AHC: Have Artisan Labor Thrive

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One of the long lasting effects of both the First and Especially the Second Industrial Revolution was the almost complete destruction of artisan based craftsman labor.

Such labor, provided out of small shops that use to dominate the towns of Europe and the US mostly disappeared by 1900, being replaced by food markets and other storefronts that distributed goods rather than manufactured them.

Niche artisan services, such as watchmaking, were able to stay alive, however staple town jobs such as furniture making, weaving, cloth dyeing, etc. were unable to compete with the large mills and factories of Western Europe and eventually disappeared

Challenge: Have such artisan labor not just survive but thrive during the industrial revolution in Europe and the US.

What are long lasting effects?
 
Frankly, it's just not possible.

Take cloth-making, a single factory can replace an entire small town of cloth weavers in terms of productivity, and give uniform products at a cheaper price. Even if there's an attempt at tariffs to protect weavers, somewhere else will develop those factories for the simple fact that it's a lot more profitable for the factory owner (many of whom had been pushing the large scale artisan work beforehand), and their ability to capitalise on the market will eventually force the tariffs open just through a loss of trade value.

Short of completely averting the industrial revolution, artisan craftsmanship just can't survive as the dominant form, or even an equal part. There might be PoDs to get certain crafts in certain areas to survive better, but you can't apply those to the whole of artisan craftsmanship and expect the same results.
 
The idiotic Luddites manage to actually achieve victory and spread their backwards violent 'movement' to the rest of Europe and the US. Western Civilization is eventually overshadowed by everyone else who actually embraces human progress instead of hiding from it like the worthless cowards that the Luddites were.

That's the only way I can see for this to happen because as previously stated Industrialism is objectively superior to Artisan labor in every measurable way.
 
what if artisan labor became politicized or something?

Like the Liberal Revolutions of 1848 start championing artisan labor as means to differentiate themselves from the aristocratic-lead land enclosure polices of the Industrial Revolution?

Or possibly Utopian Socialists?
 
OR

Dramatically accelerate the progress of technological development so that before 1900 we have functioning 3D printers, thus having gone through our industrial cycle 3D printers are able to revive artisanal production.
 
I should have mentioned this in my OP but similar of sort of thing actually HAS happened in the US in the agriculture sector.

Small US Farmers have been supported with massive subsidies since the mid-19th century and continue to be a major economic force now, even when corporate farms can produce foodstuffs at lower prices and in higher more efficient yields.

All you need is a group of MPs in Westminster or Parlement to do the same for Artisan Guilds in Europe for the same effect.

And I happen to thing a continuance of artisan labor(guild labor) in competition of industrialized labor would be a facisnating PoD with huge ripple effects for Europe, possibily butterflying away the mass unemployment and worker exploitation of 18th -19th - 20th - 21st centuries :)
 
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Ah massive subsidies, something which 18th Century governments had neither the funds nor the inclination to actually do.

The only reason the US government can actually afford to massively subsidise small farmers is because of the money they get from taxing all of the non-subsidised industrial businesses. And agriculture is something of a special case anyway seeing as a 'small farm' in the US is approximately twice the size of the average UK farm and roughly the size of the average 'large corporate farm' over here.

And the old Guilds aren't going to do anything for mass unemployment- they were the most insular, self-selecting organisations imaginable, taking on a small number of people annually as apprentices in order to preserve the prestige of the craftsmanship, to the extent that studies have shown they negatively affected quality, skills and innovation, and the idea that an 18th Century style guild would dare to consider common factory workers as worthy of their care and attention is laughable. At best stronger guilds might lead to a slightly earlier stronger Trade Union movement, but it's more likely to simply create too classes of workers, a privileged 'artisan' class and an unprivileged 'working' class, the latter being virulently against the former and wanting to dismantle the guild structure just as much as the free traders, the industrialists and those wanting to save government money from these subsidies if they're implemented at all. A pretty toxic combination really.
 
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