The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis

The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #78

by Sheilagh Ogilvie

A comprehensive analysis of European craft guilds through eight centuries of economic historyGuilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked innovations. Did the benefits of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds that dominated European economies from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds uses vivid examples and clear economic reasoning to answer that question.Sheilagh Ogilvie’s book features the voices of honourable guild masters, underpaid journeymen, exploited apprentices, shady officials, and outraged customers, and follows the stories of the “vile encroachers”—women, migrants, Jews, gypsies, bastards, and many others—desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. She investigates the benefits of guilds but also shines a light on their dark side. Guilds sometimes provided important services, but they also manipulated markets to profit their members. They regulated quality but prevented poor consumers from buying goods cheaply. They fostered work skills but denied apprenticeships to outsiders. They transmitted useful techniques but blocked innovations that posed a threat. Guilds existed widely not because they corrected market failures or served the common good but because they benefited two powerful groups—guild members and political elites.Exploring guilds’ inner workings across eight centuries, The European Guilds shows how privileged institutions and exclusive networks shape the wider economy—for good or ill.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Medieval History, Labor, European History, Reference

683 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 12, 2019

About the author

Sheilagh Ogilvie is professor of economic history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.

Reviews

[Athan Tolis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a car-crazed kid in 1980’s Greece, when I saw “The Automobile Encyclopaedia” at Eleftheroudakis, I BEGGED my mom to have it. She relented within a week and came back home one day with the massive tome. I remain to this day a car fanatic and I’m very happy we bought it, but upon receiving it I quickly realized it was a reference work: the makes I cared to know more about had at most a page dedicated to them and were buried among lesser makes that had a paragraph or even a sentence to show for their inclusion.

“The European Guilds” is a lot like that. It belongs strictly in the reference section. Strictly!

Riddled with, quite literally, thousands of footnotes (2365 across ten chapters) and 102 tables of data compiled by scholars in the field of economic and social history (this data rather arbitrarily falling into “quantitative” and “qualitative”) it is, pardon the pun, a “masterpiece” in forensic research regarding European crafts guilds.

It starts with two chapters which establish through references to previous research that guilds (i) bought their privileges by essentially bribing government and (ii) established extensive barriers to entry of all sorts of kinds. Six chapters follow that comb through all possible arguments made in modern academia in support of guilds.

I’ll spare you the agony, the book refutes every single one of them!

To summarize: the book basically rifles through fifty (give or take) nice things academic scholars have said before about European guilds (and, in particular crafts, not merchant guilds) and for each one pulls up at a minimum one study that looks at the sources and counts incidents / edicts / regulations / complaints / laws that provide strong circumstantial evidence against the scholarly argument defending the guilds. Paper being a two-dimensional medium, the author tabulates these results across two of (i) city/country (ii) craft (iii) period and calls bullshit.

There are some pictures in the middle and a twenty page conclusion along the lines of what I’d hoped the book would be: first a precis of the preceding 565 pages of data and then ten pages placing the guilds historically, asking why they arose and providing an answer to why they eventually perished (after of course having refuted four alternative explanations, for good measure). In case you’re curious, the winner is the “distributional approach” according to which “institutions arise and survive that serve the distributional ends of the most powerful individuals and groups and decline only when the powerful find other institutions that better serve their needs.”

Yes, I know, I was hoping for an explanation to which the guilds are endogenous, but hey.

But the book is not without merit. It’s a tremendous reference. It’s just that I was hoping to pick up where I’d left off a couple Christmas seasons ago, when my Mika had bought me “Life in a Medieval City” at the book fair. It’s nothing like that, it’s basically an exhaustive compilation of data supported by an often very repetitive narrative that takes you through the data. (It’s OK that the narrative is repetitive, because each chapter in a book like this had better be able to stand alone)

But it wasn’t without its moments. I felt a frisson on true pride when I learned (p.241) that among the only three all-female guilds ever to have operated in Europe outside of clothing, textiles, retailing and personal adornment, one was the soap-makers of my mom’s home town of Trikala!!

Worth reading this 585 page brick for? Probably.

[Daniel Polansky]

Not exactly sure what compelled me to read a 1500 page academic history of the European guild system, but Ms. Ogilvie makes a compelling case that they were a cartel system which stifled development and had no particularly positive benefit for the continent writ large. So, yeah, glad we don't have those anymore. Would have really hindered my walking into a job at a bakery.

[Josh Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ain't gonna lie; this was not a fun book to read. The book is meticulously researched, and Ogilvie thoroughly convinced me of pretty much all of her claims about the guilds. She also makes a lot of points with potential implications for modern economics. Hence 5-stars. But it was also incredibly dry.

The first thing to note is that this is not a narrative-driven history. Over the decades, Ogilvie has assembled two data sets of "observations" about guilds. The first consists of 12,051 qualitative observations (for instance, a guild in a specific time and place banned women from becoming masters). The second consists of 5,333 quantitative observations (for example, the daily rate of journeymen in a particular time and place). These observations derive from over a thousand scholarly articles and books.

Ogilvie brandishes this immense database to correct many mistaken theses that other scholars have put forth about guilds. I was somewhat surprised by the number of Panglossian academics who defended guilds - arguing that they were economically efficient institutions (because pre-modern European economies obviously functioned so well).

Ogilvie's positive argument is pretty simple: Guilds were cartels that sought to promote the interests of the people running them (namely master's). They extracted cartel rents at the expense of the rest of the economy.

A lot of the book is about discrimination: guilds systematically discriminated against women, ethnic and religious minorities, bastards, non-citizens, and pretty much anyone else they could get away with discriminating against. As she says early on, "Economists are puzzled by discrimination. They cannot agree even on whether it is consistent with economic rationality, let alone what causes it and what policies might address it." (Kindle Locations 450-451).

The most interesting part of the book to me was that Ogilvie positions these forms of discrimination as part of a broader web of barriers to entry, along with training requirements (which tended to be far longer than was necessary to learn the trade), membership fees, trade barriers, etc. In aggregate, these functioned to drastically limit competition and allow a small group of elites to make a lot of money (by the standards of the time). In other words, discrimination wasn't a weird economic anomaly; it was a rational move by the people in charge of institutions (even though it was harmful to the economy as a whole).

Those are my initial thoughts. I'm sure I'll be mulling this book over for another couple of months and maybe I'll update this review by and by. In the meantime, I'm going to try to find some trashy fun palate cleanser.

[Winston B-S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book rather compelling. It is a thorough explanation of how and why European Guilds were harmful to the Medieval and Early Modern European economy. Ogilvie proves with clarity how guilds were manifestly damaging with little benefits except those received by the guild members and political elites. In her opinion, guilds are a parasitic, rentseeking institution, and she demonstrates a remarkable amount of evidence to back up this opinion.

I consider myself thoroughly convinced for her main thesis and almost all of her sub-theses. My major reservation would be Chapter 9. I do not find this evidence sufficient at all. Piling fuzzy observations of guild strength on top of fuzzy GDP estimations is not sound scientific practice. But that is only one chapter in an otherwise superb work.

I would encourage anyone interested in this time period of history to read this book as it offers a fascinating insight into the dynamics underpinning society at this time. However, for those daunted by such a task, Chapters 1-5, 10 are the ones to read. Each chapter is mostly independent, so you will not be missing much.

[Nikhil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sweeping, comparative work on the influence of guilds on Europe's economies and societies. Most of Ogilvie's analysis drives home the argument that guilds were damaging, however in such a large text there are nuances to the argument (such as the ways in which they fostered community). While the novelty of the work is the continent-scale statistical analysis, the historical narrative on several points, particularly on ideas of social status, was truly fascinating and helped bring to light the mindsets of more ordinary Europeans in the medieval and early modern period.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deliciously rich in historical detail, The European Guilds presents a comprehensive analysis showing medieval craft guilds did more economic harm than good. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2021...

[Kyle Macleod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive economic history analysis of European craft guilds. It covers a fairly broad period from 11oo ad to around 1800 or even later in some places. This is a study with an extensive data base of thousands of observations on thousands of guilds both quantitative and qualitative from surviving records providing extensive information on guilds, their rules, their members, and their activities (and even data on their consequences for the local economy). The data are presented in tables (with fairly small font) but there are also lots of examples of how different guilds behaved (or misbehaved.)

On a stylistic note, readers may wonder that in this long book, the chapters have a generally similar argumentative approach and feature lots and lots of notes. This is not an effort to drive away readers but more an indication of where and why this material was assembled. If you look up the author on Google Scholar, you will find that she has written lots of publications that appear in good journals of economic history. Most have received a fair number of citations but you would not be wrong to see these are targeting a specialized audience. How to get a broader audience (for some really interesting research)? Bring your work together in a broader volume.

So what do we get from this? On a general level, this book provides details on doing business in the good old days. They were not so good, especially if you were not a wealthy member of society.

But seriously, economic history here means an effort to explain what we know about guilds in terms of various economic explanations. Did guilds help the economy or hurt it? Did they benefit society or harm it. Were guilds public institutions or private ones? What did guilds do and why did they last so long? This is not an idle question. Anyone who encounters systems like law firm partnership tournaments, academic tenure processes, and a variety of elite professional groupings is seeing current systems influenced by guilds. The way the book unfolds is that for each topic, the author presents what various other researchers have argued about a topic and then goes to the database to see whether the different arguments are supported or not. Spoiler alert - guilds restrain trade to the benefit of masters and magistrates but most everyone else ends up economically worse!

Guilds were local associations of craftsmen, legitimated by local governments, that controlled the local business for their particular trades, including who could practice, who could be trained, what products could be made, how much could be made, what quality standards would apply, and what prices could be charged. To participate in each guild, lots of money was paid, government palms were greased, and both the public and the private benefitted, except for the rest of the society that was not included in the payments. The poor could not work there or buy the products. People did not benefit from innovation. Women were excluded. The economy did not really grow much at all.

This economic system lasted for seven centuries. When the economic takeoff began, it did so in areas where guilds were weak. Where guilds were stronger, the industrial revolution took its time to show up. We continually hear about free markets and competition policy even today about large expanding tech firms. This book covers the time when markets were not free and nobody important seemed to care. The result was slow growth, a greatly reduced standard of living, and a short and generally troubled life span for most everybody.

The good old days, I am glad they are gone!

This is a long and very detailed book but well worth the trouble to work through. It is a disciplined piece of research and well written, however, and deserves attention.