Reaching beyond the city wall: London guilds and national regulation, 1500–1700 (original) (raw)
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Journal of Social History, 2020
One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper, we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. These data offer an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers and, by implication, of their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centers. Our understanding of guild "monopolies" and exclusivity is in need of serious revision.
Access to the Trade: Monopoly and Mobility in European Craft Guilds, 17 th and 18 th Centuries
Journal of Social History
One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. This data offers an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers, and by implication their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centres. Our understanding of guild ‘monopolies’ and exclusivity is in need of serious revision. WORKING PAPER VERSION FORTHCOMING AT JSH
2004
Craft guilds were essential for the organisation of urban society in the late middle ages. They not only had their role to play in structuring the urban economy; in the dense urban system of the Low Countries they very often also had important political, cultural and social functions. Historical research has focused during the past decades on the latter functions in particular, leaving aside a reassessment of the older assumptions of the negative impact of guilds on the urban economy. This paper argues that a multifaceted approach to guild life is necessary, whereby the economic role of guilds is integrated into newly acquired knowledge about guild life. In general guilds functioned as much more open and flexible economic institutions than has been acknowledged by most scholars. Guild regulation, ubiquitous in the documents, must, therefore, be reinterpreted and contrasted with its actual implementation. Moreover, the analysis of artisan careers and of the traditional life cycle (apprenticejourneyman-master) clearly shows how demographic realities such as high death rates and high migration rates cannot but have stimulated the open character of many of the urban guilds, in particular those involved in the export-oriented industries.
Introduction: Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2008
Craft guilds, Adam Smith famously suggested in 1776, are 'a conspiracy against the public', and the government should 'do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary'. 2 As in so much other economic thinking, Smith was a trendsetter in this too. Not only were his ideas about guilds shared by some of his late eighteenth-century contemporaries, they seemed to apply almost overnight when French revolutionaries abolished the guilds, first in France (in 1791) and then in much of the rest of continental Europe. For a long time, historians have interpreted the simultaneity of ideas and policies as definitive proof that the guilds had outlived themselves as the gothic remnants of a bygone age and should make way for the modern world of the steam engine and laissez-faire. Guilds, in other words, were seen as part of an economic system that had prevented the European economy from realising its full economic potential. It was, if anything, a demonstration of the validity of this argument, that England was the first European country to lose its guilds-English guilds were supposed to have vanished through some unplanned process starting in the second half of the seventeenth centuryand also the first country to industrialise. The negative view of guilds survived for the best part of two centuries in history textbooks and specialised works. 3 A recent survey of the early modern European economy routinely portrays guilds as 'restrictive', as instruments of elite rent seeking, and as hotbeds of economic 1 The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this book for several helpful suggestions, Rita Astuti, Tine De Moor, Oscar Gelderblom, Ulrich Pfister, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, as well as the participants of the conference 'The Return of the Guilds' (Utrecht, October 2006), for their comments on earlier drafts of this introduction, and Patrick Wallis also for linguistic assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.
Rehabilitating the Guilds: a Reply - 2008 - Journal Article
2008
This article examines Epstein's attempt to rehabilitate pre-modern craft guilds by criticizing my German case study. It demonstrates that his criticisms are baseless and his assertions about European guilds unsupported. Long survival does not establish the efficiency or aggregate economic benefits of any institution. Contrary to rehabilitation views, craft guilds adversely affected quality, skills, and innovation. Guild rent-seeking imposed deadweight losses on the economy and generated no demonstrable positive externalities.
Guilds in the transition to modernity: The cases of Germany, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands
Theory and Society
One important aspect of the transition to modernity is the survival of elements of the Old Regime beyond the French Revolution. It has been claimed that this can explain why in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some Western countries adopted national corporatist structures while others transformed into liberal market economies. One of those elements is the persistence or absence of guild traditions. This is usually analyzed in a national context. This article aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the development of separate trades in Germany, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands throughout the nineteenth century. We distinguish six scenarios of what might have happened to crafts and investigate how the prevalence of each of these scenarios in the three countries had an impact on the emerging national political economies. By focusing on trades, rather than on the
Can We Rehabilitate the Guilds? A Sceptical Re-Appraisal - 2007 - Working Paper
2007
This paper examines recent attempts to rehabilitate pre-modern craft guilds as efficient economic institutions. Contrary to rehabilitation views, craft guilds adversely affected quality, skills, and innovation. Guild rent-seeking imposed deadweight losses on the economy and generated no demonstrable positive externalities. Industry flourished where guilds decayed. Despite impairing efficiency, guilds persisted because they redistributed resources to powerful groups.