SOURCING AND FINANCING LOCAL RAW MATERIALS IN THE NIGERIAN BEVERAGE INDUSTRY

SOURCING AND FINANCING LOCAL RAW MATERIALS IN THE NIGERIAN BEVERAGE INDUSTRY

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The history of raw materials can be traced back to the rise of industrialization from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century when the feudal system was still in existence in England. Farming was the principal occupation of the thirteenth century in England and was destined to remain so for another 500 years. Baronial power was strong and increased with the enclosure movements for sheep rearing in the late middle age, especially after the Black Death of 1348-49 had killed at least one third of the laboring population. This gave a fillip to the principal manufacturing industry of the age the cottage wearing of wool especially in eastern England. At first the raw product only was exported, mainly to the wearing centers in flankers. By the mid thirteenth century the domestic course weaving industry had become sufficiently established in rural areas to facilitate an important cloth exporting trade as well. Near the end of the century Edward III induced the skilled Flemish weavers to settle in England, safe from religious persecution and fine quality cloth manufacture arose.

Metal working was perhaps the only other not worthy industry of these times, primarily for weapons of war rather than implements of peace reflecting the unsettled nature of the times. Iron smelting using wood as fuel was located mainly in forested areas such as the weald and Gloucester shire. Other industries, of less importance included the product ion of glass and salt, ship building and the mining of lead and coal. In late mediaeval England, the location of wool manufactured moved from the plains of the east to the higher lands in the rural west and north, with its domestic and part time nature emphasized. In home industry the women and children carded and spun, and the men wove the yarn. Merchant capitalists, using pack horse transport delivered the raw materials and collected the finished product. Production was cheaper and less restricted than in the old gild dominated towns and facilitate the use of local water supplies for power and for filling, but by the nature of production the work could not be closely supervised and losses of cloth and time had to be tolerated by traveling merchants.

At this, time, export of raw wool hides, leather and tin from England were controlled by the merchant staplers and woolen cloth primarily by the merchant adventures. The country had been a late starter in international trading owing to her position on the fringe of the old world. The Mediterranean has maintained its Northern Europe involved continental merchants such as the handcars of German and Scandinavian, who largely provided the initial impetus and enterprise which brought English traders wide markets.The tempo of economic change accelerated in the mid eighteenth century and was associated with the beginning of modern industrialization. Only since that time has a general expansion of goods and service been a regular occurrence. In the last two centuries the population has become seven times dense and the average real income has become unrecognizably greater and more valid. In that time unit of economic activity has become the company in an urbanized society, involving complex and impersonal relationships.

Personal freedom permitted mobility from the land to the industrializing coal field based towns and led to the national spirit of laissez-fire, later succeeded by the safe guarding of markets and raw materials by colonial expansion. The application of steam to land and sea transport further increased the mobility of labour, bulky and perishable materials and industrial location. It vitalized the developments in the iron founding engineering, coal, textiles and chemicals industries.

Though the start of the industrial revolution was probably in the middle late eighteenth century and economic change was accelerated by the pressure of the Napoleonic wars, the most marked period of industrialization was between 1815 and 1875. The rate of expansion was 3- 4% per year, or twice the average of the previous century and by 1860 Britain supplied half of the world’s coal and manufactured goods.

SOURCING AND FINANCING LOCAL RAW MATERIALS IN THE NIGERIAN BEVERAGE INDUSTRY