Manufacturing quality in the pre‐industrial age: finding value in diversity

When deployed on a large and rational scale and committed to high throughput levels, early modern manufacturing methods inevitably yielded a substantial proportion of non‐standard and defective items. This proportion could only increase as the pace of work accelerated in the eighteenth century. Manufacturers regained a degree of control over their marketing strategies through the more or less rigorous sorting of this output, in a pattern suited to their markets. In so doing, they forged a transitional definition of quality that moved away from the linear pursuit of excellence that motivated their predecessors towards a relative understanding of the needs of diverse groups of buyers.