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"Trade guilds"
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The social fabric of fifteenth-century Florence : identities and change in the world of second-hand dealers
\"The Arte dei rigattieri (merchants of second-hand goods in Florence) have never been the subject of a systematic study, even in scholarship devoted to the history of trades. Underpinned by a large collection of archival material, this book analyzes the social life and economic activity of rigattieri in fifteenth-century Florence. It offers invaluable information on issues such as the relationship between socio-political affiliations and economic interest as well as the structures of consumption and the spending power of different social groups. Furthermore, through the lens of the Arte dei Rigattieri, this work examines the connection between the development of the political bureaucracy, the establishment of Medicean power, and contemporaneous processes of identity construction and social mobility\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ottoman apprentices and their experiences
In this article, I analyze craft and trade apprentices in the late Ottoman Empire in order to add a new dimension to the existing literature on guilds and artisans. Rather than presenting an ideal picture, I discuss the apprentices' actions and experiences, which I argue did not take place in isolation.
First, I briefly discuss Ottoman guilds and artisans, including a literature review, define and explain both the system of apprenticeship and who apprentices were.
After focusing on the dialectical relationship between the upper and lower ranks, which presented itself through the authority - obedience or autonomy - disobedience relationship, I explain how the lower rank attempted to gain autonomy. I also question whether guild harmony was real or not and explore how some apprentices changed the direction of their life path, away from mastership to something else entirely. The hidden and unhidden resistance of apprentices will be shown through acts of theft, assault with a knife, and absconding, and through survival strategies which included running away. In the final part of the article, I describe how new institutions filled the gap left by the traditional guild system, which had been on the decline since the nineteenth century.
Journal Article
The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe
A new approach to guilds as institutions has been presented in this article. Although it cannot be denied that there is a clear need for a more global +Italic horizontal -Italic comparison of guilds in order to understand fully the functioning and role of such institutions, the debate would also benefit from a more vertical comparison, a comparison of the structure of the institution, with other forms of corporate collective action also being considered. But that would entail some risks. A theoretical approach as demonstrated in this article brings with it not only the possibility of too much generalization, it also restricts space for true empiricism. However, I hope the advantages of this new approach have been made sufficiently clear here.
Journal Article
Craft guilds in the pre-modern economy: a discussion
This article challenges the view, voiced especially by S. Ogilvie, that the 'revisionist' interpretation of the history of craft guilds is wide of the mark. The paper suggests that Ogilvie oversimplifies the revisionist position; ignores significant new work on European crafts; as a result underestimates the role of the guilds in England and the Low Countries; and incorrectly presents her own case study of the Württemberg worsted industry as typical of European industry in general. Rather than a return to what amounts to a generalized eighteenth-century debunking of the guilds, the paper pleads for more quantitative and regionally specified investigations of the economic contributions of craft guilds.
Journal Article
Guilds, Castes and Migrations in four Colonial Latin American Cities
This paper looks into the role of craft guilds in the ethnic integration or segregation of labour in the migration fl ows that took place in Latin America during the Colonial period. It analyses the guilds of the capital cities of two viceroyalties, Mexico and Lima, and contrasts them to those in the nearby towns of Puebla de los Ángeles and Cusco. The empirical evidence comprises 1200 mastership charts, which allow us to know which corporate caste regulations came into force. It is also the purpose of this paper to relate the geographical origins of new artisan masters to the broader Latin America’s urbanization process and the ethnic composition of migration fl ows from countryside to the cities and towns.
Journal Article
Rehabilitating the guilds: a reply
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. Industry flourished where guilds decayed. Despite impairing efficiency, guilds persisted because they redistributed resources to powerful groups. The 'rehabilitation' view of guilds is theoretically contradictory and empirically untenable.
Journal Article
Chinese Guilds from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: An Overview
A set of Chinese guild statistics published in 19951 forms the basis of the present overview, and those figures will be expanded within the framework of a research project currently being conducted by the project group for economic and social history at the University of Utrecht entitled \"Data infrastructure for the study of guilds and other forms of corporate collective action in preindustrial times\". This paper discusses distribution, internal organization, functions, the relationships of guilds with different levels of the administration, and points of comparison with guilds worldwide.
Journal Article
Guilds and middle-class welfare, 1550-1800: provisions for burial, sickness, old age, and widowhood
Guilds provided for masters' and journeymen's burial, sickness, old age, and widowhood. Guild welfare was of importance to artisans, to the functioning of guilds, to the myriad of urban social relations, and to the political economy. However, it is an understated and neglected aspect of guild activities. This article looks at welfare provision by guilds, with the aim of addressing four questions. Firstly, for which risks did guild welfare arrangements exist in the Netherlands between 1550 and 1800, and what were the coverage, contributions, benefit levels, and conditions? Secondly, can guild welfare arrangements be regarded as insurance? Thirdly, to what extent and how did guilds overcome classic insurance problems such as adverse selection, moral hazards, and correlated risks? Finally, what was the position of guild provision in the Dutch political economy and vis-à-vis poor relief?
Journal Article
From brotherhood community to civil society? Apprentices between guild, household and the freedom of contract in early modern Antwerp
This article examines the nature and impact of late medieval and early modern guilds through the lens of the master-apprentice relationship. Starting from a conceptual distinction between the 'guild ethos' and 'civil society', it is shown that Antwerp craft guilds stopped being 'brotherhoods' and 'substitute families' and retreated into a sphere separate from household and family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, masters can no longer be considered to have wielded a type of corporative mandate and to have acted in loco parentis. While parents had the final word in matters of discipline, masters' sons had gradually lost their privileged entrance (i.e. they stopped being 'born' within the guild), thus suggesting that the private sphere of the family prevailed over the public sphere of the guilds. The guilds' costumes and collective activities, moreover, respectively disappeared or became obsolete. From at least the 'long sixteenth century' onwards, Antwerp guilds appear to have transformed from confraternities or brotherhoods into juridical and institutional instruments, which did not aim at disciplining or socializing apprentices into an organized social group. In the end, the relationship between masters and apprentices was based on (oral and other) contracts rather than guild rules (whether formal or informal).
Journal Article
Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe
This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.
Journal Article