Handmade by Peasants for Metropolitan Consumers: Textiles, Social Entrepreneurship, and the Austro-Hungarian Countryside

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, workshops were set up across Europe to promote rural home industries producing textiles, woodwork, ceramics, or basketry. These initiatives by state institutions, members of the nobility, and wealthy industrialists combined commercial interests with the charitable objective of halting rural exodus and granting social relief to people experiencing poverty. Facing economic decline and competition from cheaper commodities produced in factories, the sale of handmade objects from rural home industries required novel marketing strategies that underlined their high production value and drew on the idea of social change. This chapter discusses the international sale and promotion of home industry products by imperial elites, notably women, from Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The handmade products were commissioned and marketed as luxury items to metropolitan consumers in Vienna, London, Paris, New York, and other major cities. Based on contemporary journalism, advertisements, and women’s writings, this chapter analyzes the consumption of rural textiles in late imperial society. In particular, it seeks to foreground the role of female social entrepreneurship in Eastern European consumer cultures at the turn of the century in the wider European context.