TY - JOUR
T1 - Access to the trade
T2 - Monopoly and mobility in european craft guilds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
AU - Prak, Maarten
AU - Crowston, Clare Haru
AU - de Munck, Bert
AU - Kissane, Christopher
AU - Minns, Chris
AU - Schalk, Ruben
AU - Wallis, Patrick
N1 - Funding Information:
The first draft of this article was written by Maarten Prak and presented at a conference in All Souls College Oxford in November 2012, organized by Andrew Wilson. The other authors subsequently added data and text, in the context of the bEUcitizen project, funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration, under grant agreement no. 320294. The topic of this article was discussed in team meetings that also included Josep
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1093/JSH/SHZ070
DO - 10.1093/JSH/SHZ070
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100893688
SN - 0022-4529
VL - 54
SP - 421
EP - 452
JO - Journal of Social History
JF - Journal of Social History
IS - 2
ER -