Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity and Change in Early Modern London (review)

210 Reviews Ward, Joseph P., Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity and Chang Early Modern London, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xiii, 203; R.R.P. US$45.00. The Trade Guilds represented the hearts and souls of medieval and Early Modern London: the citizen households where goods were processed and manufactured, and plots hatched with regard to their distribution and sale. When these households were in a healthy frame of mind, London thrived. London thrived because commerce and industry went on all over England, including the new suburbs outside the City Liberties where, it has usually been assumed, the n e w immigrants settled, in a period when the capital's population increased from about 50,000 to 600,000 in about two centuries. Ward questions the idea that guilds and their members were the defenders of traditional (gemeinschaft) ideas of community in London, but the immigrants who flocked to the suburbs and liberties were the vanguard of a more modern (gesellschaft) society. H e rejects the old view that as London grew and its functions changed, the City Companies vegetated while the suburbs were dynamic and progressive. His study of the records of twenty London Companies shows that as settlement spread beyond the city walls, company members colonised the suburbs. Early modern urban historians tend to think in terms of outsiders migrating in, less of insiders migrating out. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ward shows, London citizens and tradesmen moved their little businesses out to the new suburbs, where land and labour were cheaper. They did not think of the City and its Suburbs, but of an outreaching Metropolis. If the members of London companies thought they could live better somewhere else, they moved. Most were children or grandchildren of immigrants, and kept in touch with the villages and towns or districts whence their ancestors had come and where their relations still lived. Many returned (and turned again). Citizens of London were to be found living all over England, just as every English dialect was heard in the metropolis. Contemporaries moved less predictably than historians have suggested— in every direction. Thetidalmetaphors beloved by Braudel will not do for English society and economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where w e are dealing not with a regularly-moving ocean, but with an explosion in which the movements of the elementary particles were rapid and unpredictable. Ward stresses the independence of rank andfileguildsmen. The companies were attuned to the sensibilities and opinions of their members, wherever they lived. Against the old view of guilds dominated by little oligarchies, Ward posits more complex polities, in which a process of selectively giving and withholding allegiance (to their officer's visions of c o m m o n goals) was essential to the formation of an individual's identity (p. 3). H e finds a complexity of ideas of vocation circulating within the livery companies, and, Reviews 2H as a matter of epistemological principle, relocates the site of contention from divisions within groups to those within individuals. Ultimately, he concludes, (p. 146), the cohesiveness of the metropolis depended on the attitudes of individuals. H e lights upon the individual as a causal or explanatory principle, I think, because the real causes of London's growth and characteristics lay beyond the metropolis, and therefore beyond the brief of his monograph. Individuals were sites of contention (and indecision), as he suggests, but the contention arose out of extremely variable individual perspectives on, and experiences of, collective movements which unfolded very slowly, and were not well understood at the time: the development of the English language; the history of money; early empire; the massive shift in London's relationships to the rest of England that took place, particularly in the sixteenth century, but continuing well into the seventeenth and culminating in the Revolution; the intensification of traffic and the shift of the entire manufacturing base. The metropolis, like any locality or region, provides useful monographic focus, and Ward gives us interesting new detail about its inner workings; but progress in our understanding of the historical significance of the Early Modern period n o w depends on new ways of conceptualising thefieldswithin which the...