Fields, Factories and Workshops
Glossary
A
- Adam Smith
- The founder of classical political economy, whose famous opening chapter on the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations Kropotkin invokes at the start of his own book, both crediting and ultimately arguing against the doctrine of specialization Smith's followers extended to entire nations.
- Related: Division of Labour
B
- Brain Work and Manual Work
- The book's concluding argument: that technical and scientific education should be fused with manual training rather than kept separate, citing the Moscow method of technical instruction adopted in Chicago, Boston, and Aberdeen as a working model of integrated education.
- Related: The Moscow System, Integration of Industries
C
- Channel Islands Hothouse Culture
- The glasshouse and hothouse cultivation practiced in Guernsey and Jersey, which Kropotkin cites as evidence of extraordinarily productive intensive farming — small islands producing crops and yields far beyond what extensive agriculture on the same acreage could achieve.
- Related: Market-Gardening, Intensive Agriculture
- Complete Education
- Kropotkin's proposed ideal of schooling that combines broad scientific understanding of nature and society with practical technical and manual training, achievable, he argues, for average children before the age of fourteen or fifteen if properly designed.
- Related: Brain Work and Manual Work, The Moscow System
D
- Decentralisation of Industries
- Kropotkin's core empirical claim: manufacturing does not remain concentrated in the nations that industrialized first, such as Britain, but spreads to new producer nations as industrial skill and machinery diffuse worldwide, undermining any permanent international division of labor.
- Related: Division of Labour, Peter Kropotkin
- Division of Labour (critiqued)
- The classical economic doctrine, traced to Adam Smith, that nations and workers should specialize in narrow tasks or products for efficiency. Kropotkin opens the book by challenging the extension of this idea to whole nations — the notion that some countries should farm while others manufacture — as contrary to both economic fact and human variety.
- Related: Adam Smith, Decentralisation of Industries, Integration of Industries
G
- Galileo's Telescope (as example)
- Kropotkin's opening illustration in the chapter on brain work and manual work: Galileo built his own telescope by hand, exemplifying an older tradition in which the greatest scientific minds did not disdain craft and manual skill — a tradition Kropotkin argues modern specialized education has abandoned.
- Related: Brain Work and Manual Work
- German Petty Trade Censuses
- Statistical surveys of Germany's domestic and small workshop industries taken in 1882, 1895, and 1907, which Kropotkin analyzes to argue that while some petty trades were declining, others retained real vitality and continued to grow even as heavy industry expanded.
- Related: Petty Trades
I
- Integration of Industries
- Kropotkin's proposed alternative to specialized division of labor: each nation, region, and even individual combining agriculture, manufacturing, and craft work rather than depending on distant trade partners — the organizing ideal behind the book's statistical case for self-sufficiency and decentralization.
- Related: Decentralisation of Industries, Brain Work and Manual Work
- Intensive Agriculture
- Kropotkin's argument, built from market-gardening, glasshouse culture, and French, Belgian, and Channel Islands examples, that small, intensively worked plots can yield vastly more food per acre than extensive farming — evidence that land scarcity is not the barrier to feeding a growing population that Malthusians assumed.
- Related: The Malthusian Prejudice, Market-Gardening
J
- J. B. Lawes's Wheat Estimates
- Annual crop estimates published in The Times by agricultural scientist J. B. Lawes, which Kropotkin cites to track the dramatic reversal in Britain's home-grown versus imported wheat supply between the 1850s and 1880s as evidence in his argument about agricultural possibility.
- Related: Intensive Agriculture
M
- Market-Gardening
- Small-scale, intensively cultivated commercial vegetable and fruit growing, exemplified for Kropotkin by operations around Paris and in the Channel Islands, which he presents as proof that a small area, carefully worked, can support far more people than conventional extensive agriculture.
- Related: Intensive Agriculture, Channel Islands Hothouse Culture
P
- Peter Kropotkin
- The Russian anarchist geographer and author of Fields, Factories and Workshops, who builds his argument for a decentralized, integrated economy not from abstract theory but from statistics on manufacturing, agriculture, and small industry gathered across Europe, Russia, and the United States.
- Related: Decentralisation of Industries, Integration of Industries
- Petty Trades
- Kropotkin's term for small-scale, often domestic or workshop-based manufacturing — cabinet-making, weaving, toy-making, and similar crafts — which he documents through British, French, German, and Russian census data as a resilient and often growing sector of industry, not a dying relic.
- Related: Small Industries and Industrial Villages, Lyons Region
S
- Sheffield and Birmingham
- English industrial cities whose statistics on surviving small workshops and petty trades Kropotkin uses as primary evidence for his claim that small-scale manufacturing persists productively alongside Britain's large factories, rather than being eliminated by them.
- Related: Petty Trades, Small Industries and Industrial Villages
- Small Industries and Industrial Villages
- Kropotkin's case, from Sheffield and Birmingham to Lyons and Germany's home-trades regions, that small workshops and domestic industry persist and even flourish alongside giant factories, contrary to predictions that large-scale industry would inevitably swallow all smaller production.
- Related: Petty Trades, Sheffield and Birmingham
T
- The "National Workshops" Doctrine
- The economic idea Kropotkin attacks at the book's opening: that nature and history predestine each nation to a single economic specialty — Hungary and Russia to grow corn, Britain to manufacture — a doctrine he argues industrial history has repeatedly disproven.
- Related: Division of Labour, Decentralisation of Industries
- The 1912 Preface
- Kropotkin's revised preface for the book's third edition, updating his argument with fourteen additional years of statistics gathered since the first 1898 edition, reflecting his ongoing effort to keep the empirical case for decentralization current.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin
- The Housing Critique
- A passage in the Conclusion where Kropotkin calculates that a worker who could secure a dwelling with one month's labor a year instead spends three to five months' earnings on unhealthy, insecure housing he will never own — part of his broader case for reorganizing production around genuine human need.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin
- The Lyons Region
- A center of French silk-weaving and related small-scale textile trades that Kropotkin surveys as part of his evidence that domestic and workshop-based industry continued to thrive in France alongside large-scale factory production.
- Related: Petty Trades, Small Industries and Industrial Villages
- The Malthusian Prejudice
- The "over-population prejudice" Kropotkin spends two chapters refuting: the assumption, traced to Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, that population growth will inevitably outrun the land's capacity to produce food, which Kropotkin calls one of the most pernicious doctrines in the history of economic thought.
- Related: Intensive Agriculture, Thomas Malthus
- The Montreuil Fruit Walls
- A striking example Kropotkin gives of Parisian-area intensive horticulture: 750 acres near Paris covered with specially built stone walls, totaling 400 miles in length, used to grow peaches, pears, and grapes, yielding some 12 million peaches a year.
- Related: Market-Gardening
- The Moscow System
- A method of technical education originating in Moscow, which taught concrete, hands-on workshop skills alongside scientific instruction and was subsequently adopted in cities including Chicago, Boston, and Aberdeen — Kropotkin's model for reuniting brain work and manual work.
- Related: Brain Work and Manual Work
- Thomas Malthus
- The economist whose Essay on the Principle of Population argued that population growth tends to outstrip food supply. Kropotkin devotes substantial argument to refuting Malthus's influence on agricultural thought, citing rising crop yields as evidence the doctrine was empirically false.
- Related: The Malthusian Prejudice
W
- Watt and the Soho Workers
- Kropotkin cites James Watt's steam engine, and the practical refinements made by workshop hands like Murdoch at the Soho works, as evidence that the crucial small inventive improvements — the "nearly to nothings" — can only be learned through hands-on workshop experience, not pure engineering theory.
- Related: Brain Work and Manual Work, The Moscow System