Volume 43 part 1 (April 1998)

Summaries

Harald Deceulaer, Guildsmen, Entrepreneurs and Market Segments: The Case of the Garment Trades in Antwerp and Ghent (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)
The present essay links the social, institutional and cultural approaches of guilds and guildsmen with their daily economic practice. Using as the point of departure a case study of the Antwerp and Ghent garment trades during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a preliminary model is presented, stressing the interrelatedness between divergent strategies, behavioural practices and specific market segments. It is argued that the choice of artisans for a certain market segment implied path dependency and, hence, influenced their investment patterns, their labour relations, their attitude towards the guild, and their personal representation in daily life.

Johan Dambruyne, Guilds, Social Mobility and Status in Sixteenth-Century Ghent
This article investigates the relationship between social mobility and status in guilds and the political situation in sixteenth-century Ghent. First, it argues that Ghent guilds showed neither a static picture of upward mobility nor a rectilinear and one-way evolution. It demonstrates that the opportunities for social promotion within the guild system were, to a high extent, determined by the successive political regimes of the city. Second, the article proves that the guild boards in the sixteenth century had neither a typically oligarchic nor a typically democratic character. Third, the investigation of the houses in which master craftsmen lived shows that guild masters should not be depicted as a monolithic social bloc, but that significant differences in status and wealth existed. The article concludes that there was no linear positive connection between the duration of a master craftsman's career and his wealth and social position.

Dick van Lente, Machines and the Order of the Harbour: The Debate about the Introduction of Grain Unloades in Rotterdam, 1905-1907
In 1905, dockworkers in the Rotterdam harbour organized a great strike against the introduction of machines for the transhipment of grain. The initial success of this strike was a profound shock to the leaders of political parties and national labour organizations, who, in spite of many differences of opinion, shared a positive attitude towards mechanization and regarded strikes against machinery as reactionary. The conflict in Rotterdam provoked a national debate about the implications of mechanization, which clearly exposed the strains and contradictions in this `dominant ideology of technology.' The article shows how several local labour leaders questioned the legitimacy of this ideology and why they failed in the end to persuade their superiors.

Sharif Gemie, Octave Mirbeau and the Changing Nature of Right-Wing Political Culture: France, 1870-1914
Octave Mirbeau was a committed supporter of right-wing politics in the 1870s, and a committed opponent of the right-wing during the Dreyfus Affair. This paper examines the reasons for his political change of heart, and discusses his changing analyses of right-wing political culture. Mirbeau's ideas are compared with those of some of his contemporaries, such as Blum, Peguy and Sorel.