Work, regulation, and identity in provincial France

"The eighteenth-century French leather industry was a strategically important manufacturing sector, one vital to both civilian and military life - revealed most dramatically when its precipitous decline induced Napoleon Bonaparte to violate his own Continental System in order to procure the critical material. This study examines the production and manipulation of leather and lives of the men and women who engaged in the Bordeaux leather trades during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By focusing on one of the most passionately independent regions of early-modern France, it affords the opportunity to explore the details of artisan culture and examine the realities of an early modern craft economy and its relation to the wider French political economy."