The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 78, Band 78) - Hardcover

Ogilvie, Sheilagh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691137544 ISBN 13: 9780691137544

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A comprehensive analysis of European craft guilds through eight centuries of economic history Guilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked innovations. Did the benefits of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds that dominated European economies from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds uses vivid examples and clear economic reasoning to answer that question. Sheilagh Ogilvie’s book features the voices of honourable guild masters, underpaid journeymen, exploited apprentices, shady officials, and outraged customers, and follows the stories of the "vile encroachers"—women, migrants, Jews, gypsies, bastards, and many others—desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. She investigates the benefits of guilds but also shines a light on their dark side. Guilds sometimes provided important services, but they also manipulated markets to profit their members. They regulated quality but prevented poor consumers from buying goods cheaply. They fostered work skills but denied apprenticeships to outsiders. They transmitted useful techniques but blocked innovations that posed a threat. Guilds existed widely not because they corrected market failures or served the common good but because they benefited two powerful groups—guild members and political elites. Exploring guilds’ inner workings across eight centuries, The European Guilds shows how privileged institutions and exclusive networks shape the wider economy—for good or ill.

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Sheilagh Ogilvie is professor of economic history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Institutions and European Trade and A Bitter Living.

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The European Guilds

An Economic Analysis

By Sheilagh Ogilvie

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-13754-4

Contents

List of Figures and Plates, vii, 
List of Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xv, 
CHAPTER 1 The Debate about Guilds, 1, 
CHAPTER 2 Guilds and Governments, 36, 
CHAPTER 3 Entry Barriers, 83, 
CHAPTER 4 Market Manipulation, 172, 
CHAPTER 5 Guilds and Women, 232, 
CHAPTER 6 Quality Regulation, 307, 
CHAPTER 7 Human Capital Investment, 354, 
CHAPTER 8 Innovation, 438, 
CHAPTER 9 Guilds and Growth, 511, 
CHAPTER 10 Conclusion, 564, 
Bibliography, 587, 
Index, 637, 

CHAPTER 1

The Debate about Guilds

... [this ordinance is] for the good and profit of the craft and thecommonality of the people.

— Hosiers' guild ordinance, Paris, c. 1268

... they have enacted such ordinances ... and have conspired to maintain and defend them, contrary to the regulations made for the common good of the city.

— Judges describing the

fishmongers' guild, London, 1321

... [these privileges are] to bring utility and honour and piety not only to us, but also to the common weal.

— Hatters' guild privileges, Middle Rhine towns, 1477

... [under cover of their fraternity they act] to augment their craft at the expense of the Republic.

— Complaint against the velvetweavers' guild, Toledo, 1562

... [the guild assembly and ordinances] are most important for thepublic good and utility.

— Silk-twisters' guild ordinance, Toledo, 1627

... for private or peculiar profit is the chief foundation (tho' it always goes under the notion of a general advantage) of all those restrictions and burdens imposed on the citizens by corporations or guilds.

— Pieter de la Court, complaint against the guilds of Holland, 1662 People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

— Adam Smith, observation on urban guilds, 1776

What kind of institution makes the entire economy work better, and what kind moves resources into the hands of special-interest groups, at the expense of everyone else? In the terms people used to describe pre-modern guilds, what serves "the common weal", and what "ends in a conspiracy against the public"? This question is central to improving people's lives in rich and poor economies alike. Many factors help economies flourish, but a growing body of research suggests that one key cause is institutions – "the rules of the game in a society ... the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction". The origins of these "humanly devised constraints" often lie centuries in the past, and most theories of economic growth make assumptions about the historical institutions that set economies on an upward path. But although institutions clearly matter, what kind of institution should a poor economy aim for?

Every institution is multi-faceted and none can be boiled down to a single, all-important characteristic — as this book will argue. But one key feature is whether an institution is "generalized" or "particularized". Generalized institutions are ones whose rules apply uniformly to everyone in society, regardless of that person's identity or group membership. The rules of the game established by such institutions apply to any economic agent impartially. In principle, a generalized institution is equally accessible to all participants, and thus facilitates and constrains everyone's transactions in the same way. An example of a generalized institution is a state in which a clear rule of law is established, or a competitive market with open entry. In the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, "laws should be clear, exact, and alike for all citizens".

Particularized institutions, in contrast, have rules that apply differentially to different people. The rules of the game differ according to whether a person has particular characteristics. These characteristics are not related to the transaction in question. Instead, they relate to identity: gender, religion, ethnicity, social stratum, parentage, ancestry, legal privileges, or group membership. The rules and entitlements of an occupational guild, for instance, applied only to persons with membership in that guild. Non-members of the guild were treated quite differently. Guild membership in turn depended — as we shall see in this book — on many non-occupational criteria. The rules of a guild might guarantee your property rights or enforce your contracts, but only because of your particular identity, privileges, and entitlements as a member of a particular subset of economic agents, defined according to transaction-unrelated criteria.

Generalized institutions, some might claim, are idealized constructs that cannot be applied to pre-modern economies. True, no economy is regulated by perfectly generalized or perfectly particularized institutions. Instead, the two types of institution appear in different combinations in each society. But there is no technical reason why generalized institutions were impossible in pre-modern economies. Empirically, some pre-modern economies had quite generalized institutions, just as some modern ones have quite particularized ones. The county of Champagne in the thirteenth century, for instance, did not have perfectly impartial governmental institutions or perfectly impersonal markets; but it did offer a much more generalized institutional framework than most other societies at the time (and for centuries afterwards). These generalized "rules of the game" attracted hundreds of merchants from many lands, making the Champagne fairs the fulcrum of long-distance trade in western Europe from c. 1180 to c. 1300. Similarly, neither Venice and Bruges in the fourteenth century, Antwerp in the fifteenth, Amsterdam in the sixteenth and seventeenth, nor London in the seventeenth and eighteenth had perfectly impartial governments or perfectly impersonal markets; but each of them in turn offered an institutional framework that moved away from delegating power to corporate groups to providing public institutions that guaranteed the property rights and enforced the contracts of all comers. These generalized institutions made each city in turn a successful centre of trade and industry which, for a time, outperformed other urban centres. Likewise, as we shall see in the course of this book, Flanders in the fifteenth century, the Northern Netherlands between 1560 and 1670, England between 1600 and 1800, and the guild-free jurisdictional enclaves inside the cities of eighteenth-century France, did not have perfectly impartial governments or perfectly impersonal markets. But they did offer an institutional framework that curbed the particularized privileges of guild masters, creating a much more level playing field for outsiders to enter, compete, and engage in disruptive innovation. As this book will show, every society in pre-modern Europe had a different combination of "rules of the game", each offering different gradations between the particularized and the generalized.

The coexistence of particularized and generalized institutions in all economies raises the question of the relationship between the two. Do highly particularized...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691137544
• ISBN 13: 9780691137544
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 672
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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