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Artisans, merchants, and other workers formed guild associations throughout history as a way to standardize practices in their professions. As their legal powers grew, guilds regulated production, fixed rules for apprenticeship, restrained competition, and countered foreign competition with precise ordinances. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, with growing economic deregulation, guilds were considered an obstacle to progress and were abolished worldwide.
Guilds, in both the Middle Ages and the modern age, may be understood as those associations, particularly typical of western Europe, formed by artisans, merchants, and other workers who perform the same job and have to submit to certain rules. They have been known as corporazioni or arti in Italy, zunfte, gilden, or handwerke in Germany, metiers or corps in France, gremios in Spain, and gilde in those countries overlooking the Baltic Sea.
Their origins are old. In the ancient Greek cities there were associations with religious and charitable purposes. They arose in Egypt, too, and in ancient Rome from the third century BCE as free associations (collegia, corpora, or artes) controlled by the state. Following the decline of the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, and the decline of cities, these associations disappeared, then revived after the year 1000 all over western Europe, although the link between these associations and the previous ones is not very well established. In contrast, the derivation of the Byzantine guilds from the Roman ones has been proved. In Japan, by comparison, guilds arose much later than in other countries: It was only between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that town merchants (or chonin) united in privileged associations, in order to oppose the feudal landowner. As regards Arabian towns, we do not know anything about artisan or commercial guilds before the fifteenth century. In India guilds developed under the Mughal Empire, in the seventeenth century, bringing together mostly traders, but they were controlled by the state; in Constantinople the government used to name the guilds’ heads directly, as guilds had the function of supplying the city with food. The same thing happened in the Ottoman Empire, while in China guilds were weak or did not exist at all, due to the predominance of foreign merchants. In England the existence of guilds can first be proved in 1087.
Guilds in Europe could be professional communities that were very narrow (rope makers, wool carders) or quite wide (cloth makers). A famous skilled guild arose in Spain: the mesta, which united the sheep breeders, was established in 1273 by Alphonso X of Castile. Sometimes guilds were connected with ethnic minorities. For example, in Tudela, Spain, in the late thirteenth century, Moors had a monopoly on iron and leather working. This was the only such case in Spain, however, and it did not recur elsewhere because in nearly the whole of Europe, ethnic minorities were often excluded from guilds. Even more complete was the formal exclusion of the Jews, who were usually prevented from organizing their own guilds, at least until the seventeenth century, with the exception of concessions and derogations. Thus a turning point was marked with the 1648 royal decree by Habsburg monarch Ferdinand III of Hungary, who allowed the Jews of Prague to carry on with all kinds of jobs.
As their legal powers grew, guilds regulated production, fixed rules for apprenticeship, restrained competition, and opposed foreign competition with precise ordinances. Internally, they designated their officials, and their membership was subdivided into masters and apprentices (maestri and garzoni in Italian; maitres apprendistes and garcons in French; and meister [master], geselle [journeyman], and schelinger [apprentice] in German). Each guild formed a special jurisdiction: the heads of the guild judged controversies between its members and technical disputes about the trade. From the twelfth century onward, guilds appeared in towns as separate entities with their own legal status.
In many countries, as time went by, there developed a politically significant distinction between major and minor guilds: The former were usually constituted of merchants (e.g., the six corps marchands in Paris; the herrenzunfte in Basel; and the arti maggiori in Florence, where they seized power in 1293), while the latter were mostly constituted by artisans. As regards the guilds’ organization, it is necessary to distinguish between those areas— Venice, Sicily, France, Aragon, and Catalonia, some parts of the German Empire, the Mughal Empire in India—where the central power was able to keep its own privileges and those where it had to share these privileges with class interests. Thus in large independent cities, such as Milan, Florence, Siena, Bologna, those of Flanders, and some German cities, guilds played a political role in government. Nevertheless with the creation of great nations, guilds lost their power and became more and more closed, monopolistic circles.
With the appearance of the eighteenth-century doctrines of the Enlightenment and English liberalism, and with growing economic deregulation, guilds were seen as an obstacle to progress. The guild system was abolished for the first time in Europe in 1770 by Leopold II of Tuscany, then in 1791 by the French National Assembly and, finally, during the Napoleonic era, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, almost all over Europe and the world.
Bibliography:
- Baer, F. (1970). Guilds in Middle Eastern history. In M. A. Cook (Ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (pp. 34–98). London: Oxford University Press.
- Kramer, S. (1905). The English craft guilds and the government. New York: Columbia University Press.
- MacKenney, R. (1987). Tradesmen and traders: The world of the guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250–c.1650. London: Croom Helm.
- Martin Saint-Leon, E. (1922). Histoire des corporations de metiers [History of the Guilds]. Paris: Alcan.
- Pini, A. I. (1986). Citta, comuni e corporazioni nel Medioevo italiano [Towns and Guilds in the Italian Middle Ages]. Bologna, Italy: Clueb.
- Wischnitzer, M. (1965). A history of Jewish crafts and guilds. New York: Jonathon David Co.
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