Crafting SVG is a small manual production based on the use of hand tools.
Crafts emerged with the beginning of human production activity, passed a long historical path of development, taking various forms: with the emergence of custom craft and especially the market associated with the emergence and development of cities as craft and trade centers. Household handicrafts are often referred to as domestic industries (i.e. non-agricultural production), handicrafts to order and to the market as handicrafts. In Russian Statistical Literature, all artisans of the 19th and 20th centuries were often called bush laborers.
Crafting SVG History
Household craftsmanship is widespread throughout the history of pre-capitalist societies. The rural population produced most of the handicrafts they consumed. Gradually, handicrafts to order and the market began to play a leading role. In ancient Greece, ancient Rome, there was a significant number of artisans in the ancient East who were self-sufficient and who produced products to order or market.
The emergence of professional craftsmanship, especially in urban areas, led to the emergence of a new production sector and a new social stratum – urban artisans. The emergence of developed forms of their organization (shops), which protected the interests of this stratum, created particularly favorable conditions for the development of urban crafts in the Middle Ages. The leading branches of the city craft were: cloth making, production of metal products, glassware, etc. In the process of industrial revolution (the middle of the XVIII century – the first half of the XIX century) the factory industry, based on the use of machines, replaced the craft. Crafts (to order and the market) were preserved in the industries related to the service of individual needs of the consumer or the production of expensive artistic products – pottery, weaving, art carving, etc.
To a large extent, the craft has been preserved in underdeveloped countries. However, even here it is being replaced by the factory industry as a result of industrialization of these countries. Folk arts and crafts related to tourism and export are preserved.
Already in the ancient world there are rudiments of handicraft activity, manifested in the processing of famous objects, mostly at the home of the owner of the material and by the hands of slaves. This is the nature of craftsmanship in Greece, as evidenced by Homer.
While the Greeks despise craftsmanship, which was recognized as unworthy of a free man, craftsmanship as a permanent professional activity was the work of a very limited contingent of persons, except for the meteks and slaves who were part of the house (buckwheat.οίκος). At first, the artisans worked one by one.
Some handicrafts in Greece, however, rose to a high degree, despite the use of the simplest tools and instruments. Over time, crafts have spread not only in terms of luxury goods, but also in terms of meeting the everyday needs of the lower classes of the population.
Already in Greece, artisans sometimes experienced competition from relatively large industries that emerged from the middle of the V-th century BC. With the existence of separate, closed farms that satisfied their needs through the specialization of slave labour, there was no ground for the development of crafts as a free professional activity in Rome; due to the lack of a contingent of persons who would constantly need the products of other people’s labour and have the opportunity to pay for them, Roman craftsmen, Buddhists, etc. and (artifices) had to join the ranks of proletarians. Only in the presence of the known property which served as a source of income (usually – the small land lot), the craftsman could exist comfortably and in execution of casual orders to have an auxiliary income. With the formation of large estates, which absorbed a significant part of the small land, the artisans, the rows of which were mainly replenished with freedmen, had to look for work on the side and perform it at the house of the customer.
In order to increase the volume of production in an artel, the artel could economically put under control or acquire ownership of one or more owners, and then it grew into a factory or factory. With the advent of more and more complex and energy-intensive machines and mechanisms in a trade, and especially with the involvement of science, the trade grew into industry. The presence of complex and numerous machines and mechanisms, as well as high-tech processes, is the very edge beyond which the craft ends and the industry begins. An example of this is the transformation of Ivanov in Russia in the 19th century, a typical settlement consisting mainly of weaving artels, into a city with a large number of weaving factories. Further, with a large application of modern, scientifically sound processes, Ivanovo became the center of the textile industry in Russia. Here are some other examples of the “evolution” of the industry with increasing production volumes, complicating and increasing the number of used equipment and involving science:
The bakery and mill trade has turned, each into its own part of the food industry;
The shoemaker’s craft has evolved over the years into a footwear industry;
Weaving and spinning crafts together gave birth to the textile industry;
The tailoring trade became a sewing industry;
Blacksmith’s craft became the ancestor of a number of industries related to the processing of metals.
Nevertheless, many handicrafts continue to exist along with their industries, creating a professional environment from which a lot of specialists are recruited to the respective industry. For example, highly qualified carpenters or shoemakers use their potential in the furniture and footwear industries.
Ordinary notions of craftsmanship as obsolete in modern society are deceptive. And nowadays, new handicrafts continue to appear (for example, a button maker, who can help to put a spare button on the clothes from the repair kit of the purchased item instead of the broken one, will replace the lock on the cover of the purse instead of the broken one, will install a lot of other necessary riveted accessories for fashionable women, which is difficult to put and pick up at home when the experience in installation is not enough). In sphere of an information technology with the beginning of development of social networks there was a craft of the expert on SMM or, as it name more often, the community manager. It is possible to count such new crafts in sphere of digital technologies not less than ten.
Some crafts, having appeared, and remain at handicraft or semicraft level and do not find an industrial equivalent owing to the technological features (for example, knitting of fishing flies).