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Clock and watch making in the mid-fifteenth century can be considered a new trade in Europe. Although instrument making can hardly be considered a trade at all, the two occupations were intertwined – despite which the multi-faced, hard-to-define, small-scale nature of instrument making would mean that, unlike clock making, it would never become incorporated as a recognised trade. The two had developed together from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, when a new semi-autonomous mechanism, controlled by a falling weight for sounding bells, was combined with displays that presented visually not only the hour, but also the place of the Sun and Moon in the zodiac, the rising and setting of the signs, the length of day and night, the seasons, and, more rarely, the movements of the planets. The development of an alternative motive force – the controlled unwinding of a coiled spring – in the early to mid-fifteenth century made possible the introduction of a new range of portable and personal timekeepers, but many of them still offered calendrical and astronomical indications. At the same time, sundials were essential for setting any mechanical timepiece should it stop, and for checking the (often variable) time it showed against that given by the only available standard – the movement of the sun. The making of sundials therefore became associated with clock making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic institutions that foster technological innovation and diffusion and enable flexible adaptation to technical change enhance social welfare. In all these respects, early modern craft guilds have not been judged very favourably. It is generally believed that they were devoted to maintaining their members' rents by excluding non-members from the labour market and that they resisted labour-saving technologies. The marginalisation, demise, or abolition of craft guilds was therefore a prerequisite for successful proto-industrial and industrial development. The roughly contemporaneous demise of the craft guilds and rise of industrial manufacturing is seen as conclusive evidence of the restrictive practices and negative welfare effects of craft guilds. While it is certainly true that craft guilds did oppose technical change under specific circumstances, the point is easily overgeneralised. In most parts of continental Europe, the dissolution of guilds from the late eighteenth century on had political rather than industrial motivations, even though abolition was often justified in economic terms. Arguments by economic historians based on the temporal coincidence between the demise of craft guilds and industrial developments hark back to those eighteenth-century debates and rely on highly aggregated evidence. Establishing a direct causal link between the dissolution of guilds and industrialisation without considering decision making at the level of individual craft guilds runs the risk of incurring an ecological fallacy, that is, of making inferences about individual behaviour on the basis of aggregated data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Over the past few decades the historiography of craft guilds has changed dramatically, as historians have realised that the rules and regulations that had formerly underpinned writing about guilds were not necessarily adhered to in practice. This has resulted in a double reorientation of the historiography. On the one hand, many historians of the guilds have construed the inconsistencies between practices and norms as evidence of ‘flexibility’. On the other hand, they have de-emphasised the economic impact of the craft guilds, in favour of their social and cultural contributions to the shaping of medieval and early modern European society. The upshot of this reorientation has been that guilds have been declared irrelevant in the economic domain where they were traditionally perceived to be most significant. Much of the recent literature, however, covers broad swathes of the pre-modern economy and lumps together evidence from a wide variety of trades, which did not necessarily follow the same rules and dynamics. To diminish the potential dangers of this approach, this chapter focuses on a single trade during a relatively brief span of time. The arts are a particularly attractive sector for pre-modern economic historians for two reasons. First, since artists signed their products and since those products were generally durable, it is possible to trace details over time about sales, prices, and so on for individual paintings, and at times even for sculpture and silverware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility of Pre-modern Skilled Workers For a long time historians systematically underestimated the mobility of workers in pre-industrial Europe, on the assumption that individuals before nineteenth-century industrialisation and urbanisation were essentially place-bound. Social historians inspired by modernisation theory described the transition to modern society in terms of a radical increase in mobility – an argument that required establishing a counterpoint in terms of a spatially ‘stable’ and ‘immobile’ pre-modern society. As a survey from the 1970s put it, ‘there is widespread agreement that industrialisation, at least in Europe, caused an extraordinary spatial and occupational mobilisation, thereby marking a decisive break with static preindustrial society’. As Steve Hochstadt noted a few years later, ‘general works on economic history, family life, and social structure still describe preindustrial society as rooted…. Premodern Germans are still described as immobile in most general demographic studies. Even city populations are considered exceptionally stable…. Only with industrialization did German society become mobile’. Although this view still finds some support, it was already becoming clear that migration was a ‘normal and structural element of human societies throughout history’. This revisionism soon extended to pre-modern Europe to include journeymen, as researchers discovered that a market for specialised labour had already begun to develop in the later Middle Ages, particularly in connection with the rise of organised tramping (Gesellenwanderung). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent literature on craft guilds in late medieval and early modern Europe no longer considers these institutions as obstacles to the rise and expansion of capitalism. Indeed, markets, competition, social inequality, and individualism are now being viewed as characteristics of craft guilds rather than as their antitheses. Ample material is available to substantiate this perception. The enormous flexibility of such institutions, however, does not necessarily mean that the urban craft economy was a freewheeling affair, as some authors are inclined to assume. After all, such a position would suggest that craft guilds had little or no economic impact, which is hardly compatible with their centuries-long existence and with the fact that corporate regulations often instigated criticism on the part of merchants and political elites. Determining whether and under which conditions urban craft guilds benefited the economy requires an agent-centred perspective. These institutions were set up, transformed, disbanded, re-established, and abolished through interacting groups of agents with different strategies and objectives, amid changing and unequal balances of power. Craft guilds of themselves neither impeded nor promoted economic change and growth; their effects depended on who wielded economic and institutional control, their measure of autonomy with respect to other groups, and their willingness and ability to take the initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological invention and innovation in the pre-industrial economy are still poorly understood. This is partly because of the difficulty in identifying the small-scale and anonymous innovations that dominated technical progress at the time. However, the problem is compounded by several long-standing assumptions about pre-modern manufacture, in particular by the view that from the fifteenth century onwards craft guilds – which provided European urban manufacture with its main institutional framework for over six hundred years – were organised rent seekers that systematically opposed technical innovation. This chapter suggests that the prevailing view of craft guilds misrepresents their principal function and their technological consequences. It begins by analysing the guild structure from the point of view of individual producers and suggests that the primary purpose of craft guilds was to provide adequate skills training through formal apprenticeship. It then argues, from evidence of innovation and resistance to it, that technological invention and innovation were a significant, albeit mostly unintended, effect of the crafts' support for investment in skills. It concludes by briefly addressing the counterfactual question implied by the guilds' critics: if craft guilds were technologically regressive, why was guild-based craft production not out-competed by its major contemporary rival, rural proto-industry? Rather than provide a detailed study of an individual craft or of a constellation of guilds in one town, the focus is on the broad outlines of a system that remained fundamentally unchanged for more than half a millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Craft guilds, Adam Smith famously suggested in 1776, are ‘a conspiracy against the public’, and the government should ‘do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary’. As in so much other economic thinking, Smith was a trendsetter in this too. Not only were his ideas about guilds shared by some of his late eighteenth-century contemporaries, they seemed to apply almost overnight when French revolutionaries abolished the guilds, first in France (in 1791) and then in much of the rest of continental Europe. For a long time, historians have interpreted the simultaneity of ideas and policies as definitive proof that the guilds had outlived themselves as the gothic remnants of a bygone age and should make way for the modern world of the steam engine and laissez-faire. Guilds, in other words, were seen as part of an economic system that had prevented the European economy from realising its full economic potential. It was, if anything, a demonstration of the validity of this argument, that England was the first European country to lose its guilds – English guilds were supposed to have vanished through some unplanned process starting in the second half of the seventeenth century – and also the first country to industrialise. The negative view of guilds survived for the best part of two centuries in history textbooks and specialised works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As economic institutions, craft guilds have been judged unfavourably at least from the late eighteenth century onwards. In the view of the enlightened elites pressing for liberal reforms, craft guilds presented an obstacle to economic growth and welfare. In the course of the nineteenth century, both liberal and radical economists considered craft guilds as a paradigmatic institution of a pre-capitalist economy, while writers of the German historical school, such as Werner Sombart, viewed craft guilds as a materialisation of a typical pre-modern economic spirit. Prominent among the arguments put forward by eighteenth-century philosophes and nineteenth-century economists figures the supposition that craft guilds served mainly as cartels for the appropriation of monopoly rents for its members. At the same time, craft guilds are said to have resisted the transition from simple commodity production to more complex production regimes, which increased the control of entrepreneurs over production and enhanced productivity by applying new technology. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the economic effects of late medieval and early modern craft guilds. First, it has been argued that craft guilds prevented market failure (adverse selection) in long-distance trade. Bales of textiles, in particular, were characterised by considerable asymmetry of information, in the sense that a buyer would have had to assess quality by unrolling and inspecting each bale, which would require a lot of time. Since long-distance merchants, local retailers, and consumers might all need to assess quality individually, information costs were unavoidably inflated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]