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Two Competing Theories of Craft and Skill

Introduction

Glenn Adamson’s The Invention of Craft attempts to trace the historical development of craft as

a distinctly modern phenomenon. While I agree that it is necessary to historicize craft and account for

its contested development, I am going to argue that The Invention of Craft suffers from fundamental

weaknesses in its theoretical armature. These weaknesses are most evident in his treatment of his

primary theoretical opponent: the Arts and Crafts Movement. Adamson’s book is intended as a

correction of what he takes to be the basic narrative of that movement: that the period of modernity

threatens the existence of craft. The trouble with Adamson’s approach is that it sets itself against the

weakest version of the Arts and Crafts Movement’s critique. I believe that the critique of the situation

of labor developed by William Morris provides the beginnings of a theoretical foundation more capable

of accounting for the empirical data Adamson gives. Morris identified a real tendency under capitalism:

the de-skilling of manual labor. Therefore, after a quick and critical summary of Adamson’s thesis, I

will move from a version of the de-skilling thesis presented by Morris, through key moments in

Adamson’s account, to the thesis’ modern version as developed by Harry Braverman and John Roberts.

The backdrop of this is a methodological disagreement regarding the status of the literary output

of the various thinkers on skill and labor at the beginning of the modern period (for our purposes here,

the latter half of the 18th century to the close of the 19th). Too often Adamson regards the ideas of

thinkers like Morris as simply false or even neurotic. The most extreme example of this tendency is his

treatment of Morris and John Ruskin’s writings as “screen memory” systematically falsifying both their

understanding of their present and the past.1 I regard them as evidence of real developments in the role

that craft plays in general production – which is not to claim that they can be taken at face value.

1 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 181-232


I will conclude with a cursory note of key absences in Adamson’s history, absences that I

attribute to an understanding of craft that, in spite of its historicity, still fails to account for the many

modalities that results from the nature of contested development involving multiple agents.

Between the present and the past (tense)

Adamson’s gambit is that “craft is itself a modern invention. … It emerged as a coherent idea, a

defined terrain, only as industry’s opposite number, or ‘other.’”2 He takes pains to assure us that this

does not mean artisanal work did not exist outside of modernity, only that, “before the industrial

revolution, and outside its sphere of influence, it was not possible to speak of craft as a separate field of

endeavor – from what would it be separated?” Societies outside of this sphere “lacked that distinctively

modern discursive shift, particular to Europe and America, in which craft was marked out as something

special.”3 Significantly, and as Adamson himself acknowledges, this marks a break from his previous

approach to craft – which defined it simply as “making something well through hand skill.”4 For

Adamson, this approach is no longer viable because craft emerges out of a discursive struggle to

theorize and hence control skilled labor in the period of modernity, hence, “there is no way of talking

about craft that is neutral.” Adamson therefore elects the terms “artisan” and “artisanal” as a way of

talking about skilled labor “in a less ideologically charged manner.”5

This maneuver marks a significant tension in Adamson’s historiography – the root of this

tension is an approach to historical investigation which is explicitly idealist and a periodic slip into

materialism. His strategy is “akin to intellectual history”,6 founded upon an interpretation of Michel

Foucault that treats discourse as the key method of controlling disruptive social forces – such as skill.7

It seeks to “track the development of an idea over time – with the difference that this idea is not only

2 Adamson p. xiii.
3 Adamson p. xvi.
4 Adamson p. xxiv.
5 Adamson p. xxiv.
6 Adamson p. xiv.
7 Adamson p. 6.
formulated in the period writings, but also inscribed into objects and their popular reception.”8 But if

craft is explicitly theorized as a discursive regime – that is, epistemologically – he cannot avoid the

stubborn ontological fact of handwork in labor. Craft then leads a (only partially acknowledged)

double-life in the text: it is a discursive regime and also the form that specifically artisanal labor takes

in the period of modernity.

Hence, while admitting that industrialization “sometimes” saw “skilled hands” tamed by means

of brute force, the more significant means by which this control was achieved were “discursive and

pictorial, rather than physical”.9 His exemplar for these efforts is Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie which

figured artisans quite literally as hands possessed of an abstract and interchangeable regularity.

Adamson moves on from this fairly quickly to the control exercised by capital over labor at the point of

production via managerial organization and the division of labor – but the relationship between these

two moments of his narrative is only weakly theorized. He simply moves from the discursive

developments to the managerial ones by noting that “What Diderot and his assistants did on the page,

manufacturers did in real life, setting their highly skilled operatives into ever more specific roles.”10

Hardly any effort is put to establish a causal connection between these two different kinds of

developments. As a rule, they merely parallel each other throughout the text with minimal interaction.

Although Adamson would certainly not argue that these two developments just happen to move

together, he is able to offer only occasional and impressionistic observations as to what determinations

might exist between them.

Thus, Adamson embeds craft in a power struggle, that is to say, he politicizes it – but in a very

particular way. He concedes that the heart of this struggle is the battle to establish craftspeople’s

autonomy or heteronomy relative to industry, but it is primarily waged at the level of the social

imagination; it is a struggle for the cultural status of artisans. This makes it difficult to sustain a vision

8 Adamson p. xiv-xv
9 Adamson p. 7.
10 Adamson p. 9.
of the various theoretical pronouncements on the nature of craft as attempts to grasp historical

developments by partisans (laborers, industrialists, and reformers) seeking to intervene actively in those

developments at the point of production. Hence, changes in the relations of production and the role

skill plays in the labor process appear as brute historical facts rather than as fiercely contested, if

strongly determined, developments.

The correlative of this, naturally, is that the theoretical output of the period is treated as

essentially ideological, in the pejorative sense of the word. Rather than partial apprehensions of live

developments, they are presented as outright misunderstandings of the actual facts. It is Adamson’s

project not simply to correct, but to replace the conventional narratives of craft’s emergence with his

own (un-ideological) one. He is fairly even handed in this respect: the champions of craft revivalism,

the various artisans’ associations, and the prize-fighters of industry are all treated as having contributed

to the development of a genre of fiction whose name is ‘craft.’ I believe that this results in a subtle but

persistent and symptomatic pattern of misreading of the primary literature.

From the perspective of artisans, the struggle over craft is the struggle for the autonomy of their

labor over and against its domination by capital (although Adamson does not exaclty say so in quite

these words). But what is key here is to grasp the position and nature of craft as undergoing a long (and

dialectical) process of development – and not to reify it as something possessed, in any simply sense, of

a fixed “real nature”.11 Too often, theories which express one-sidedly key characteristics of craft’s

ongoing development are dismissed as merely wrong rather than as (however distorted) ideological

expressions of reality. This leads to questionable interpretations of those expressions.

More often than not, the primary texts Adamson cites are written in the present tense. These

texts explicitly register the trace of an on going process. Hence: “machinery goes on from day to day

pulling man by man out of the ranks of independence, and reduces his being down to a mere broken

11 Adamson p. 10.
spirited automaton.”12 When Adamson goes on to parse and aggregate these texts, he typically shifts to

the past tense. For example: “there was a surprising convergence of opinion around the body of the

artisan as being like an unthinking machine … the artisan was merely mechanical, capable only of

execution”13 as though they had instead registered an established fact. Much of the one-sidedness or

exaggeration that Adamson sees actually results from his tendency to read them as expression of

opinion on the actual nature of skilled labor rather than as interventions against processes in the middle

of happening. (It is perhaps because of this that industrial action makes almost no appearance in

Adamson’s history of craft’s invention.)

Adamson against the Arts and Crafts

Not surprisingly, Adamson finds it very difficult to find texts from the period discussing skill

and craft in a way with which he can agree. However, in as much as The Invention of Craft is an

intervention in craft theory, it is pitched against Adamson’s interpretation of the predominant narrative

of the field as established by the Arts and Crafts Movement. This narrative, as Adamson glosses it, is

essentially elegiac: machine production is said to have by and large replaced craft and hand skills so

that they no longer have any place in modern production. Adamson thinks this is wrong on every count.

Far from superseding craft, industrialization relied on it (and, it is, implied modern production

continues to do so). Rather, “modern systems of production ... reposition[ed] skilled hands, consigning

them to a secondary role” – that was, nevertheless, necessary and persistent. Moreover, it was not

machines that effected the change in the role of the artisan because, as a rule, mechanization was not

actually able to replace hand skill, and because the shift occurs not in British factories but via “the

division and specialization of labor” pioneered in the workshops of the Continent before the advent of

mechanization. Adamson goes even further: the transformations that can legitimately be attributed to

mechanization “did not … de-skill workers” because “mechanization [was] able to replace hand skill”

12 Anonymous, quoted in Adamson p. 130, emphasis added. Even Morris tends to write in the present tense: “What
[machines] really do is to reduce the skilled labourer ...” (“Useful Work,” p. 105-106).
13 Adamson p. 130-131
outright only in a very few industries.14 Moreover, where they did so, they only repositioned the role of

skill in production process rather than eradicating it entirely. Critics like William Morris “ignored the

nuanced interdependencies of the hand and the machine” that developed during and after the industrial

revolution, if they had not done so, they would have realized that “skills were not in decline in the mid-

nineteenth century. On the contrary, craft was the order of the day.”15

It is worth testing Adamson’s account against the facts he brings to bear in support of it, but it is

also worth testing it against the strongest version of what he takes to be the conventional account of de-

skilling under modernity. It is necessary in this respect to point out that Adamson is building his case

against the Arts and Crafts critique by first homogenizing the various contributors of the movement and

then forcing a coherence upon them that they frequently do not possess. In effect, Adamson is attacking

the received version of this critique, rather than the one which actually appeared at the time. While

there is something to be said for this approach, it is certainly contrary to his avowed method

(intellectual history).

Not that William Morris

There is no point trying to make a full accounting here of what is in fact a rich, varied, and

extraordinarily vast literature. I will focus instead on developing a different interpretation of William

Morris. It is important to note that Morris’ gives more than one account of capitalism’s (not

modernity’s) transformation of labor. A selective reading of Morris’ huge literary output can justify

Adamson’s summary, but it is easy enough to find texts that complicate or flat out contradict it. I will

concede at the outset, however, that Morris does indeed exaggerate the death of craft at the hands of

(capitalist) industry. As Larry Shiner observes, “the majority of the tens of thousands of small

workshops and their handcraft ethos” do not disappear in Europe and North America until 1914, and

even then, they leave “scattered survivals”.16 My key bone of contention, rather, is in the received

14 Adamson p. xix.
15 Adamson p. xvi (emphasis added).
16 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 209.
wisdom that Morris has an essentialist view of machinery as both the sufficient and the necessary

condition for the destruction of craft.

The trouble with Adamson’s account is that it foists a problem on Morris (the preservation of

handicraft tradition) that is in fact secondary to most of his writing on the subject of the transformation

of labor. Although Morris does indeed sometimes shade into machine-essentialism, by and large, his

concern is neither with the machinery in the abstract nor with handicrafts in the abstract. Hence in a

text that Adamson actually cites17 as an example of the premature declaration of craft’s death, Morris

begins his elegy not with automation but with the development of capitalism as such. Not with

industrialization, but with the appearance of a monopoly of the means of production for the capitalists

on the one hand and of free wage labor on the other. Not with the machine age, but with the sixteenth

century when the “workmen were collected into workshops” into which eventually entered “a new

invention, the division of labour.” The epoch of production which is characterized by “automatic

machinery” (beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century) is thus only the highest phase of a

dialectic with a long history. In this respect, Morris’ account does not differ from Adamson’s in quite

the way that he claims. Far from being too historically narrow, Morris locates the transformation of

labor not in the industrial revolution, nor even, as Adamson does, with the developments of the 1750s,

but in the emergence of capitalism itself in the mid to late sixteenth century – into which both

industrialization and the development of divisions of labor in craft workshops are explicitly

subsumed.18

Although Morris is not always consistent, the concern which usually structures his writings and

speeches is not with craft or even beauty, but the loss of the worker’s joy in labor – it is to this loss that

these the others are subordinated. Handicrafts are not an absolute good: joy in labor is. While Morris

17 Adamson p. 182.
18 William Morris, “The Revival of Handicraft,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1888/handcrft.htm This
is precisely why Morris’ nostalgia is consistently medieval rather than for the workshops that mark the beginnings of
capitalism, he differs in this respect from the likes of Soetsu Yanagi who waxed poetic for an imagined version of these
in China (see Soetsu Yanagi and Bernard Leach, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Palo Alto,
California; Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972), p. 134 -135).
clearly thinks that handicrafts are a reliable source for this kind of joy, capitalism robs even them of

that quality, so that, in the production of ornament under capitalism, the worker is “compelled to

pretend to happiness in his work, so that the beauty produced by man’s hand, which was once a solace

to his labour, has now become an extra burden to him”.19 It is capitalism and not machinery that is the

sufficient and necessary condition of workers’ misery. Under capitalism, “‘labour-saving”’ machines”

only produce toil by “reducing the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled” and increase the rate

of unemployment. Under different social conditions, they could actually be used to save labor and

increase leisure time for everyone, allowing people to cultivate skills where the presence of machinery

has been attenuated and contributing to the pleasures of labor by entering into social production as part

of a rich variety of modes of labor between which people can move more or less freely.20

This is certainly not Adamson’s version of William Morris. But, at times, Adamson’s critiques

of Morris are so implausibly extravagant as to be simply risible. Of Morris’ utopian novel, News From

Nowhere, for example, Adamson’s writes “there is something terrifying in the way Morris scrubbed

away the mess of modernity,”21 before quoting the design critic, Deyan Sudjic, according to whom

Morris “was no totalitarian, but in the Phnom Penh of Year Zero, there is a hideous echo of News From

Nowhere.”22 There is much to disagree within this novel, McCarthy-esque comparisons to Pol Pot do

not quite get at them.23 Adamson’s more modest objection is that Morris – who, as he points out,

frequently outsourced production jobs to skilled workers from other workshops – was mistaken to think

that “craft stood at the very threshold of death’s door and was incompatible with industry”.24

As I will explain shortly, key aspect of Admason’s claim is that “craft was the order of the

day”25 because artisanal labor was required for the development of machinery in the means of
19 William Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” in Political Writings of William Morris ed. A.L. Morton (New York:
International Publishers, 1973), p. 102. My emphasis.
20 Morris, “Useful Work,” p.105-107.
21 Adamson p. 185.
22 Deyan Sudjic, The Guardian, 3 May 1996 quoted in Adamson p. 185.
23 For a spirited defense of News From Nowhere see Paul O’Flinn, ‘From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of
Freedom: Morris’s News from Nowhere ’ International Socialism. 2: 72, 1996. 101-12.
24 Adamson p. 183.
25 Adamson p. xvi.
production. Adamson suggests that, in addition to his general inability to deal psychologically with

modernity, Morris may have been blinded by his “aesthetic predilections” to the fact that, far from

being cast aside, “skilled artisans had a large measure of responsibility in giving shape to modernity.”26

It is interesting to contrast this claim with a passage from Morris’ News From Nowhere. In that novel, it

is conceded that there was indeed “one class of goods” that were made “thoroughly well” in the

Victorian era:

that was the class of machines which were used for making things. These were usually
quite perfect pieces of workmanship, admirably adapted to the end in view. So that it may
be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of
machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for
the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts. In truth, the owners of
the machines did not consider anything which they made as wares, but simply as means for
the enrichment of themselves. Of course, the only admitted test of utility in wares was the
finding of buyers for them - wise men or fools, as it might chance.27

In other words, Adamson actually misses the full breadth of his opponent’s vision. It is not that Morris

was blind to the place of craft in the production of means of production, it was that he valued it

differently. Morris and Adamson did not have drastically dissimilar facts, it is only that the

relationships they establish between those facts differ.

With this caveat in place, we can rephrase but accept the thrust of Adamson’s question: Why

does Morris believe that capitalism has tended towards the de-skilling of labor? Adamson gets at his

objection via a particular interpretation of Morris’ claim that the automatic machine “supersedes hand-

labour”28 – another way of framing the question might be: what does “supersede” mean? Conveniently,

Adamson’s own historical account gives us some clues.

When is skill not skill?

To repeat, Adamson has three main objections to what he takes to be the Arts and Crafts critique

of modernity: [1] mechanization did not actually enable industry to do without hand skills in the

26 Adamson p. 182.
27 William Morris, “Chapter XV. On the Lack of Incentive to Labor in Communist Society” in News From Nowhere,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/nowhere.htm
28 Morris, “The Revival,” quoted in Adamson p. 182.
production of its wares; [2] where mechanization displaced hand skill, it relocated it to a different but

still necessary moment of production; and [3] most of the transformations to which Morris and his co-

thinkers objected (when they weren’t simply imagined) in fact predate the industrial revolution. All of

this, naturally, is entirely correct – in fact, stated in these terms, Morris would thusfar agree. It is more

difficult to get from these premises, to Adamson’s conclusions that there just is no general pattern of

de-skilling under capitalism (or in the late nineteenth century more narrowly) and that, indeed, “craft

was the order of the day.”29

Adamson devotes much of his book to this argument, and it will not be possible to address it in

full. Instead, I will discuss two key examples from the text and suggest that Adamson could have

pushed their logic further, if he had only been willing to reverse his conclusions. Adamson points out

that in the nineteenth century, automation was only “used in the initial stages” of the making process.

Finishing had to be done by hand, because machines were not capable of the kind of finesse of finish

that hands could give. Perhaps more interestingly, Adamson justifies his claim that “[c]raft operations”

continued to be important to industry on the basis of the kind of “repetitive handwork” that executed

this finish. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the observation that machine-made metal

components such as those for rifles had to be sanded smooth by hand.30 Now it is one thing to say that

hand labor persisted in such industries, it is another thing to say that the transition from hand made

rifles to ones in which a significant proportion of the labor could be done by machining involves no de-

skilling of the workforce. Not only are we entitled to point out that such hand finishes are less and less

the norm, we should also ask what it means to call this kind of hand labor “skilled” and suggest that no

degradation of skill has taken place.

Without a comparison of the labor processes involved in gun manufacture before its

industrialization, it is of course difficult to account for the kinds of skills that either processes involved.

I would argue however that Adamson’s assumption that no de-skilling is evident in his example is the
29 Adamson p. xvi.
30 Adamson p. 145.
logical conclusion from an argument made in the his first chapter. Here he observes that

anthropologists of labor have noted that “skill has been redefined by multinational corporations to

signify speed, rather than quality.” But against an objection that this new understanding of skill might

be “simply exploitative,” Adamson cautions against “idealizing skilled production and ignoring its real

nature.” Tellingly, the benchmark he gives for this “real nature” are the “craft workshops of the

eighteenth century” in which “speed, separation, and specialization” were already driving factors.31

Harry Braverman has a different interpretation: “For the worker, the concept of skill is

traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials

and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of

production.” As this kind of mastery is eroded, “what is left to workers is a reinterpreted and woefully

inadequate concept of skill: a specific dexterity, a limited and repetitious operation, ‘speed as skill,’

etc.”32 M.C. Kennedy, whom Braverman also cites, is even more explicit. For Kennedy “skill covers [a

worker’s] ability to imagine how things would appear in final form if such and such tools and materials

were used” and their ability to accomplish a task on the basis of this knowhow. If speed and dexterity in

the abstract could constitute skill then a worker who “rapidly and with facility [did] nothing but snap

his fingers over and over again” for their livelihood would be called skilled. For Kennedy, such a

worker should more properly be called dexterous. Although in the proper context, dexterity may be a

component of skill, to the extent that skill is reduced to dexterity, “in large industry today, increased

dexterity means decreased skill.”33

It is this final point that Adamson resolutely refuses to acknowledge. Of course speed and

dexterity are components of skill in any period – but, as Braverman and Kennedy show, the imposition

of speed as the predominant measure of skill has the effect of transforming skill into its opposite. The

31 Adamson p. 10.
32 Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974), 307.
33 M. C. Kennedy, The Division of Labor and the Culture of Capitalism: A Critique (Unpublished PhD Thesis: Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1968) p. 171-172, n. 99.
spirit of Adamson’s previous definition of craft (“making something well through hand skill”)

continues to haunt the text. Although he treats the “invention of craft” as the struggle by competing

social classes to master skilled hands, he does not embed skill itself in the issue of mastery at the point

of production.

The consequences of this approach are perhaps even more apparent (and dire) in his account ofo

the role of craft in the production of means of production (that is to say, in the production of capital

goods). In his discussion of the development of cast iron as an industrial product, Adamson notes that

artisans were required for its development – not only because craftspeople such as masons and

bricklayers were required to construct the blast furnaces, but most strikingly, because pattern makers

were employed “to make wooden models for every casting.”34 Craft, Adamson notes, persisted in

industry in the form of the production of “patterns and prototypes”. On this basis, he argues that mass

production may actually “increase the importance of craft skill rather than diminish it, for the quality of

thousands of products” now depended on the crafted molds that legislate over all subsequent stages of

the production process.35 Clearly, transforming craft skills so that they exercise a legislative, rather than

executing, role in production has the reciprocal effect of transforming the labor that executes the

pattern. This is in fact a continuation of an earlier trend (that Adamson identified) whereby craft

masters – often themselves under the direction of designers and architects – began to differentiate

themselves more permanently from the journeymen beneath them. These “makers were increasingly

kept at” a trainee level so that the “ratio of journeymen to … autonomous masters … steadily

increased.”36

In other words, craft objects and skilled workers began to play a part in the legislation over the

labor process (typically the final part just before mass production proper). But the consequence for the

workers executing their patterns was precisely that the skills required of them diminished

34 Adamson p. 77.
35 Adamson p. 145.
36 Adamson p. 26.
proportionately. The new legislative skills developed by a proportionately small number of individual

makers was the means by which capital reduced the skills required of workers generally.

John Roberts – after Braverman – characterizes this as the dialectic of skilling and de-skilling in

general social technique, but is at pains to emphasize that it is the asymptotic tendency towards

absolute de-skilling for the ordinary worker which predominates over this dialectic.37 For both, de-

skilling is not only a matter of the de-skilling of the workforce, but also of its polarization: the

concentration of scientific control on the legislative end and an almost total lack of control on the

operative end. Thus, it is not a question of the total destruction of skill at the level of general social

technique – but the relation of the general body of the working class to this accumulated knowledge

and control.38 As the passage from News From Nowhere shows, Morris did not think that

industrialization left no place for skill – however in concentrating it in the production of means of

production, capitalist industrialization began a process whereby skill began to be suppressed in all

subsequent moments of the production process. This is the sense in which “the automatic machine

supersedes handlabour”39 even if those machines where themselves made by hand. However inadequate

Morris’ grasp may have been on this tendency, in attempting to grasp it at all, he is surely closer to the

mark than those who simply deny it. As Braverman memorably points out, to see in industrialization

only the development of skill and not its polarization “is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with

one foot in the fire and the other in ice water will tell you that 'on average,' he is perfectly

comfortable.”40

It is only worth adding that the development of automatic machinery as a means of production

swiftly began to be applied to the production of new means of production. That is, the production of

capital goods are also subject to the pressures of automation so that skill gets pushed further and further

back into the legislative process. As the development of rapid prototyping shows, there is no reason to
37 John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form (London: Verso, 2007), p83-87. See also Braverman p. 172.
38 Braverman p. 58.
39 Morris, “The Revival,” quoted in Adamson p. 182.
40 Braverman p. 294.
assume that the skills required for the production of means of production should remain hand making

skills.

An addendum instead of a conclusion

There is something of the half-measure in Adamson’s abandonment of his previous definition of

craft as hand skill. While he is right that craft cannot be spoken of with this apparent political

neutrality, it might have been more productive to theorize and to politicize skill itself more thoroughly

– to see in the concept of skill a contested name for equally contested relations of power. This would

mean understanding skill itself as a relation of power exercised by different agents in different ways

and in relation to a variety of other agents. Without this, hand skill remains in itself too neutral. Perhaps

the most telling result of this is that Adamson is scarcely able to register the different modalities of its

existence at the outset of modernity – in spite of the fact that this period actually sees the development

of a striking variety of different kinds of craft practices. Industrial craft is not the only form that

artisanal labor takes under modernity: the late nineteenth century also sees the development of a

nascent studio crafts in the form, for example, of atelier ‘Art Pottery’ where quite free decorators

operated under the sponsorship of industry; or of the Martin brothers, studio potters avant la lettre.41

As a rule, artist potters defined their skilld almost entirely in relation to surface decoration,

modeling, and to a lesser degree glaze effects. They operated in connection to industry but worked in

separate workshops from the rest of the production process. They were encouraged to develop

individuality in their works but to keep within the house style. They also used their status as decorators

to differentiate themselves from makers, in the sense of throwers, casters, and even moldmakers, were

excluded from artist status and answered more directly to factory foremen and managers. Plastic form

was rarely given much focus except that a form had to be good enough to merit decoration and match

41 Malcom Haslam’s invaluable scholarship on the ceramics of the late 19th century is probably the best source for both of
these examples. See Malcom Haslam (ed.), English Art Pottery 1865-1915 (Suffolk: Baron Publishing, 1975) and
Malcolm Haslam, (1978) The Martin brothers, potters, (London: R. Dennis, 1978).
the house style, while the chief limitation put on ornament was that it had to take care not to undermine

the form.

The Martin brothers, active from the 1870s to the First World War, were able to use the

established status of art pottery to anticipate the development of studio pottery. Their complete

independence as producers enabled them to bring three dimensional form into the realm of artistic

authorship, integrating form, function, and surface modeling to a degree unparalleled by other art

pottery studios. But this was still less an attempt to establish a self-conscious artistic career than a

peculiar development of the older small-scale handicraft workshop.

In both, a nuanced negotiation of the skilled labor of the artist and the problem of autonomy can

be seen. But this negotiation is performed by people trying to establish actual practices relative to

industry and other laborers, and not simply an act of discourse.

Although Adamson sets out to reposition craft as a modern invention, the sense in which it is

also and primarily a social practice is frequently lost. Too often, craft appears as though it were a single

thing at any given period in Adamson’s analysis. But precisely because the term refers to social

practice(s) involving diverse agents struggling to establish craft in different ways, it rarely has a unitary

existence. Rather craft exists in many different ways – not just in competing interpretations, but as

competing kinds of activities.

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