Overall: 18.5cm (7.4in) x 17.5cm (7in)
Provenance:
Philip Bryan Davies-Cooke, FSA, DL, JP (1832-1903), of Gwysaney Hall, Flintshire, and Owston Hall, Yorkshire.
Thence by family descent.
This humble handmade pin might be considered in relation to Adam Smith’s economic deliberations on pre-industrialized pin making methods in his ‘The Wealth of Nations’. He identified eighteen distinct steps in the pin making process and mentions that pin factory workers were poorly paid, despite high productivity. The wonders of cooperative production observed in pin making was also discussed by Denis Diderot in Encyclopédie, the most famous of the encyclopedias of the 18th century. However Smith’s pin factory illustrates the ‘division of labour’ with a much deeper understanding than his Enlightenment predecessors.