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Reviewed by:
  • Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation
  • Carlo Marco Belfanti (bio)
Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation. Edited by Maarten Prak et al. Aldershot Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xii+269. $99.95.

The craft guilds are back, as a theme of research and historiographical debate! After decades of ostracism, during which the craft guilds that arose in the Middle Ages were treated as one of the principal obstacles to modern economic development—guilty of having introduced rigid regulation of the job market, of having caused the cost of work to soar, of having hampered innovation, and of other nefarious deeds—finally, recently, scholars are again studying the guild systems without allowing themselves to be swayed by a historiographical tradition encrusted with prejudices. Thus the rehabilitation of the craft guilds has begun, but, as often happens in these cases, this has launched a season of historiographical revisionism not without its excesses. If in precedence the condemnation of the craft guilds was as unanimous as it was acritical, then their successive rehabilitation has attracted enthusiastic adherents who have not always argued their case adequately.

But that cannot be said about this book edited by Maarten Prak, Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen, and Hugo Soly, an excellent example of how it is possible to reconsider the role played by the craft guilds in a serious and balanced fashion. Their volume analyzes the evolution of the guild systems in the Low Countries during the early modern period, with a comparative approach aimed at illustrating the peculiarities that marked this institution in various territorial contexts. Despite their rapid spread throughout all of Europe, the craft guilds were established under diverse forms according to the local situation. As the authors justly underline, we cannot speak of the “guild system . . . in the sense of a universal system of institutions” (p. 30). The comparative approach is, effectively, the most appropriate methodological instrument for studying the phenomenon of the craft guilds in their multiple regional variants, highlighting analogies and abnormalities without professing to define a single unique model.

The Low Countries lend themselves extremely well to this type of analysis. Despite the limited territorial extension, at least two principal institutional forms of craft guilds developed, while further distinctions also emerged. On the one hand, there was the system established in the southern areas, politically subject first to Spain and then to Austria, which underwent a period of notable economic prosperity until 1585 and then declined. On the other hand, there was the system that evolved in the northern provinces, which became independent at the beginning of the seventeenth century and established themselves as the most advanced economy in Europe. Two different paths are reflected in the two diverse institutional trajectories followed by the craft guilds. [End Page 1049]

The first observation to be made, however, is relative to the quantitative analysis: the phase of great economic development of the territories of the southern Low Countries (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) coincided with a considerable increase in the number of guilds, while in the northern area the period of maximum expansion of the craft guilds was between 1560 and 1670. Another distinguishing factor in the experience in the northern Low Countries and the southern Low Countries is the differing political impact of the guild systems. In the territory governed by the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, the craft guilds rarely played a relevant political role: in the balance of power in the Republic there was no maneuvering room left for those institutions that had arisen in recent times, which had not been able to confirm themselves as political subjects. The situation in the southern Low Countries was exactly the opposite, where the craft guilds had been active from the twelfth century and had participated in the construction of the local social and institutional network, confirming their role as one of the protagonists of city political life.

This last consideration suggests that we stress the necessity of not limiting research to the significant economic function of the craft guilds; also indispensable is a careful analysis of the noneconomic functions carried out by these institutions in politics...

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