Neil McKendrick

II. Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline

It is a text-book commonplace that Josiah Wedgwood was amongst the pioneers of English factory organization—the discipline of workers, the division of labour, and the systematization of production—but his work in these fields has never been examined in detail. Sixty thousand Wedgwood manuscripts, organized on a geographical basis for the sake of modern area advertisement rather than for the convenience of the historian, perhaps explain this neglect. The papers have not been ignored, but they have been sifted rather than studied in detail. Certain generalizations have emerged from this hit-or-miss investigation. In the articles of three visiting North American historians, Hower, Bladen and Schofield, and in the work of Thomas (essentially concerned with the history of the whole of the Potteries), the embryonic and incomplete skeleton of Wedgwoods methods has been laid bare, but much of the flesh has been discarded in the process.

Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley: An Inventor-Entrepreneur Partnership in the Industrial Revolution

The importance of the role of the industrial inventor in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution is recognized by everybody: Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, John Kay, James Watt, James Neilsen, George Stephenson, William Murdoch, Josiah Wedgwood, even schoolboys can reel off their names with glee, and their careers have mostly been investigated in satisfactory detail by economic historians. But the role of the merchant entrepreneur—their natural partner and alter ego—has been far less exhaustively studied. Those who are well known are few, and those whose careers have been examined in detail even fewer. As a class they do not even occur in the indices of the two standard text-books on the Industrial Revolution—those by Mantoux and Ashton; Matthew Boulton is one of the few individuals amongst them who have avoided total obscurity, and he is now receiving adequate treatment.

Josiah Wedgwood : an eighteenth-century entrepreneur in salesmanship and marketing techniques

When Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730, the Staffordshire potters sold their wares almost solely in Staffordshire. Their goods found their sale in the local market towns, and occasionally, carried by pedlars and hawkers, they reached further afield - to Leicester, Liverpool and Manchester. To sell in London was rare, to sell abroad virtually unknown. Yet by 1795 Wedgwood had broken through this local trade of fairs and pedlars to an international market based on elegant showrooms and ambassadorial connections.