1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Not a picturesque survival of household production but a historically produced business form — that is how this general survey of Austrian small trades frames Hausindustrie, arising wherever expanded markets, putting-out capital, simplified technique, and cheap labor reorganize older craft relations. The Verleger, not the artisan, is the pivotal figure, linking dispersed rural and urban labor to distant markets and converting independence into dependent piecework. Schwiedland traces forms from Hausfleiß and Lohnwerk through manorial and monastic origins, showing small masters ground between factory competition and merchant capital and undone above all by capital scarcity. His detailed case of Vienna's mother-of-pearl button turners anchors the theory: technical simplification multiplies competitors, overcrowds the trade, and drives the wage-and-price spirals that push formally free masters back toward homework and wage labor.
Die Epochen des Verlagssystems sind vorzüglich Epochen der hausindustriellen Umgestaltung des Handwerks.
English translation: “The epochs of the putting-out system are above all epochs in which the handicrafts are transformed into cottage industries.”
Strip away every trace of domestic charm, and Hausindustrie reveals itself as a relation of pure dependence: production routed through merchants, masters, agents, and contractors who push the costs of production into the worker's own household. Prepared amid the Viennese enquiry into women's work, Schwiedland's essay derives the Sweating-System directly from that structure — wage-cutting, excessive hours, evasion of factory and insurance law, destructive underbidding — and insists it needs no special middleman, since the putter-out can exploit just as well. A capital-poor trader may set up as a Verleger, take materials on credit, and force prices down, ruining older workshops and degrading quality alike. The home here is no shelter but a dispersed factory; his account of children wasting in dust-filled rooms turns economic diagnosis into a moral charge against a society that calls itself Christian.
In ihrer sozialen Lage sind diese Produzienten stets schwach und abhängig.
English translation: “In their social position, these producers are always weak and dependent.”
New Zealand appears here not as a colonial curiosity but as a working laboratory of administrative social policy, its Factories Act of 1894 and the tightening amendment of 1896 rendered into German so that European reformers might study the concrete legal machinery of labour protection. Schwiedland, offering the statute in translation alongside his own commentary, shows how registration, inspection, worker lists, accident reporting, and posted abstracts make the workplace countable and supervisable, while differentiated rules govern women, children, apprentices, and recent mothers. His sharpest attention falls on home work: labelling of goods from unregistered dwellings, restrictions on infected premises, and the 1896 ban on subcontracting textile work, meant to keep sweating from vanishing into the household. Publicity and sanitation, he concedes, cannot touch starvation wages; only worker organization can.
Der Geist thätiger Socialpolitik, welcher schon aus der Zahl dieser Arbeitergesetze spricht, durchdringt auch die übrigen Gebiete der öffentlichen Verwaltung Neu-Seelands.
English translation: “The spirit of active social policy, which speaks already from the sheer number of these labor laws, likewise pervades the other spheres of public administration in New Zealand.”
Origin is not concept: house or putting-out industry may grow from domestic work, wage labour, rural or urban craft, or even factory production, yet none of these births determines its essence. Across four forms, the dependent Kleinmeister who keeps his license but loses control of materials and market, the Zwischenmeister or sweater who profits from the wage difference, the isolated Heimarbeiter, and the Sitzgesellengruppe, Schwiedland tracks a single constant: production commanded by a Verleger rather than served for a customer. Against German and Austrian law, which sorted dependent home workers from supposedly independent Hausgewerbetreibende, he insists both are subordinate once the intermediary controls the outlet. Dependence, not poverty and not place, marks the boundary; independence survives as legal form after commercial capital has seized the market.
Da gibt es keine Krankenkasse und gar nichts.
English translation: “There is no sickness fund and nothing whatever.”
The itinerant peddler had become a screen onto which liberals and anti-liberals, settled shopkeepers, manufacturers, poor migrants, and officials each projected rival fears, and the answer offered here is to dissolve the single figure into a set of economic functions. A Hausierer might be an impoverished independent, a producer selling his own goods, a commission agent for village craftsmen, a wage-dependent seller, or part of a regional migration system. Tracing Habsburg policy from Maximilian I through Maria Theresa and Joseph II, repeated prohibitions giving way to licensing and passport systems, Schwiedland argues that mobility belongs to the essence of commerce rather than to its abuse. He records the overcharging and shoddy goods, yet favours targeted restriction over abolition, and closes on how little is actually known.
Der Hausierer sucht sein Publikum auf, während der sesshafte Händler auf das Publikum wartet.
English translation: “The peddler seeks out his public, while the settled merchant waits for the public to come to him.”
In Victoria and New Zealand, colonies Schwiedland reads as freer than Britain from aristocratic ballast and therefore bolder in social experiment, a new type of wage rule was taking shape against the sweated trades. Victoria's wage boards delegate rate-setting to expert representatives of employers and workers under an impartial chairman; New Zealand instead channels disputes into compulsory conciliation and binding arbitration awards. Neither, he insists, sprang from abstract formulas of a living or family wage, but from concrete trade practice, often union standards. Evasion through double books and collusive underpayment does not refute the system; it proves that law needs organized labour behind it. The result is neither old maximum-wage policing nor doctrinaire socialism, but an authoritative lower boundary governed by Billigkeit, a public standard of fairness.
Dabei wetteifern beide Gebiete miteinander im socialpolitischen Fortschritt. Dessen höchste Blüte bilden derzeit die Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung unzureichender Löhne.
English translation: “Both regions vie with each other in socio-political progress. Its highest flowering at present consists in measures for raising insufficient wages.”
The 1896 Vienna enquiry into women's labour filled seven hundred printed pages, stirred the press and public, then dispersed without producing a single practical measure. Sympathy, Schwiedland argues, was never the point: the distress of seamstresses and home workers stands in causal connection with their lack of organization, and the hardest case is the trade that is almost wholly female and dispersed across private dwellings. Marriage expectations, domestic burden, mistrust, replaceability, and dependence on a husband's wage all weaken association at the very moment they depress pay. His remedy is a hybrid of law, compulsory or state-aided representation understood as education, and the Berlin Christian-social Gewerkverein as a model in which bourgeois women initiate a union and then withdraw, culminating, where a sales cooperative bypasses the Verleger, in structural change.
Da frägt sie nur um den Auftrag, nicht mehr um dessen Preis.
English translation: “There she asks only about the commission, no longer about its price.”
Behind the putting-out worker's apparent independence lies subordination to the entrepreneur who supplies the work and dictates its terms, the premise from which this expansive programme of home-work legislation proceeds. Schwiedland explains why employers favour dispersed production: it lowers fixed capital and workshop costs and shifts the risk of falling Konjunktur downward onto the household. Against this he assembles a coordinated arsenal, registration, compulsory sickness insurance, sanitary licensing of workrooms, co-liability of landlord and Verleger, worker organization, wage schedules and binding minimum rates, surveyed comparatively across Australia, North America, England, and the Austrian crownlands, down to Galician locksmiths and Gablonz glass cooperatives. Yet he warns against rigid, schematic rules: home work is too diverse for a single formula, and only statute, self-help, and administration together can reach the emerging fifth estate.
Der Käufer der Verlagsarbeiter aller Kategorien ist nicht »Kunde«, sondern »Verleger«.
English translation: “The buyer of the putting-out workers of every category is not a »customer« but a »putter-out«.”
Economic theory must begin not from an abstract calculator but from the acting person, whose bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution shapes conduct in advance. Dedicated to the psychiatrist August Forel, this essay builds a layered anthropology, reflex, instinct, character, habit, suggestion, and traces economic behaviour to instinctual complexes of nutrition, protection, possession, power, and vanity that differ sharply in urgency. Schwiedland's sharpest tool is a distinction economics had blurred: Begier, desire, generates its own activity and seeks heightened pleasure, while Bedürfnis, need, is provoked by deprivation and drives toward its removal. The essence of economy, he insists, lies not in consuming but in procuring goods for future satisfaction. Culture is the refinement of striving; luxury is ambiguous, capable of both waste and invention; and economic reform, he concludes, must include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: “Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.”
No economy is governed by interest alone: conduct is formed by moral sentiment, custom, and law, each carrying its own sanction, conscience, public opinion, state force, and its own historical rhythm. Drawing on Schaeffle, Wundt, Westermarck, and Schmoller, Schwiedland traces how inward feeling hardens into Sitte, the socially expected form of conduct, and how custom in turn sustains, softens, or defeats written law even after its repeal. The deeper ground of both is collective self-protection, which is why acts condemned as selfish between individuals may be praised when done for the state. Applied historically, the argument shows guild rules and price ordinances confining commerce until the eighteenth century, liberal freedom then loosening them, and the modern state re-entering through factory protection, wage regulation, and social insurance to subordinate economic voluntarism to the community's sense of the fair.
„Sitte ist stärker als Recht“.
English translation: “Custom is stronger than law.”
Adolescence is neither childhood nor adulthood but a vulnerable passage, bodily growth, sexual maturation, emotional volatility, unfinished judgment, and industrial society, Schwiedland argues, throws working-class youth into adult labour, lodging-house life, drink, and disease before they can withstand them. He reads juvenile mortality, delinquency, and institutionalization as effects of environment rather than innate depravity, and faults courts and prisons for deepening the damage they claim to correct. Against this he sets a coordinated Jugenddienst: vocational guidance matched to health and aptitude rather than mere vacancies, placement offices, youth homes serving as substitute family, medical supervision, thrift schemes, and legal protection. The Jugendhort must feel like a large family, not a school or barracks. Care for the earning young, he closes, matters more than relief for those already broken, because the future lies with them.
Was in erster Linie benötigt wird, ist also ein Nachweis nicht der Stellen, sondern der richtigen Berufe.
English translation: “What is needed first and foremost, then, is a placement not of positions, but of the right occupations.”
Nature becomes power through technique, and technique becomes consequential only through the purposes that select it, such is the moving relation this compact essay sets out. Schwiedland defines Technik as purposive, rule-guided practice, distinct from science yet inseparable from it: science discovers laws, technique invents and shapes, and technical devices often run ahead of theory and compel it to catch up. In economic life the decisive test is not technical elegance but profit; the entrepreneur, not the engineer, decides whether an innovation pays under constraints of capital, labour, and demand. Technical possibility, he argues, is broader than economic possibility. Enlarged capacity in turn opens new markets, steam, railways, dyes, electrolysis, aviation, while free competition turns every profitable advance into pressure on all producers, making Wirtschaftlichkeit the ruling principle of modern life.
Stets ist indes die Technik Mittel zum Zweck: sei dieser eigene Selbstbefriedigung oder die Erreichung äußerer Ziele.
English translation: “Technique is always, however, a means to an end: whether that end be one's own self-gratification or the attainment of external goals.”