The Economy of Renaissance Florence

5. Artisans, Shopkeepers, Workers

c h a p t e r f i v e Artisans, Shopkeepers, Workers The Work Force: Guilds, Artisans, Workers on the Margins of the Market. Performance of the Artisan Sector: Demand-Driven Growth, Parameters of the Local Market. The previous chapters have dealt with the leading sectors of the economy that were controlled by capitalist investors—international commerce and banking and the textile industries. The people in this chapter worked in many activities, but they can be lumped together in one composite sector of the economy that produced goods and services primarily, if not exclusively, for the local market, not for export . The performance of this sector was a function of the distribution and structure of wealth. The sector grew as a result of the increased demand for consumer goods that arose from the wealth that flowed into the city in the form of profits from textile exports and merchant banking abroad. The success of the sector lay in its ability to satisfy that demand, especially for the wide range of luxury products at the top end of the market desired by the rich, so that only a small percentage of those profits were spent on foreign-made goods. As a result, the profits brought home from abroad were, in effect, reinvested in human capital. To some extent, the initiative and enterprise that drove this performance must have been inspired by the desire of many of those who worked within the sector to improve their economic status. We therefore need to understand how the artisan—by which is meant here both shopkeeper and skilled craftsman—conducted his affairs in this particular marketplace: the extent to which institutions defined the parameters of his activity, how he prepared himself to confront the market, what instruments and practices he utilized to deal with market conditions, the degree of success he could hope to achieve. Through these structural and technical aspects of work we can hope to penetrate to the economic realities of the lives of men who made their living in one of the principal centers of capitalism in its preindustrial form.1 1 Much of what follows is taken from Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance 342 The Urban Economy The Work Force Guilds According to the traditional historiography, the economic life of most skilled workers and shopkeepers in medieval Europe revolved around guilds.2 An exclusive organization, the guild—at least according to the stereotype that emerges from generalizations in the historiography—regulated the training of the apprentice , established the role of the master within the corporation, and defended the interest of the group in the marketplace. In addition, guild religious activities, welfare concerns, and family traditions reinforced the economic ties that bound members together. In the preindustrial period the working life of the worker centered on this restricted corporate life, not on the marketplace. His economic culture consisted in a strong sense of the exclusiveness of his craft, the dominance of the master within the craft, pride in his work, and the protective comfort of a closed religious and social body. These cultural norms are the antithesis of those generated by the so-called free market, in which the individual operator is on his own. In the historiography, in fact, guilds are regarded as an obstacle to the development of the modern economy, especially in the textile industries, the leading sector in the development of industrial capitalism. In sixteenth-century Italy the resistance of guilds to lowering quality presumably destroyed the ability of the industry to compete with less expensive products imported from abroad, and later, in northern Europe, the flight of the industry from the city to the countryside in order to escape guild conservatism is seen by some as a step toward the industrial revolution, a development known, in fact, as protoindustrialization. These grand historiographical schemes, however, often appear disembodied from studies of specific situations in which guildsmen confronted market conditions . A difference between rules and reality has been noted in late medieval Bruges, for instance, where guilds appear to have been relatively open institutions and artisan entrepreneurs fairly successful in circumventing guild regulations.3 Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), ch. 6. The social world of the workingman is best approached through the studies of Giovanni Cherubini and Franco Franceschi. For Cherubini, see Scritti toscani: L’urbanesimo medievale e la mezzadria (Florence, 1991); and Il lavoro, la taverna, la strada: Scorci di Medioevo (Naples, 1997). For Franceschi, “La...