The value of craftwork in a nineteenth-century industrialised economy: The Scottish case

"My research into the craft economy starts with the premise that far from disappearing with the rise of machine production, handwork survived, evolved creatively and thrived in various ways throughout the period under consideration and beyond. The project from which this presentation is derived considers Scotland, putting the country in a broader British and European context. It explores sectoral and business case studies and includes a survey of craft design, exhibition and retail. This paper examines the character and value of craft production in a modernized industrial economy, focussing on two sectors producing luxury goods for personal consumption – glass and silverware - where handwork and machine work co-existed in a complex relationship. The approach that underpins the research embraces the materiality of manufactured goods relative to craft skill, considering, for instance, the haptic and visual contemporary meaning of hand-made goods. It is also founded on a consideration of the cultural and market value that craft skill represented. By ‘craft value’ what I mean is a consideration of financial value as a function of material costs and labour input (both design and production); but also the aesthetic and cultural value that is accorded to various forms of manufacture where there was a complex interaction between the evidence contained in goods and made apparent to consumers, that they were a product of the ‘hand’ or of the ‘machine’, or of both, and that manufacturers could choose to highlight one over the other to meet market expectations."