TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number],and the footnotes have been placed at the end of each chapter.
The cover image was created by the transcriberand is placed in the public domain.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
Fields, Factories
and
Workshops
OR
INDUSTRY COMBINED WITH AGRICULTURE
AND BRAIN WORK WITH MANUAL WORK
BY
P. KROPOTKIN
NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1913
[Pg v]
PREFACE.
Fourteen years have passed since the first edition ofthis book was published, and in revising it for this newedition I found at my disposal an immense mass of newmaterials, statistical and descriptive, and a great numberof new works dealing with the different subjectsthat are treated in this book. I have thus had anexcellent opportunity to verify how far the previsionsthat I had formulated when I first wrote this bookhave been confirmed by the subsequent economicalevolution of the different nations.
This verification permits me to affirm that theeconomical tendencies that I had ventured to foreshadowthen have only become more and more definitesince. Everywhere we see the same decentralisationof industries going on, new nations continuallyentering the ranks of those which manufacture for theworld market. Each of these new-comers endeavoursto develop, and succeeds in developing, on its ownterritory the principal industries, and thus frees itselffrom being exploited by other nations, more advancedin their technical evolution. All nations have made aremarkable progress in this direction, as will be seenfrom the new data that are given in this book.
On the other hand, one sees, with all the greatindustrial nations, the growing tendency and need of[vi]developing at home a more intensive agricultural productivity,either by improving the now existingmethods of extensive agriculture, by means of smallholdings, “inner colonisation,” agricultural education,and co-operative work, or by introducing different newbranches of intensive agriculture. This country isespecially offering us at this moment a most instructiveexample of a movement in the said direction. Andthis movement will certainly result, not only in amuch-needed increase of the productive forces of thenation, which will contribute to free it from the internationalspeculators in food pro