Transcribed from the January 1943 George Allen & Unwin reprintof the March 1892 edition , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
by
FREDERICK ENGELS
Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky
London
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
Museum Street
The book, an English translation of which is here republished, wasfirst issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, wasyoung, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears the stampof his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of whichhe feels ashamed. It was translated into English, in 1885, byan American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in thefollowing year in New York. The American edition being as goodas exhausted, and having never been extensively circulated on this sideof the Atlantic, the present English copyright edition is brought outwith the full consent of all parties interested.
For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were writtenin English by the author. The first had little to do with thebook itself; it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of theday, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second—theoriginal preface—is largely made use of in the present introductoryremarks.
The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in manyrespects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Thoughnot expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a lawof modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which CapitalisticProduction is carried on, the less can it support the petty devicesof swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representativein Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve himso well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he findsto be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin;and, again, the commission p. viagent,who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequentingthe Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order tobuy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightlymore refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are consideredthe acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, thosetricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money,and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed,purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the samewith the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.”
The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of anew industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financialreforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce allthe elbow-room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californianand Australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The Colonialmarkets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbingEnglish manufactured goods. In India millions of hand-weaverswere finally crushed out by the Lancashire power-loom. China wasmore and more being opened up. Above all, the United States—then,commercially speaking, a mere colonial market, but by far the biggestof them all—underwent an economic development astounding evenfor that rapidly progressive country. And, finally, the new meansof communication introduced at the close of the preceding period—railwaysand ocean steamers—were now worked out on an international scale;they realised