Tue Oct 24 09:14:20 EDT 2006
Published by EH.NET (October 2006)
Maarten Prak, Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen and Hugo Soly, editors,
_Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and
Representation_. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. xii + 269
pp. $100 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7546-5339-0.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gary Richardson, Department of Economics,
University of California, Irvine.
_Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries_ is an edited
collection that summarizes the conclusions of a group of scholars who
have, during the last decade, revolutionized our understanding of
craft guilds in the late-medieval and early-modern Netherlands. The
volume is a seminal contribution to several literatures, a must-read
for scholars interested in the economy of early modern Europe, and
filled with insights likely to influence scholars interested in a
wide range of nations, topics, and time periods.
The collection contains nine chapters. All of them contain valuable
insights. In this brief review, I try, but cannot possibly,
thoroughly describe them all. My goal is to briefly describe a
handful of the most intriguing and important insights in each
chapter, in hopes of encouraging readers of this review to read the
book.
The first chapter is "Craft Guilds in Comparative Perspective: The
Northern and Southern Netherlands, a Survey," by Catharina Lis and
Hugo Soly. This chapter discusses the traditional scholarship
concerning guilds, describes issues of recent interest, defines the
organizations to be examined, and outlines the broad conclusions of
the group. The chapter points out that "few institutions have been so
omnipresent as craft guilds in the lives of such a multitude of city
dwellers in so many European countries" (p. 1). The chapter notes
that craft guilds had many functions. Some of the most important were
occupational, social, religious, political, and mutual-aid. The
chapter asks why apparently similar institutions served so many
different purposes and had such varying effects. The rest of the
essay answers these questions.
Chapter 2 is "The Establishment and Distribution of Craft Guilds in
the Low Countries: 1000-1800," by Bert De Munck, Piet Lourens and Jan
Lucassen. This chapter examines a database of several thousand guilds
representing a large portion of the occupational organizations that
existed in the Netherlands over the last one thousand years. The
analysis yields a number of distinct patterns. To a large extent, the
rise of guilds paralleled the rise of cities and procurement of civic
charters. The prosperity of guilds and cities went hand in hand. The
guilds played an important part in encouraging the expansion of
commerce in cities such as Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Amsterdam; but
also played a role in their decline, probably by inhibiting
innovation and protecting the interests of members at the expense of
the public interest. Guilds developed first in the southern
Netherlands. On the eve of the Dutch Revolt, the pattern in the North
and South was similar. The guild system had matured in most sizeable
towns and cities. After the Dutch revolt, developments diverged. The
economic and demographic center shifted to the North, where the
economy continued to flourish and guilds continued to grow. The
political success of the Reformation in the northern Netherlands
caused a reorientation of guilds away from religious and towards
social functions, such as care for the poor. An appendix to the
chapter describes the data, which will probably form the basis for
the quantitative study of Dutch guilds into the foreseeable future.
Chapter 3 is "Corporate Politics in the Low Countries: Guilds as
Institutions, 14th to 18th Centuries," by Maarten Prak. The chapter
begins with the observation that "the origins and evolution of craft
guilds were influenced as much by political developments as economic
ones." The evidence and analysis laid out in the chapter
substantiates that statement. The first section discusses the
revolutionary activities of guilds in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, beginning with the Battle of the Spurs, on 11 July 1302,
when an army of Flemish artisans defeated a force of French
aristocratic infantry. During the next two centuries, towns
throughout the Low Countries provided artisans in their municipal
constitution, a revolutionary act that linked guilds and local
politics and the defense of urban social and political orders.
Guilds' involvement in urban politics had in important and symbiotic
influence on the evolution of guilds and governments for the next
several centuries. Patterns diverged between the south, east, and
west. Much can be learned from studying this divergence.
Chapter 4 is "Export Industries, Craft Guilds and Capitalist
Trajectories, 13th to 18th Centuries," by Catharina Lis and Hugo
Soly. The chapter examines the trajectories of industries during the
late medieval and early modern eras. The chapter concludes that
guilds did not intrinsically promote or impede the rise of export
industries. The success or failure of industries depended upon which
groups wielded economic and political control. The involvement of
groups with divergent and conflicting interests in the production of
export goods explains the transformations that guilds underwent over
time. The organizational structure of export industries followed
different courses in the North and the South. Institutional
developments in Flanders and Brabant paved the way for the rise of
industrial export capitalism from the fourteenth century onward,
while seventeenth-century Holland reached the most advanced stage of
merchant capitalism.
Chapter 5 is "Dressed to Work: A Gendered Comparison of the Tailoring
Trades in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, 16th to 18th
Centuries," by Harald Deceulaer and Bibi Panhuysen. This chapter
compares Northern and Southern industries during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, examining the relationship between women and
guilds, and the extent to and ways in which women were excluded from
the organizations. The comparison shows that economic challenges to
the same sector in different regions could elicit entirely different
institutional responses, which in turn could affect the way the
market operated. In the northern Netherlands, which possessed more
women and fewer men as a percentage of the population, female
seamstresses grew in prominence in garment production during the
eighteenth century, while in the southern Netherlands, craft guilds
and the garment industry remained more exclusively male.
Chapter 6 is "Religion and Social Structure: Religious Rituals in
Pre-industrial Trade Associations in the Low Countries," by Alfons K.
L. Thijs. This chapter shows that from the later Middle Ages onward,
craft guilds engaged in religious activities as well as social and
economic functions. Free associations of fellow tradesmen even
propagated religious worship as their chief mission. Craft guilds and
religious brotherhoods often existed alongside one another and were
in some cases affiliated. Many craft guilds arose from brotherhoods
during the early modern period. After the Reformation in the northern
Netherlands, collective requiems to commemorate dead guild members
ceased. The decline occurred even in the southern Netherlands,
despite the eventual military and political victory of Catholicism
there, because the Counter Reformation infringed upon the guild
system's religious, popular, and devotional traditions.
Chapter 7 is "A Tradition of Giving and Receiving: Mutual Aid within
the Guild System," by Sandra Bos. The chapter begins with the
observation that "mutual aid for and by the members has figured among
the guilds' responsibilities from the outset" (p. 174) and that
guilds struggled to overcome "the problems inherent in insuring small
populations" (p. 174). The chapter goes on to explore the variety of
mutual insurance systems in early modern guild associations and
inquires into the role of religion, municipal administration and
economic prosperity in the emergence of these systems. Before the
Reformation, mutual aid was often a religious arrangement. After the
Reformation, mutual aid continued to be provided, even in the
Northern Netherlands, where guilds abandoned their religious roles.
The mutual aid consisted of aid to craftsmen who were unable to
support themselves due to illness, disability, or infirmity in old
age; assistance to widows and surviving children; and funding for
funerals and burials of the deceased.
Chapter 8 is "Corporative Capital and Social Representation in the
Southern and Northern Netherlands, 1500-1800," by Johan Dambruyne.
This chapter investigates the sources and influence of corporate
capital created and accumulated by guilds in the early modern
Netherlands. Three kinds of capital are examined. The first is
economic capital, or in other words, the material form of accumulated
labor. The second is social capital, defined as the benefits arising
from a self-sustaining network of relationships. The third is
cultural capital, principally being education, science, art, and
ideas. The chapter concludes that early modern guilds clearly
invested in capital of all three types, but heterogeneity existed in
strategies for accumulating and employing capital. Differences
existed across industries, time, and towns. Differences also existed
between the northern Netherlands, where guilds invested more in
economic capital, and the southern Netherlands, where guilds invested
more in social capital.
The last chapter, by Jan Lucassen and Maarten Prak, concludes that
craft guilds in the Low Countries contributed to the economic,
political, social, and religious fabric of the region. Craft guilds
fostered medieval and early modern economic development. Craft guilds
varied greatly in the tasks that they undertook, structures that they
adopted, and ways in which they interacted with the political and
cultural systems in which they were embedded. The importance of the
local context cannot be overstated, yet a general conclusion can be
drawn. "Guilds in the Low Countries played a highly significant role,
not only in the lives of their own members, but also in shaping the
societies they were part of."
Now, it is time for my general conclusions. I believe this volume
summarizes a wide range of insights into the economy, polity, and
society of the late-medieval and early-modern Netherlands. It should
be read by scholars interested in that period and scholars interested
in the general relationship between institutions and economic
development.
Gary Richardson is the author of "Guilds, Laws, and Markets for
Manufactured Merchandise in Late-Medieval England," _Explorations in
Economic History_ (2004) and "The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling
Institutions in Medieval English Agriculture," _Journal of Economic
History_ (2005).
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