------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (December 2008)

S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak, editors, _Guilds, Innovation and the 
European Economy, 1400-1800_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2008. viii + 352 pp. $99 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-521-88717-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Christine MacLeod, School of Humanities, 
University of Bristol.


Until recently, Adam Smith’s condemnation of craft guilds as “a 
conspiracy against the public” has implied that the juxtaposition of 
“guilds” and “innovation” is an oxymoron. That this no longer so is 
thanks to three decades of lively revisionist scholarship, which has 
seen guilds rehabilitated as significant political and cultural 
institutions, especially by historians of pre-revolutionary France. 
Economic historians, however, with one or two exceptions -- one thinks 
especially of R. W. Unger’s _Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800_ (Assen, 
1978) -- have been slow to relinquish the stereotype of moribund 
rent-seekers whose habitual reaction to technical innovation was 
resistance and rejection.  Yet, a fruitful debate has now been joined, 
with the revisionist camp ably represented here, not least by S. R. 
(Larry) Epstein, whose untimely death occurred during the preparation of 
this volume. Their claim is a bold one: “that the impact of [craft] 
guilds on the early modern economy was more positive than has so far 
been acknowledged by historians of the traditional, and even of the 
revisionist, school” (p. 23). As several contributors explicitly 
recognize, they have an arch-critic in Sheilagh Ogilvie, whose important 
work on early modern Germany challenges the natural tendency of 
revisionists to over-compensate,  reminding us in particular of the 
guilds’ economically inefficient patriarchal, hierarchical and 
anti-Semitic exclusivity.  With that in mind, let us examine the case 
for the defense.

First, six comparative syntheses of research (including Epstein and 
Prak’s lucid introduction) emphasize different aspects of the craft 
guilds’ economic function and role in innovation.  Ulrich Pfister’s 
contribution is divided between two chapters, the first of which has 
relatively little to say about technical innovation, but offers an 
enlightening exploration of craft guilds through the modern theory of 
the firm. His argument, that “craft guilds and firms were functional 
substitutes” (p. 50), rests on a demonstration of the guilds’ firm-like 
behavior in delegated monitoring and vertical integration, both of which 
reduced their members’ agency costs.  Focusing on the entrepreneurial 
activities of master artisans engaged in the export trades, Catharina 
Lys and Hugo Soly explore the development of subcontracting amongst them 
and compare it (not unfavorably) with proto-industrialization.  Reith 
Reinhold condenses an extensive body of research, most of it previously 
only available in German, on the circulation of skilled labor through 
central Europe since the fourteenth century. Not only does he emphasize 
migrant artisans’ role as the principal conduit of technological 
diffusion, especially of “tacit” knowledge, but he also shows how 
“tramping” acquired an important function in the acquisition of skills 
and completion of a journeyman’s training, to the point where some 
guilds began to insist on it.

A further six contributions investigate individual cities and/or crafts: 
London commands the lion’s share, justified by the conventional belief 
that its guilds, being incompatible with industrialization, were the 
first to disappear. This justification is dismantled implicitly 
throughout but explicitly by Ian Anders Gadd’s and Patrick Wallis’ 
demonstration of how four metropolitan guilds succeeded in establishing 
nationwide jurisdictions in the period 1500-1700 (without the harmful 
effects that Ogilvie has identified elsewhere), and by Michael Berlin’s 
analysis of the varying fortunes of London’s guilds through to their 
legal termination in 1837: “far from experiencing a long ‘natural’ 
decline, the regulatory mechanisms of many of the companies were 
abrogated as a result of historical conjunctions and circumstances 
unique to each trade” (p. 337).  Anthony Turner compares the various 
ways in which the novel trades of horology and instrument making were 
absorbed into early modern Europe’s corporate structure and highlights 
their generally positive attitudes towards technical innovation. Guilds’ 
hostility to patents, which they opposed as restraints on trade, stood 
in sharp contrast to the ferment of “collective invention” that placed 
these crafts among the most technically dynamic.  Similarly, Francesca 
Trivellato’s exposition of how Venice’s silk and glass trades adapted to 
innovation downplays the significance of patents in this, their 
legislative “home” (Venice enacted Europe’s first patent law in 1474). 
Instead, she highlights the importance in glassmaking of private recipe 
books, which were “so precious that they were included in women’s 
dowries” (p. 224n), as both revealing of constant product innovation and 
intra-guild competitiveness. Perhaps most surprising of all, we find 
seventeenth-century Dutch artists clamoring to be organized into guilds. 
Yet, as Maarten Prak suggests, Holland’s booming art market could only 
be supplied through large increases in productivity, implying extensive 
specialization and division of labor, such that “painters had to get 
used to working for a market that was not fundamentally different from 
the market for wine or furniture” (p. 150).  Painters’ guilds offered 
their members expanded facilities, including corporate salesrooms where 
the pricing of such hard-to-value products could be publicly determined 
and events for the discreet education of newly rich customers.

Three contributions stand out for their particular concern to specify 
the links between guilds and innovation.  Epstein’s, reprinted from the 
_Journal of Economic History_ (1998), contends that the craft guilds’ 
primary function was to police the transmission of skills via the 
regulation of apprenticeship, thereby sharing out “the unattributed 
costs and benefits of training among its members” (p. 56).  Adam Smith’s 
mistaken belief that apprenticeship’s purpose was rather to defend a 
labor-market monopsony, argues Epstein, stemmed from his undervaluing 
the difficulty and cost of transmitting skill, especially its “tacit” 
component which could only be taught through personal demonstration and 
repeated practice; simultaneously, the apprentice learned his master’s 
trade secrets.  From the resulting high investment in human capital 
flowed three unintended but systematic boosts to innovation: “by 
establishing a favourable environment for technical change; by promoting 
technical specialisation through training and technical recombination 
through artisan mobility; and by providing inventors with monopoly 
rents” (p. 73). Such incremental innovation via quotidian 
problem-solving was of infinitely greater significance, Epstein 
suggests, than the more visible cases of guilds overtly resisting 
labor-saving machinery.

The ironic implication of Epstein’s argument for Liliane Pérez’s study 
of pre-revolutionary Lyon is the guilds’ own ignorance of this 
involuntary progress.  For, while most contributors offer examples of 
guilds passively accepting product innovations and even new processes 
provided they were labor- or skill-intensive, Pérez shows the Grande 
Fabrique (Lyon’s powerful silk guild) taking great pains to actively 
promote and disseminate them.  French guilds generally were in tune with 
the “enlightened” state’s policy of promoting innovation through 
offering financial incentives. Yet, Lyon was demonstrably “the most 
technologically innovative city in France” (p. 242). In its quest to 
forestall secrecy and private appropriations of knowledge, the Grande 
Fabrique mobilized various local institutions to validate inventions and 
assess appropriate levels of reward; it instituted a public repository 
of models; and it paid bonuses in proportion to the number of new 
devices sold to Lyon weavers.  Ultimately, however, such interventionism 
proved not merely unnecessary but possibly counter-productive: Pérez 
points to the bitter contests over priority and “unfair” reward that 
erupted.

Pfister’s second chapter takes the bull of innovation by the horns, 
investigating the checkered career of the engine loom for weaving silk 
ribbons.  Although the labor-saving engine loom was predictably resisted 
by most guilds, Pfister’s analysis demonstrates that this was neither 
universal -- it depended on local economic and institutional contexts -- 
nor without other implications for the organization of labor, such as 
cutting costs to compete with mechanization through the increased 
employment of women (as Trivellato shows happening in Italy).

What emerges from this exceptionally coherent volume is not only the 
complexity of this institution, whose history spans more than half a 
millennium and a myriad of particular trades and local circumstances, 
but also the persistent tensions to which it was subjected, both 
internally from individualistic and capitalist challenges to its 
collective ethos and externally from the exigencies of nation states. 
Moreover, it adds another spur to the demanding search for innovation in 
the workshop and on the construction site, rather than in the too easily 
accessed and counted records of the patent office.


Christine MacLeod is Professor of History at the University of Bristol 
and author of _Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British 
Identity, 1750-1914_ (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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