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A reply to SA 0715/D5004 which commented on SA 0621/ D1545. It is found difficult to accept 'Thomas D. Curtis' implication that medieval craft guilds developed, did their part to encourage the rise of capitalism & after they had made their contribution, slowly passed from the scene.' Nothing is found in the writings of Max Weber which would preclude the author's hyp. The original article is rephrased as demonstrating that the goals of society changed radically between the 15th & 17th cent's. This means that the guilds became an irrational econ instit that thwarted the implementation of the new soc goals. Efforts to retain the guild structure constituted an attempt to prevent ED through the use of a new set of instit's. It is concluded that guilds disappeared from the instit'al structure, not because they became irrelevant, but because their destruction was a necessary prerequisite to the achievement of Western Europe's new set of econ, soc & pol'al goals. M. Maxfield.

This article challenges the view, voiced especially by S. Ogilvie, that the 'revisionist' interpretation of the history of craft guilds is wide of the mark. The paper suggests that Ogilvie oversimplifies the revisionist position; ignores significant new work on European crafts; as a result underestimates the role of the guilds in England and the Low Countries; and incorrectly presents her own case study of the Württemberg worsted industry as typical of European industry in general. Rather than a return to what amounts to a generalized eighteenth‐century debunking of the guilds, the paper pleads for more quantitative and regionally specified investigations of the economic contributions of craft guilds.

This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.

An attempt is made in the present paper to make a brief survey of the trade, and Crafts guilds, of the region through ages in general and that of the period in particular to understand in proper perspective, the corporate activities of the guilds. Since antiquity, the people of Telangana region showed a keen interest in trade and commerce. The dangers on the high ways inspired the traders to travel in groups under the leadership of a Sarthavaha. Economic development of the region, during medieval period, depended upon many factors such as; 1. Geography, 2. Political conditions, 3. Social institutions and customs, 4. Transport and communication. Despite disturbed political conditions and frequent changes of ruling families, trade and commerce in this region seems to have flourished without much interruption. The valuable gifts made by the traders, merchants and their wives were possible because of the wealth and prosperity of the trading community. The inscriptions from various sites from different parts of Telangana record the donations made by a class of people called Sresthins' or Settis' appearing to be respectable tradesmen enjoying special position of honour among the members of their profession.

"When the mortality rate is high, repeated interaction alone may not sustain cooperation, and religion may play an important role in shaping economic institutions. This insight explains why during the fourteenth century, when plagues decimated populations and the church promoted the doctrine of purgatory, guilds that bundled together religious and occupational activities dominated manufacturing and commerce. During the sixteenth century, the disease environment eased, and the Reformation dispelled the doctrine of purgatory, necessitating the development of new methods of organizing industry. The logic underlying this conclusion has implications for the study of institutions, economics, and religion throughout history and in the developing world today"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

M. Weber's concept of the Protestant Ethic is often misunderstood because the PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM is only a small part of Weber's total work in the fields of econ history, the development of the world's religions, & the growth of diff econ systems. Any criticism of his thesis based solely on this work takes into account only a portion of Weber's life-long study of motivational forces underlying the rise & development of capitalistic org's. The 2nd area of confusion is the linking of the ethic to a particular dogma, usually to Calvinist dogma, & from this linkage it is concluded that Weber created a monocausal theory of capitalistic development, which is applicable only to a limited historical period. However, Weber speaks of an 'elective affinity' between particular types of religious beliefs & the ethics & work habits of the econ actor. Thus it is evident that his thesis is a universal concept which is applicable to almost any situation where a metaphysical orientation influences econ behavior. On the basis of these views, it can be seen that the development of the Protestant Ethic & craft guilds gave a stimulus to the Industr Revolution. The ethic provides the ideological motivation for sustained ED within a specific framework of cultural instit's. The relationship between the ethic & the instit's is that of an elective affinity which contributes to the process of SE change. Weber concludes that the late medieval period was the cumulation of the process of rational capitalism & can best be understood as a part of the development of rationalism as a whole. The rise of medieval cities in the northern part of Europe was one of the major contributors to this evolution of Occidental rationalism. These cities evolved craft guilds, which, with their use of day laborers & rational org of apprenticeship, factor markets, commodity markets, & legal structures, became part of the process of change toward a capitalistic system based upon econ activity. Thus the northern European craft guilds were not major barriers to the Industr Revolution, but can be looked upon as an integral part of the evolutionary process of capitalism. Modified AA.

AbstractThis paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or 'institutions for collective action'. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself.

This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high‐quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent‐seeking purposes.