Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400-1800 (review)

The literature on craft guilds is dominated by a mixture of local or regional case studies interspersed with attempts to look at particular crafts across larger geographies. Few historians have risked a synthesis on the matter of guilds, and for good reason. Understanding multifunctional corporate institutions like guilds is fiendishly complicated, not least because across Europe they were embedded in distinct political, cultural, market, and social settings. Nor has the literature been helped by the fact that historical economists from Adam Smith onward gave guilds a bad reputation, at least in economic terms. Guilds were "a conspiracy against the public" (1).

For about a decade, a number of economic historians, including Epstein and Prak, editors of this volume, have argued that guilds occupied a crucial role in the cultural, social, and sometimes political world of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. The central point of this volume is to make the revisionist case that guilds had a positive economic impact as agents of technological progress and its diffusion in late medieval and early modern Europe. The volume features an interesting mixture of theoretical survey chapters (introduction and Chapters 1–4) and broad case studies (Chapters 5–11) covering the German and Italian territories, the Netherlands, France, and England and such crafts as cloth spinning, painting, glass blowing, working in gold and pewter, book-selling, and clock making.

Guild revisionism has not gone uncontested. In a heated exchange in the Journal of Economic History (2008), which at times went beyond the professional, Ogilvie, a leading critic of revision, restated the traditional economic case against guilds.¹ She argues that guilds institutionalized the exclusion of women and minorities from many trades, that long apprenticeships were in most activities unnecessary to acquire skills, and that guilds' conservatism reduced the rate of innovation. Their only purpose was rent seeking, a simple redistribution of income in favor of their members at the expense of society at large. Epstein's untimely death prevented him from picking up the gauntlet, but in some ways, his co-editor and the other contributors to this volume, which was finished after his death, stepped into the ring to continue the debate.

The central issues of the debate are laid out in Epstein and Prak's introduction, Prak's chapter on Dutch painting and Chapter 2, a reprint of Epstein's 1998 article on craft guilds, apprenticeships, and innovation, which arguably provided the initial push for the re-evaluation of the economic role of guilds. If guilds were primarily rent-seeking, Epstein asked ten years ago, then why did they have to enforce membership since everyone should have wanted to join? His answer was that guilds were cost-sharing rather than rent-seeking institutions. They matched masters and apprentices through monitored learning, which controlled opportunistic behavior. Given that much of premodern crafts combined tacit and experience-based knowledge with a certain amount of propositional know-how, Epstein and Prak maintain that the acquisition of skills took years of face-to-face training in apprenticeships.

Guilds overcame information asymmetries through quality control and branding. They did not oppose technological change but pushed it into a skill-intensive direction. The clustering and encouragement for migration that guilds entailed fostered innovation as an unintended but crucial side effect. One of the most successful high-skill trades was Dutch painting. Its guild structure qualifies the traditional assumption that northern Netherlandish crafts were only lightly regulated—and thus that less guild power was associated with more innovation. More importantly, Prak also shows that creating a mass market in painting was possible only through clustering, guilds' training activities, branding, and the quality assurances given to buyers. Even the most successful painters acted accordingly and abided by their guilds. Rent seeking was a real problem only in low-skill crafts that maintained privileges thanks to strong political representation. In sum, the authors argue for "the often beneficial, and at times indeed crucial, positive effects of...