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Herring trade and holy feast. The growing importance of religious practices in the Schonenvaarders guild in sixteenth-century Haarlem This article examines the importance of religious and social practices for a sixteenth-century guild of herring merchants in Haarlem. Although recent historiography on medieval and early modern corporations has shown the importance of these practices for guild life in general, not much is known regarding merchant guilds specifically. Using practice-oriented sources such as the administration and memberships lists in guild books, and religious artefacts such as the guild's altar, this article maps the religious and social practices of the guild members. It argues that although in the sixteenth century the guild still presented itself as a guild of herring traders, these economic activities of the guild declined in importance in this period compared with its pre-existing social and religious activities. Thus, the function and practices of the guild changed over time, showing the flexibility of these dynamic institutions. The Schonenvaarders guild shows also the importance of these religious practices for both community cohesion within the guild and corporation-based lay piety in sixteenth-century Haarlem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the sixteenth century novels of Thomas Deloney entitled 'Iacke of Newberie' and 'Thomas of Reading' in terms of his own involvement in the cloth trade of London, England as a silk weaver. Deloney's advocacy for the needs of his class; Position as a yeoman in the guild London Weavers' Company; How Deloney's idealization of his craft mixes past and present ideologies of craft governance.

Enjoying a special attention from Wallachian princes, Târgovi;te became a prosperous trade fair during the first decades of the 15th century. A century later, during 1532-1534, an Italian traveller, Francesco della Valle of Padua, noted that Târgovi;te had really raised a town profile. A few years later, another traveller, Anton Veranciscs would point out that, at that time, Târgovi;te was the most important town in Wallachia, the more so as the princes of the country had their main residence there. If around 1581 the town counted 1022 homes and about 5000 inhabitants, by the mid of the 17th century it reached about 4000 houses and 20000 inhabitants. In the first half of the 16th century, the town of Târgovi;te gained a growing economic and commercial importance, which will be highlighted in the present study [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century untilMorisonvMoat(1851), described by theOxford History of the Laws of Englandas ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions could no longer be enforced in the guild courts by the late seventeenth century, or within the wider jurisdiction of the courts of the City of London. Instead, as the second half of the paper shows, it was the law courts proper that came to provide succour to those working trade secrets, allowing them to both restrain employees from using secrets for their own benefit and/or to sell secrets to other parties. This was a halting process, but one that had certainly begun prior to Morison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Employing novel data on over 400 apprenticed orphaned boys from the Dutch cities of Leiden and Utrecht, this article explores the functioning of apprenticeship during and after the guilds. Although the mobility of apprentices was high and contracts were uncertain, no complaints arose from masters or guilds. Wages paid to these apprentices demonstrate that their labour made a gradually increasing contribution to the workshop from the start of their term. This enticed masters to take on apprentices and removed the need for contract enforcement. After the guilds were abolished, the number of apprenticed orphans in the crafts grew, suggesting that guilds previously hampered access to training. Additional data collected for regular (non-orphan) apprentices corroborates these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The activities of female-run embroidery agencies have been largely ignored in scholarship dedicated to the design professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study reveals that embroidery agencies and societies played a key role in organizing and systematizing the female-dominated embroidery workforce, thereby granting women needleworkers new access to the business side of art. In illuminating the material and economic conditions of these women's working lives, the author unpacks the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between embroidery organizations and professionalism, at a time when the design industries themselves were becoming increasingly professionalized and commercialized. Two broad categories of embroidery agencies are examined: modest, economically driven work depots; and artistically and philanthropically motivated embroidery societies. In the brief period of time when the popularity of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic and demand for ecclesiastical embroidery made embroidery a viable remunerative business, dedicated agencies and societies gave women with little or no connections to the art world access to a market for their wares. It was this access that allowed female needleworkers to practice as professional art workers according to that term's most basic definition – they supported themselves monetarily through artistic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay looks at the fragmentary evidence documenting the marches of the bow shooting fraternities, festive groups connected to the guilds that paraded in great numbers through the streets of London in the 1580s. Situating their activities within the larger history of the longbow as a peculiarly English weapon, the essay argues that these marches worked to install a mercantile, imperialist ideology in the bodies of the marchers and the streets they paraded through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second Chantries Act of 1547 called for the dissolution of a range of intercessory institutions, including religious gilds. Rather than disband, Norwich's Gild of St. George worked to reorganize as a secular company. In the process it abandoned its patron saint and substituted active involvement in the city's mayor-making ceremonial for traditional religious observances. The decision to remake the gild was a singular one that has not been adequately explained. This article borrows from the work of Jonathan Barry and Phil Withington to argue that the effort was driven by the power of early modern notions of association and company to foster a form of sociability compatible with leading urban political values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic geography of cities is often thought to have changed dramatically between the medieval and early modern eras. The medieval city is seen as having been strictly regulated, both in terms of markets, and in terms of space. The early modern city, by contrast, is associated not only with growth, but with the breakdown of rigid regulation by guilds and a new commercial outlook. However, empirical studies of the spatial organization of medieval cities have been limited, and quantitative surveys of urban economic geography have focused on the seventeenth century and later. This article analyses the spatial distribution of occupations in the City of London between the 1370s and the 1550s using a large probate dataset. It examines occupations that remained clustered or dispersed, but concentrates on the apparent breakdown in economic clustering among London's leading trades. Prosopographical analysis reveals that merchants and retailers became more specialized, but that this was accommodated within London's existing guild-based occupational identities, which had become ossified. Rather than the end of the middle ages having marked a dramatic change from guild-based spatial organisation, occupational clusters simply continued to evolve in line with the principles of locational economics throughout the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text of a 1784 document from the guild of San Juan Pungarabato in Tierra Caliente, Mexico, administered by Matheo Nicolás up to 1784, is presented, with comments on the information this source offers on the area's economic and social conditions and the role of blacks in regional development.

One of the key concepts of Max Weber's „The City” was that in northwestern Europe landed nobility and urban patricians were clearly distinguished; for Weber, this was indeed the main reason to locate the occidental city in the north rather than in the Mediterranean. It has often been tought that tournament books and armorials produced this very difference - to display inherited status (in the case of ancient families) or to claim status (in the case of social climbers). The article looks at one of the largest, most sumptuous and, at the same time, most widely spread armorials of medieval Europe, that of Konrad Grünenberg (d. 1494). He himself has often been quoted as a paradigmatic social climber, as he left his guild to join the society of the local nobility „Zur Katz” and issued a sumptuous armorial. Yet this armorial, while containing over 2000 coat-of-arms mainly from the southwest of the Empire, does not mention any single memberof the „Katz”. Instead, it praises the tournament societies of the „Vier Länder”, of which Grünenberg was not a member, and highlights tournaments in which Grünenberg never participated. This, I argue, indicates that armorials (and related documents, like tournament books) were not only about status already gained - as Grünenberg ignored the Katz society he was a member of in his armorial - or to be gained - as he himself produced the arguments for why he could not join the society he praised in his armorial. Instead, already for contemporaries they served to discuss the social order in a more abstract way; it was not only members (or would-be members) of the respective social groups who knew and reproduced its social codes. Grünenberg's armorial is part and parcel of a new discussion of origins and kinship, namely patrilineal kinship that took place in all social milieux. Not only did much of this happen in cities, in Konstanz it was the guilds (and not the nobility) that first insisted on patrilineal descent as a proof of status. The growing social importance of kinship around 1500, and in particular the leading role of cities and urban institutions in this process, runs counter to received narratives that equate modernity with the decline of kinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of consumer preferences and manufacturer's attitudes, focusing on the effects of consumerism on products and artisan guilds in early modern Europe. Other topics of the article include the relationship between producers and their products, the effects of raw materials on product quality, and analysis of the concepts of gifts and commodities in relation to objects produced in the early modern period.

Copyright of Socio-Economic History / Shakai-Keizai Shigaku is the property of Socio-Economic History Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the history of corporatism and social models in the Netherlands and Belgium. The author analyzes the history of guilds in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times. Other topics mentioned in this article include labor history, the socioeconomic history of the Low Countries, and labor relations.

This paper is an account of the institutional mechanisms that have influenced business history in the early to late Middle Ages in the city of Coventry. The paper discusses socio-cultural, political, religious, and historical influences on the city's major trades during the era and incorporates analysis of governance structures in the form of Coventry's famous guilds which were instrumental in shaping the trajectory of one of England's foremost cities during the chronicled era. Through this examination we seek to complement and contribute to business history literature that is increasingly intrigued by business and economic activities pre-dating the industrial and manufacturing era, thus enriching discussion about business and institutional dynamics in the pre-modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a February 12-13, 2014 conference in Leipzig, Germany on the history of art societies in central Europe. Topics of presentations delivered included the history of the guilds and fraternities of painters and woodblock carvers in Prague, Czech Republic, painters' guilds in Silesia and Mähren, Germany, and the history of the painters' guilds in Krakow, Poland.

The other side of the formation of the modern state is the thorough transformation of social structure, the way people are organized, and the mechanisms of social mobilization and participation. One distinctive feature of these changes is the growth and expansion of civil organizations (minjian zuzhi). As a linkage point between the state and the individual, civil organizations have exerted an important and unique influence on the orientation as well as the nature of society. The history of the separation and reorientation of state and society in China was both specific to China as well as relevant to global experience. In recent years, research on modern Chinese civil organizations has become rigorous and fruitful, covering a wide range of topics from the history of chambers of commerce to guilds, peasant associations, freelancer groups, charity groups, cultural and educational clubs, and religious organizations. Thanks to a relatively large pool of participating scholars, the discussions have also multiplied and deepened, contributing to the study of modern Chinese history a new yet indispensable subfield. All of these studies not only delineate the organizations' background, development, structure, and function, but also pay attention to their relations with the state. Indeed, state-society relations constitute the most widely applied analytical framework. This is related to the middleman position of civil organizations, as well as to the state's ability to dominate them under the Chinese social tradition of strong state and weak society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the medieval guild workshop, small masters operated as class hybrids that personified a distinct economic form. Marx's Capital shows how these masters served as a thread stitching together the historical break that transformed Europe into an industrialized capitalist society. Despite their role in this transition, the proliferation of such hybrids has been undertheorized, even though the coexistence of different kinds of class structures is quite possible in today's corporations. Capitalist class structures may combine in the same enterprise with slave, feudal, ancient, or even communist class structures. To further understand such sites, this paper offers a basic class theory of hybrids. An immediate political importance arises from the possibility that collective-based employment may often develop only in a hybrid. As a result, a new theory and politics of transition beyond capitalism emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the conditions for the emergence of the agents of the Industrial Revolution by comparing the market-supporting institutions in pre-modern England and China. Market-supporting institutions in pre-modern England supported group mobility and expansion of laws, which permitted the forthcoming of new entrepreneurs critical for launching industrial ventures. By contrast, market-supporting institutions in pre-modern China, although supporting individual mobility, led to stable social stratification and stagnancy in law development, which did not provide appropriate conditions for the emergence of industrial entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses St. Martin le Grand precinct during the reign of King Henry VIII of England. The area in within the City of London, England but was governed by Westminster Abbey and by royal grant was given status as both a sanctuary and a liberty, meaning it was free from oversight and legislation imposed by the City, the Bishop of London, and to some degree, even the king's law. As the area was outside the realm of influence of London's craft guilds, immigrant artisans settled in the area so they could freely ply their trades without guild interference.

The article considers the reading habits of artisans in France and Italy for the period c. 1400 to c. 1520 by using a study of colophons and ownership marks found in manuscripts as well as wills and inventories. It finds that religious books written in vernacular languages helped provide insights into late Medieval religious life and reading habits. Membership of artisans in guilds, as well as the relative social status of guild members, are explored.

The article discusses the role of Netherlandish immigrant painters during the Dutch church reformation from 1560 until 1580 with special attention to Austin Friars. The author analyzes the role of the painters guilds in Antwerp, Netherlands and London, Great Britain. Other topics mentioned in this article include the travel and urbanization of painters, the role of memoranda books as historical sources, and English painters.

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Journal of Maritime History is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article uses the newly digitised Registers of Apprentices and Freedom Admissions of The Clothworkers' Company to provide a comprehensive survey of female membership in one City of London Livery Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By analysing who these apprentices, Freewomen and mistresses were and what they did, it aims to shed new light on women's work in this period. It shows that apprenticeship was used by girls of middling and genteel social status to enter the textile trades and, although few went on to take up their Freedom of the Company, the Clothworkers' records show an increasing level of female membership over time. Freewomen required membership in order to operate businesses within the City - although patrimony may also have been used to gain access to Company alms - and most mistresses operated through the Company as the wives or widows of Freemen, demonstrating that marriage was no bar to economic activity. Textile-related occupations predominated, with a significant cluster of female milliners in business in prominent City locations, charging high premiums to train apprentices in one of the few genteel and potentially lucrative trades open to women in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1800s, felt hatters used skills, tools and materials that were little changed for almost three hundred years. What change there was often resulted in further hazard in the workplace. Air in workshops was laden with animal fibre; dangerous chemicals were increasingly common. The trade was notorious for drunkenness on and off the job and was, latterly, supposedly defined by madness. Government was little concerned. As with all industry, manufactory owners controlled the loose workplace arrangements, while their home workers were left to fend for themselves. The discipline of occupational health was still far from finding its feet. Contemporary evidence is centred on individual observation and a deal of medical fumbling; numbers are in short supply. Yet, alongside debates on wealth, what other condition than health better defines contentment? This article examines the degree to which the lives of these craftsmen of the nineteenth century may have been damaged by their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An alderman of fifteenth-century London had to be worth £1000, and the lower civic ranks were not immune from financial evaluation. A wealthy marriage could propel a man up the civic hierarchy, and it was the best source of capital with which to trade. The richest catch was a widow, with or without children, for London custom protected the estates of both, and there was a plentiful supply of widows. Examples are culled from the 181 aldermen from 1400-1499, and show the coincidence of election with marriage. Some of the wealthiest widows were mayoresses more than once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the civic elite and guilds of Dublin, Ireland and their efforts to preserve its heritage of civic privileges when faced with threats from immigrants in the seventeenth century. Topics include the influence of the civic elite over their corporation's control over the admission of new citizens, Dublin's economic privilege of right to form guilds where members had rights to work at certain occupations and trade in certain goods and the need to defend guild monopolies against outsiders in the seventeenth century.

Copyright of Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları is the property of Turk Dunyasi Arastirmalari Vakfi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Historical scholars have recently turned their attention to local communities, resulting in a lively debate about the role of regions and provinces in Western Europe. This has quite predictably led many to question this resurgence of local identities in order to discover the cultural roots and the geographical boundaries of these identities and their interaction with the formation of nation-states in the literary, artistic and political practices of the past two centuries. This article provides an introduction to one specific transnational intellectual network, the Guild of Saint Thomas and Saint Luke, which in the latter half of the nineteenth century served as a forum for the different local identities which were influential in the Gothic (and Catholic) Revival of the Low Countries. The interaction among the most influential members during the annual excursions of the Guild and the choice for the locations of these meetings resulted in different ideological discourses about the position and the borders of ‘Christian art’ in the Low Countries. Due to both internal and external influences these discourses very soon integrated into the national frame, making the definition of a potentially common style for the whole area impossible. The analysis is based on existing literature on regionalism and the Neo-Gothic Revival, and on archive material concerning the first meetings of the Guild. The above-mentioned observations offer the opportunity to underline the peculiarity of transnational permanent networks composed by a fluctuating number of participants and to stimulate debate about the applicability of this example to other geo-cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the history of the Guild of All Arts (GAA), an artists' guild based in the Scarborough section of Toronto, Ontario. The essay explores the role of the GAA in promoting national identity, tourism, and craft in Ontario and its part in the Craft Revival Movement. The fate of The Guild Inn, a GAA hotel, is also discussed along with the author's analysis of topics including revival communities, craft production, and businesses operated by artists.

This article considers a surviving garment for what can and cannot be learned through an object analysis, and suggests that comparison with other sources can increase the value of the available evidence. The article argues that focusing on the technical decisions made during knitting provides insights into the understanding and assumptions of the knitter and allows for tentative conclusions to be reached about working practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guilds provided for masters' and journeymen's burial, sickness, old age, and widowhood. Guild welfare was of importance to artisans, to the functioning of guilds, to the myriad of urban social relations, and to the political economy. However, it is an understated and neglected aspect of guild activities. This article looks at welfare provision by guilds, with the aim of addressing four questions. Firstly, for which risks did guild welfare arrangements exist in the Netherlands between 1550 and 1800, and what were the coverage, contributions, benefit levels, and conditions? Secondly, can guild welfare arrangements be regarded as insurance? Thirdly, to what extent and how did guilds overcome classic insurance problems such as adverse selection, moral hazards, and correlated risks? Finally, what was the position of guild provision in the Dutch political economy and vis-à-vis poor relief? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflict between models of corporate identity in the guilds of seamstresses and tailors of France from 1675-1776 is discussed. Topics include male and female kinship privileges in the tailors' guild, the creation of a female model of guild membership among the seamstresses of Paris, the clash of two sources of female privilege, women and the guild family in the Parisian tailors' guild, the autonomous career paths of mistress seamstresses, tailors and seamstresses of Caen in the early 18th century, a clash over a guild funeral in 1741 in Caen, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and the abolition of the guilds, the rhetoric of family in the tailors' appeal, and defense of a 'unique' female guild in the seamstresses' appeal.

This article focuses upon the Jewish dockers of Ottoman Thessaloniki. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the loading and unloading of merchandise between ships and docks in the port of Thessaloniki was dominated by Jewish manpower. This dominance should be considered, first of all, in relation to the pre-industrial regulations of the Ottoman labour market. Work on the Thessaloniki docks was operated by veteran guilds of Jewish labourers (registered according to ethnic or family affinity) who managed to distribute all the specific spheres of work among themselves (the gedik principle). They demonstrated a high standard of professionalism (the hisba value) and created a well-organized welfare system. These outdated regulations still maintained their validity in spite of the legal abolition of the guild system (1860), and the emergence of the industrial labour market. The second reason for Jewish prosperity derived from the political turmoil of that period. Against the background of the Macedonian Question and the Western semi-colonization of Macedonia, the Jewish dockers should be seen as part of an ethnic group which clearly defined itself as supporting the preservation of the Ottoman regime in the Southern Balkans. As such, the Ottoman regime counted them as a loyal and useful element in maintaining its interests in the docks, and in exchange came to their aid when modernization of the infrastructures might have thrown many of them out of work in the port. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New evidence is examined relating to the making of the Royal Armouries exquisitely decorated sporting gun by William Simpson of York, which has been said to be the finest English gun in existence. Simpson had moved from London to York by 1837 and it has been suggested that this gun was made by him for William Constable (who is known to have owned it) of Burton Constable Hall, near Hull, and indeed, that elements of its decoration were made to match that found on other items made for the Hall. However, it is shown that these apparent links are matters of chance and that this wonderful gun was, in fact, made as a marketing exercise to help Simpson establish himself in York. Advertisements in the York Courant in the summer of 1738 show that Simpson offered it as a raffle prize! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Archery and crossbow guilds first appeared in the fourteenth century in response to the needs of town defence and princely calls for troops. By the fifteenth century these guilds existed across northern Europe. Despite this they have not received the attention they deserve, and have even been dismissed as little more than militias. An analysis of the uniquely detailed account books of the two Bruges guilds, the archers of St Sebastian and the crossbowmen of St George, reveals much about their social activities, and especially their annual meals. Feasts were important to the guilds in three main ways. Firstly, they demonstrated the guild''s status and wealth. Secondly, meals helped to strengthen the bonds of the community. The guild''s community could include not just members resident in Bruges, but also shooters from other towns and even leading noblemen. Thirdly, and in contrast to this, communal meals were an occasion to exhibit the hierarchy present within these guilds. Hierarchy is shown through the range of foods purchased, and through the seating plans preserved in the St Sebastian''s guild accounts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article focuses on the earliest known guild document written in Old Polish: the 1466 charter of the linen makers of Rymanów, Poland. Discovered by mere chance among the town's records, the author highlights its value and usefulness to scholars working in various fields. The linen trade in Rymanów had been completely unknown to historians, he notes, adding also that the charter is another important primary source that can shed further light into the history of the towns of Małopolska in the late Middle Ages. For lexicographers, linguists, and Polish language researchers, the charter also yields new material in the areas of medieval Polish spelling, syntax and vocabulary. The manuscript is fully reproduced in color within the body of the article (between pages 10 and 11).

The article discusses corporative interest groups such as craft guilds in Mechelen, the Netherlands in the eighteenth century with reference to opportunism, corporatism, and progressiveness in order to illustrate economic and social dynamics of the early modern period. Other topics discussed in the article include the political and ideological aspects of the guilds, election processes of citizen representatives, and the make-up of the craft guilds such as breweries, fish-sellers, and meat cutters.

Copyright of Socio-Economic History / Shakai-Keizai Shigaku is the property of Socio-Economic History Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents an exploration into the origins and development of merchant guilds in Western economic history, focusing on their emergence during the late Middle Ages and their decline in the Early Modern era. A comparative methodology is presented to analyze the activities of different commercial organizations throughout Europe during the period. Empirical citations are given relating commercial statistics spanning multiple European countries, including Italy, Germany and Great Britain. Additional subjects discussed include commentary on the fragmentation and decentralization of the guild system and the significance of social business networks.

The article discusses medieval guilds, considering the methodology of current research and the taxonomy of form and function employed in historiography. It is argued that guilds referred in the Middle Ages to four separate institutions, craft-guilds, fraternities, corporate guilds, and military units. Examples are analyzed from the Swiss city of Zurich, and the French city of Strasbourg, showing that the form and function of the guilds overlapped. The author call on future researchers to be more sensitive to these issues in order to better grasp medieval life.

This article uses club theory to explain why two major medieval commercial centres declined in the early modern period. Lübeck and Danzig illuminate the difficulties experienced by old-style European towns where early modern guilds (and other privileged ‘corporations’) had a lot of political influence in making the transition to the new style of north-west European cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg. The article refutes theories proposing that the special privileges awarded to a merchant elite enhanced economic growth; instead, it is argued that those privileges gave rise to ‘club goods’ that were beneficial only to a small number of merchants and were provided at the expense of society at large, resulting in economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]