A preindustrial society has typical features of the time before the Industrial Revolution.
The adjective preindustrial is used to describe that which precedes the development of an economy based on industry . Industry, meanwhile, is understood as the set of actions and procedures that allow obtaining and/or transforming natural raw materials.
Preindustrial societies are those that existed before the Industrial Revolution , which occurred in England starting in the mid- 18th century and then spread throughout the rest of Europe and the United States . The Industrial Revolution was a process that generated great technological and economic changes, but also social and cultural changes, also contributing to the implementation of capitalism on a global level.
Characteristics of a preindustrial society
A preindustrial society, in this way, presents the characteristics that predominated before the modernization that promoted the Industrial Revolution . It can be said that feudalism and slavery belong to the pre-industrial era.
Among the features that characterized preindustrial societies, there are an economy supported by agriculture , limited and artisanal production, and a limited division of labor. Furthermore, they had personalistic authorities with little capacity to promote class mobility and social changes.
It is important to note that there are several concepts that are often used synonymously with pre-industrial society: agrarian society , pre-capitalist society , traditional society and others. Many sociologists and historians, however, establish differences between these ideas , which in some cases also carry a very marked ideological component.
Agriculture is the economic pillar of a pre-industrial society.
The traditional authority
Preindustrial societies were not all the same, but they had certain characteristics in their foundations that we can generalize to define them with a certain degree of clarity and understand why they differed so much from their successors. One of the concepts that stands out in them is traditional authority , a type of leadership in which the authority of a government regime or an organization is largely linked to custom or tradition.
In the context of a traditional authority, any claim can be answered that "the situation has always been like this" to justify its more negative characteristics. Of course, today we often encounter this type of precarious foundation when we study violent and unjust traditions, which an alien would consider barbaric .
Therefore, in pre-industrial societies the manifestation of power did not occur through a bureaucracy or an impersonal State, but through rather personalistic authorities. Although there were already examples of these two concepts in societies before the Industrial Revolution, we cannot speak of the modern State as we know it thanks to the development it has undergone since then.
Pre-industrial society vs. modernity
Social change was not normal in pre-industrial societies, where moral and religious codes reigned, rather than science and systems of laws constantly revised to adapt to the needs of the moment. The mentality and behavior of the people were much more restricted than today, although we still have a lot of work to do to reach an ideal situation.
Given that these societies were located before the Industrial Revolution, one of the biggest differences can be found in the pace of economic production, which was much lower before the birth of mass production. Furthermore, the division of labor was very limited: the low complexity of industrial production did not require a level of specialization comparable to today's. The economy, in short, was based on agriculture and artisanal production.
On the other hand, beyond the expression preindustrial society, we can find this adjective associated with other nouns: preindustrial city , preindustrial design , preindustrial climate , etc. In all cases, mention is made of a historical period prior to the Industrial Revolution .