Question

How Porto industrial system was part of network of commercial exchange

Answer 1

Even before factories began to dot the landscape in England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market. This was not based on factories. This early form of industrialisation was called as proto-industrialisation and the industrialists as proto-industrialists. The merchants of the towns provided money to the peasants and artisans of the countryside to produce for the international market. Cottagers and poor peasants who had earlier depended on common lands for their survival now looked for alternative sources of income. Income from proto-industrial production supplemented their shrinking income from cultivation. Thus linked the town and the country side by commercial terms. Products from the country side were given the finishing touches in London and then exported.