Pre-industrial society refers to specific social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

A park interpreter demonstrates a typical rural kitchen of 1918 (Sauer-Beckmann Farmstead, a living history farm at the Lyndon B. Johnson State Park and Historic Site, Texas, United States). The woman's role seems pre-industrial, but the technology is already industrial.

Theoretical foundations

"While imaginetic centers concentrate on partial images of tomorrow, defining possible futures for a singly industry, an organization, a city or its sub-systems, however, we also need sweeping, visionary ideas about the society as a whole. Multiplying our images of possible futures is important; but these images need to be organized, crystallized, into structured form. In the past, utopian literature did this for us. It played a practical, crucial role in ordering men's dreams about alternative futures. Today we suffer for lack of utopian ideas around which to organize competing images of possible futures. Most traditional utopias picture simple and static societies - i.e., societies that have nothing in common with super-industrialism. B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, the model for several existing experimental communes, depicts a pre-industrial way of life - small, close to earth, built on farming and handcraft. Even those two brilliant anti-utopias, Brave New World and 1984, now seem oversimple. Both describe societies based on high technology and low complexity: the machines are sophisticated but the social and cultural relationships are fixed and deliberately simplified. Today we need powerful new utopian and anti-utopian concepts that look forward to super-industrialism, rather than backward to simpler societies. These concepts, however, can no longer be produced in the old way. First, no book, by itself, is adequate to describe a super-industrial future in emotionally compelling terms. Each conception of a super-industrial utopia or anti-utopia needs to be embodied in many forms - films, plays, novels and works of art - rather than a single work of fiction. Second, it may now be too difficult for any individual writer, no matter how gifted, to describe a convincingly complex future. We need, therefore, a revolution in the production of utopias: collaborative utopianism. We need to construct "utopia factories."

Some attributes of the pre-industrial societies

• Limited production (i.e. artisanship vs. mass production)
• Primarily had an agricultural economy
• Limited division of labor- i.e. Capitalism needs a vast amount of specialized knowledge and skills due to the complex nature of industrial production. In pre-industrial societies, production was relatively simple and, thus, the number of specialized crafts was limited.
• Limited variation of social classes
• Parochialism- Social theories hold that communications were limited between human communities in pre-industrial societies. Few had a chance to see or hear beyond their own village. In contrast, industrial societies grew with the help of faster means of communication, having more information at hand about the world, allowing knowledge transfer and cultural diffusion between them.
• Pre-industrial societies developed largely in rural communities. Capitalism developed largely in urban areas.

See also

• British Agricultural Revolution
• Industrialisation
• Modernization theory

Bibliography

• Grinin, L. 2007. Periodization of History: A theoretic-mathematical analysis. In: History & Mathematics. Ed. by Leonid Grinin, Victor de Munck, and Andrey Korotayev. Moscow: KomKniga/URSS. P.10-38. ISBN 9785484010011.