, in the manner above mentioned, by the violent operation, if one may say so, of the stocks of particular merchants and undertakers, who established them in imitation of some foreign manufactures of the same kind.
Such manufactures, therefore, are the offspring of foreign commerce, and such seem to have been the ancient manufactures of silks, velvets, and brocades, which flourished in Lucca during the thirteenth century.They were banished from thence by the tyranny of one of Machiavel's heroes, Castruccio Castracani.In 1310, nine hundred families were driven out of Lucca, of whom thirty-one retired to Venice and offered to introduce there the silk manufacture.Their offer was accepted; many privileges were conferred upon them, and they began the manufacture with three hundred workmen.Such, too, seem to have been the manufactures of fine cloths that anciently flourished in Flanders, and which were introduced into England in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth; and such are the present silk manufactures of Lyons and Spitalfields.Manufactures introduced in this manner are generally employed upon foreign materials, being imitations of foreign manufactures.When the Venetian manufacture was first established, the materials were all brought from Sicily and the Levant.The more ancient manufacture of Lucca was likewise carried on with foreign materials.The cultivation of mulberry trees and the breeding of silk-worms seem not to have been common in the northern parts of Italy before the sixteenth century.
Those arts were not introduced into France till the reign of Charles IX.The manufactures of Flanders were carried on chiefly with Spanish and English wool.Spanish wool was the material, not of the first woollen manufacture of England, but of the first that was fit for distant sale.More than one half the materials of the Lyons manufacture is at this day, foreign silk; when it was first established, the whole or very nearly the whole was so.
No part of the materials of the Spitalfields manufacture is ever likely be the produce of England.The seat of such manufactures, as they are generally introduced by the scheme and project of a few individuals, is sometimes established in a maritime city, and sometimes in an inland town, according as their interest, judgment, or caprice happen to determine.
At other times, manufactures for distant sale group up naturally, and as it were of their own accord, by the gradual refinement of those household and coarser manufactures which must at all times be carried on even in the poorest and rudest countries.Such manufactures are generally employed upon the materials which the country produces, and they seem frequently to have been first refined and improved in such inland countries as were, not indeed at a very great, but at a considerable distance from the sea coast, and sometimes even from all water carriage.