Golden Opportunities: Jewelry Making in Birmingham between Mass Production and Specialty

Abstract

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.