Key Concepts: Factory System, Mercantilism, and Social Classes

Posted on Mar 13, 2025 in Geography

Key Economic and Social Concepts

• Factory System: A productive method of work organization and industrial production, contrasting with the domestic system. It centralizes machinery, tools, and workers under one roof. Each employee contributes a separate part to the total output, increasing process efficiency.
• Domestic System: A productive method of work organization where industrial production occurs in a scattered manner in workers’ homes, often part-time and alternating with agricultural work. Bourgeois entrepreneurs provide raw materials and tools to workers for producing specific products.
• Theory of Malthus: The theory that population grows faster than food production. It proposes birth control and suggests that natural regulatory factors (wars and epidemics) delay a total power crisis.
• Autosubsistence: Production for one’s own consumption without bringing surplus to market.
• Tithing: A 10% tax (on earnings) to be paid to the king, ruler, or church leader.
• Guild: A type of economic association of European origin, implanted in the colonies, bringing together artisans of the same trade. Guilds appeared in medieval cities and lasted until the late modern age, seeking to ensure work for their partners, their economic stability, and learning systems.
• Colonial Trade: A new speculative method established between the metropolis and the colony, primarily focused on the extraction of precious metals from mines.
• Mercantilism: An economic system concerned with the development of trade, mainly exports. It considers state intervention appropriate and believes that a country’s wealth is based on its possession of precious metals.
• Free Trade: An economic system that offers absolute freedom of trade and commerce without state intervention, allowing the flow of goods to be governed by the competitiveness of firms and the advantages of each country, resulting in a proper distribution of goods and services.

Social Structures and Political Systems

• Nobility: One of the three estates of medieval and ancien régime, along with the clergy and the Third Estate. This estate belonged to the privileged, along with the clergy, and generally held high positions. The higher nobility constituted the aristocracy.
• Clergy: One of the three estates of medieval and ancien régime, along with the nobility and the Third Estate. This estate belonged to the privileged, along with the nobility, and was constituted by the regular clergy and the secular clergy.
• Third Estate: One of the three estates of medieval and ancien régime, along with the nobility and the clergy. This estate belonged to the underprivileged and included the bourgeoisie. Most of the population belonged to this estate.
• Establishment: Social strata defined by a person’s birth, which divided the Ancien Régime. Each establishment had its own laws and a distinct economic system.
• Social Class: A group of people belonging to the same social level who share customs, businesses, interests, etc.
• Bourgeoisie: A social group made up of people of the middle class (merchants, shop owners, and other businesses).
• Privilege: A unique advantage enjoyed by the nobility and clergy in the old regime, such as being exempt from paying direct taxes and having their own laws and courts.
• Absolutism: A government system in which, theoretically, the monarch has all the powers of the state without any limitation.
• Enlightened Despotism: A monarchy based on the old regime that adopts a policy of reforms based on the ideas of the Enlightenment.
• Enlightenment: A new way of thinking and seeing social reality, which appeared in the final stage of the old regime, based on the use of reason and freedom as instruments of personal and intellectual emancipation of mankind.
• Locke: An English philosopher and thinker with great influence on the thinking of the European Enlightenment. In his works, he criticized absolutism and defended the right to rebellion against tyranny. He believed a political right based on a social pact was needed to maintain the principle that all men are by nature free and equal.
• Division of Powers: The management of state functions, defended by Montesquieu, in which the legislature was for the parliament (represented by social groups), the executive power should be in the hands of the king, and the judiciary should be independent.