How would you characterize the nations manufacturing system before the early 1800s

Before the 1800s, the word "manufacturing" remained close to its original meaning, "making by hand" (from Latin manus, hand, and facere, make) for all manufactured goods such as footwear, textiles, jewelry, armor suits, weaponry, tools, etc. necessitated a great deal of manual work the way it had always been since the earliest times of civilization. During the boom of international trade begun during the Crusades, some European entrepreneurs came up with the idea of hiring great numbers manual workers in order to match the volume of goods yielded by their Eastern counterparts (Arab and Indian merchants mostly).

Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of machines, manufacturing heavily relied on highly-qualified workers who would always start out their careers in their youth as apprentices for a highly-qualified worker/artisan or master, this is, an expert in a trade or line of manufacturing. It might take between 10 and 20 years for an apprentice to achieve the same level of performance as a master. Whereas this way of training artisans guaranteed high standards of quality, it severely limited the number of manufactured products every artisan could produce. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution the latter inverted: the quality of goods manufactured fell down (to an acceptable level, though), while the time required for training a work was reduced to a few days or weeks allowing, i turn, to greatly increase the number of qualified workers available for the factories.

shang dynasty

western zhou (ca. 1046-771 bce)

eastern zhou (ca. 771-256 bce)

raw information is your answer

~courtney