Volume 53 supplement 16 (2008)

Summaries

Return of the Guilds

Edited by Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor, and Jan Luiten van Zanden

Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor, and Jan Luiten van Zanden The Return of the Guilds: Towards a Global History of the Guilds in Pre-industrial Times
The recent emergence of the sub-discipline of ''global history'', and of its branches ''global economic history'' and ''global labour history'', is probably one of the most interesting developments in the social and historical sciences.1 In the age of globalization the question should be asked whether it is possible to analyse and understand global patterns of social and economic change in the recent or more distant past, without taking into account the role of institutions in those developments. This collection of essays focuses on a particular type of institution, the guild, in all the varieties of it that can be found around the world, and tries to estimate its value for economic development and social and political change, in a global and comparative framework.

Clare Crowston Women, Gender and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research
According to their self-representations, Western European guilds in the early modern period (1500-1800) were archetypal patriarchal institutions. In cities and towns where they existed, the vast majority of guilds restricted their membership to men. This paper will examine briefly the consensus established in the 1980s regarding the decline of women's labor status in the early modern period. It will then discuss new research that complicates our understanding of women and gender in the guilds. Along the way, we will address a series of themes, including women's place in the labor market, the accessibility of vocational training, women's independent guild privileges, the transmission of corporate membership, and the nature of family and identity among guildsmen and women. We will draw on published literature on women's work and corporate status, as well as on my own archival research on seamstresses in eighteenth-century France.

Hugo Soly The Political Economy of European Craft Guilds: Power Relations and Economic Strategies of Merchants and Master Artisans in Medieval and Early Modern Textile Industries
Since the 1990s, authors have argued increasingly that craft guilds are likely to have benefited the economy. But this revisionist thesis is not generally accepted. Some historians reject it, emphasizing that craft guilds were far from efficient institutional arrangements operating to the advantage of the pre-industrial economy. The aim of this essay is to shed light on how power relationships on the one hand and economic strategies of merchants and master artisans on the other related to one another, with due consideration being given to Derek Keene's advice that it is better "to focus on the nature of the power that was articulated through the different forms of association, which can be described as guilds than on the institution itself". A comparative approach is necessary to ascertain which power constellation determined whether individual master artisans generally had ample, little, or no economic leeway under the existing legislation. Given the central question in debates about the economic significance of craft guilds, sectors that produced for export seem to be the most relevant. The predominant export-oriented industry with respect to capital investment, employment, and profits was textile manufacturing, where several stages of production became guild-based very early on in many parts of western Europe.

Onur Yildirim Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era
History of the Ottoman guilds has long been studied within the context of Ottoman economic development and the paradigm of "decline" has been adopted as the analytical framework to trace the historical evolution of these institutions. This traditional viewpoint has recently been subjected to a critical revision which moves the attention away from the general picture to local conditions and dynamics. Adopting the same critical stance, this article revisits three major historical developments that had their particular marks on the history of Ottoman guilds during the early modern period. It argues that the response of Ottoman guilds to these developments varied considerably from one setting to another, depending essentially on local conditions and dynamics.

Tirthankar Roy The Guild in Modern South Asia
The article suggests that associations containing the formal character of a European guild were rare in late-medieval to modern South Asia. However, informal collectives did exist to regulate production, employment and entrepreneurship. Two overlapping models of control over capital and labor resources merit particular consideration, caste or community and master-cum-headman. While the community served some of the same functions that a formal guild would, namely, restrict access to useful and valuable knowledge, organize training, and enforce codes of conduct, the two were not equivalent institutions. The informal collective, where condition of entry was birth, was less open, less democratic, and an unlikely basis for laws of association to develop

Marie Louise Nagata Brotherhoods and Stock Societies: Guilds in Pre-modern Japan
In Japanese history there are two organizations usually translated as guilds that are quite different from each other because they flourished in very different periods of Japanese history. Both organizations were associations of people with the same trade or similar commercial interests and both organizations took steps to protect and advance the commercial rights of their members including attempts to gain monopoly control of certain commodities or markets, but otherwise they were quite different from each other. The purpose of this article is to discuss the history of guilds in Japan focusing on these two organizations: brotherhoods and stock societies. I will address them chronologically and so will begin with the medieval brotherhoods called za followed by their early modern transformation, then I shall move on to the kabu nakama which I have called "stock societies", before concluding with a discussion of guilds in Japan.

Josef Ehmer Rural Guilds and Urban-Rural Guild Relations in Early Modern Central Europe
A European comparative approach to the history of guilds still displays considerable gaps. This article discusses one particular characteristic of Central European guilds: the spread of rural guilds and the establishment of an area-wide guild system in the early modern period. In European historiography, guilds usually appear as urban institutions. No doubt, the first medieval craft guilds were established in towns and the spread of guilds in the late Middle Ages was an urban phenomenon. In the early modern period, however, things changed, at least in some European regions. In many parts of Central Europe, guilds became widespread in rural areas as well, and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century in some regions, village master artisans who belonged to a guild far outnumbered their urban fellow guildsmen. The aim of this article is, firstly, to present some evidence on the development of rural crafts and of urban/rural guild systems. Secondly, the relations between rural and urban craftsmen and guilds are discussed; these appear as fields of joint as well as of divergent interests, of agency and conflicts.

Luca Mocarelli Guilds Reappraised: Italy in the Early Modern Period
Over the past few decades, the interest of numerous historians has been roused by the subject of guilds, due to their widespread distribution, the way they were founded, and how they functioned. Various researchers have demonstrated the ability of guilds, in a world lacking anything like modern firms, to provide an efficient solution to complex problems of monitoring production and keeping transaction costs under control. Overall, it is no longer possible to ignore the part played by manufacturing crafts in protecting the customer, first by means of the guilds' certification of the quality of any of its products offered for sale and then through a guarantee that the workers involved in the various phases of production had been adequately trained through a proper apprenticeship. This intense international debate has given rise to renewed interest in guilds in Italy too, which led to the collective research programme carried out between 1997 and 2002, encouraged by the desire critically to reconsider Cipolla's view that guilds were one of the main reasons for the decline of the Italian economy during the seventeenth century. Recent work has helped to clear urban guilds of the accusation that they were responsible for a lengthy crisis. The new research has in fact shown the importance of guilds as part of a deeper and quite well-defined process of reorganization.

Tine de Moor The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe
During the Late Middle ages, Europeans formed to a previously unknown intensity and extent "alliances" that were not (primarily) based on kinship, but on other common characteristics such as occupation. In the urban context, organizations such as guilds and fraternities can serve as examples. For the countryside, this is the period that communal land tenure arrangements, or simply "commons", were increasingly formed and institutionalized. It is not so much the actual formation of such types of collective action that is striking, nor their institutional characteristics that make this region in this period so exceptional, but the high intensity of new units of such collective action that were being formed that makes this movement striking enough to refer to it as "a silent revolution". This article argues that the silent revolution to a large extent created the institutional infrastructure for socio-political change, and so for other forms of collective action which became characteristic for western Europe and came to be considered as a vital ingredient in preparing for its exceptional economic head start.

Christine Moll-Murata Chinese Guilds from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: An Overview
The Chinese merchant and craft associations that are most similar to European guilds originated in the late sixteenth century. They started to proliferate from the mid-eighteenth century onward and, after the intercession of the Taiping rebellion and the Opium Wars, their numbers soared from the mid-nineteenth century on. Commercial and handicraft guilds began to decline after Chambers of Commerce were promoted in the economic and political reforms during the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Subsequent governments of the Republic of China, both at Peking (1912-1927) and Nanking (1927-1937) first launched branch-specific commercial and industrial associations, and eventually ordered the re-organization of the traditional guilds. Although this command was formally implemented, various transitional modes and arrangements lingered on until the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949. A set of Chinese guild statistics published in 1995 forms the basis of this overview. The paper discusses distribution, internal organization, functions, the relationship of the guilds with different levels of the administration, and points of comparison with guilds worldwide.

Jan Jansen From Guild to Rotary: Hunters' Associations and Mali's Search for a Civil Society
Every kinship system will challenge the people who use it with structural tensions that require organizational (socio-cultural) solutions. Most societies based on agriculture combine a patrilineal kinship system with a (from a man's perspective) patrilocal settlement strategy. This means that sons remain on the father's compound/homestead, and they marry women from 'elsewhere', thus regulating both biological production and political support. This system works perfectly until food scarcity/land scarcity or personal ambition puts pressure on it. Since the inheritance rights of the homestead belong to the oldest son, this pressure may lead to fission or to departure of the younger brother(s). Given this structural tension in societies that combine patrilineal kinship and patrilocal settlement, societies have developed 'mechanisms' to deal with it. These mechanisms both recognize the tension and attribute to younger brothers particular tasks and challenges. The Mandé peoples, a cluster of ethnic groups that live in the savannahs of West Africa and that trace descent to the medieval Mali Empire, have dealt with this tension by attributing to the younger brothers tasks related to activities outside the homestead/compound. Hunting is such an 'external activity' par excellence. This article will discuss how Mandé hunters are functioning. It will be argued that particular characteristics attributed to hunters appear of immediate and major importance to the functioning of the nation-states in which live Mandé ethnic groups.