This book is an economic, historical, and sociological examination of rural textile industries in the Lower Rhineland beginning in the sixteenth century, culminating with the age of factory organization in the early 1800s. Drawing on archival sources not available to English language readers, the late Kisch analyzes the evolution of entrepreneurial innovations, the growth of a skilled labor force and changes in institutional mechanisms and patterns of social behavior that prepared this critical economic region for the innovation of factory production that came with the industrial revolution.