Centre for Urban History

This article examines the nature and impact of late medieval and early modern guilds through the lens of the master-apprentice relationship. Starting from a conceptual distinction between the ‘guild ethos’ and ‘civil society’, it is shown that Antwerp craft guilds stopped being ‘brotherhoods’ and ‘substitute families’ and retreated into a sphere separate from household and family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, masters can no longer be considered to have wielded a type of corporative mandate and to have acted in loco parentis. While parents had the final word in matters of discipline, master sons had gradual lost their privileged entrance (i.e. they stopped being ‘born’ within the guild), thus suggesting that the private sphere of the family prevailed over the public sphere of the guilds. The guilds’ costumes and collective activities, moreover, respectively disappeared or became obsolete. From at least the ‘long sixteenth century’ on, Antwerp guilds appear to have transformed from confraternities or brotherhoods into juridical and institutional instruments, which did not aim at disciplining or socializing apprentices into an organized social group. In the end, the relationship between masters and apprentices was based on (oral and other) contracts rather than guild rules (whether formal or informal).

In the 18th-century Southern Netherlands, rapt de séduction – synonymous with the marriage of minors without parental consent – wasn’t an extinguishing practice. Among the elite groups courtship behaviour of minors was an acute problem. The question was not, however, one of changing norms and values of youngsters. Due to changing relations between different social groups – e.g. between high aristocrats and rich merchants – traditional barriers seem to have been crossed more boldly from about mid-century on, but this does not point to the emergence of notions as ‘free choice’ and ‘modern love’. On the whole youngster are likely to have followed the wishes of their parents even more desperately then before; and if some minors didn’t, they were genuinely seen as weak and blind victims of their own uncontrollable inner feelings directed to the wrong party. From both perspectives, ‘free choice’ paradoxically resulted in a growing dependency on traditions and authority.

This article addresses changing assessment procedures for (guild-based) artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Discussions in and on two new educational institutions (the art academy and the medical college) in the seventeenth century (and beyond) reveals that manual skills and embodied knowledge were gradually devalued. The egalitarian guild-ethos was substituted with a more individualistic approach based on “ingenium”, which was related to both designing (drawing and invention) and theory. Paradoxically, while observation, experience and experiment grew important among an intellectual elite, the hands-on skills of artisans became perceived as being devoid of talent and genius.

This article examines the problem of illicit labour from the perspective of transformations in the (local) distribution channels. Rather than large masters circumventing the guilds’ rules to labour market entry or large merchants shifting from a Kauf to a Verlag system, early modern manufacturing guilds in Antwerp confronted mercers and wholesalers who entered into production without being masters. In response, the guilds extended their rules, so that their regulations actually matured in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than (labour market) deregulation and proto-industrialization, the issue was the disappearance of the straightforward link between production and retailing, tied together by mastership.

The main reason for the decline of craft guilds in Antwerp should not be sought in the labour market but rather in the product market. Apprenticeship systems, masterpieces, and trademarks were conducive to a labour market monopsony but at the same time to the representation of product quality. On the one hand product quality was legitimized through the superior manual skills of masters, on the other it was objectified through the attribution of quality marks to the characteristics of the raw material used. This strategy was successful for the sale of the durable, expensive, luxury products Antwerp was renowned for until the first half of the seventeenth century, but economic elites and customers stopped favouring corporative regulations, when demand shifted towards less expensive and more fashionable products. As guild-based skills were not necessarily superior in reality and consumer loyalty ultimately depended upon the masters’ trustworthiness, the craft guilds were bound to lose credibility.

This article examines to what extent early modern guilds’ trade marks can be considered (modern) brands. It is argued that guilds could have firm-like functions the visual manifestation of which was a ‘brand’, but small manufacturing masters could just as well control and sanction branding practices themselves. While helping to solve problems of information asymmetry, the collective mark then objectified product quality by locating it in the political standing and ‘quality’ of guild-based masters. The crucial shift at the end of the Ancien Régime, was the disappearance of this link between the status of urban ‘freemen’ and the cultural identity of their products.

This article contributes to the debate about the early modern craft guilds’ rationale through the lens of apprenticeship. Based on a case study of the Antwerp manufacturing guilds, it argues that apprenticeship should be understood from the perspective of ‘distributional conflicts’. Fixed terms of service and master pieces guarded the guilds’ labour market monopsony, enabling masters to distribute the available skilled and unskilled labour among members (among others through the restriction of the number of apprentices per master). Although from the perspective of product quality, this may have enabled masters to prevent adverse selection, the introduction of standardized apprenticeship requirements was the result of social and rent-seeking concerns.

This articles addresses the issue of conventions from the perspective of the early modern guilds’ regulations on product quality. Starting from the ideas of François Eymard-Duvernay one specific convention is identified, i.e. ‘intrinsic value’. This convention enabled guild-based artisans to locate product quality in their political standing and, hence, was intimately linked to the (urban) political context. While this may be familiar to the ideas on ‘justification’ of Boltanski and Thévenot, the historical analysis reveals fundamental conceptual problems. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both the convention of intrinsic value and the guilds’ power to define product quality became obsolete because of epistemological transformations. While intrinsic value as a convention was connected to the idea of matter possessing mysterious, religious and creative powers in itself, natural philosophers and artisans naturalized matter from the seventeenth century on. As a result, value tended to become synonymous with either the products’ place in a taxonomy of products or the meaning produced in discourses external to the product. This article therefore suggests that the identification of different ‘conventions’ in history may not be sufficient. Instead, fundamental shifts in the subject-object relationships should be taken into consideration.

This essay proceeds from the field of tension between the synchronical approach of the economics of convention and the diachronical approach of economic anthropology (in the tradition of Karl Polanyi). It is argued that the economics of convention remain problematic to historians in that they fail to capture the long term transformations  traditionally referred to as the emergence of modernity and the coming about of homo economicus. As a possible solution, the use of concepts and insights from Actor Network Theory is defended. While this cluster of theories enables an historical perspective without considering modernity as a natural process, it confronts changing relationships between subjects, objects and cultural systems of meaning head on.

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in Renaissance Italy and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Contributors to this volume set out to analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

This essay proceeds from the assumption that historical research on material cultural has tended to search for the origins of the modern consumer – to be found, for example, in Renaissance Italy. The modernity of this consumer is related to the reduction of the value of objects to a semiotic issue. Under the influence of post-structuralist theories, objects are seen as ‘signs’, the meaning and value of which depends upon their place among a wider set or taxonomy of signs. In order to qualify this approach, I examine the perception of and attitudes towards products held by a particular group of producers (as opposed to consumers): guild-based manufacturing masters. Moreover, I compare their strategies and sensitivities to those of natural philosophers, who were devising new ways of addressing and thinking about matter in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. My point is that, for guild-based masters, products were not entirely commodified. By linking their privileged status to product quality, they were actually guarding the gift-like characteristics of their products. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these strategies were progressively discredited due to processes of modernization led by philosophers and driven by epistemological transformations in which a modern sign system emerged. Present-day scholars are thus revealed to be continuing this particular intellectual and epistemological tradition.

Current ideas about the ‘agency’ of cities are very much influenced by economists who point to agglomeration economies and the clustering of institutions, if not to the presence of ‘creative classes’ and a tolerant and diverse cultural climate. In this paper, such views will be historized and denaturalized. It will be examined how ‘urban agency’ was produced and fabricated in the long run, stressing the role of political philosophy and epistemic undercurrents. First, focusing on guilds and artisanal economic actors (which formed an important part of the urban fabric in a range of late medieval and early modern cities), I will describe the co-emergence of specific types of skills and knowledge and the urban as a community and body politic. Subsequently, I will argue that the city as an ‘agencement’ transformed drastically during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the transformations concerning both the political and economic identity of guild-based artisans and the city as a specific political community were contingent upon specific (epistemic and other) attitudes and practices related to matter and materiality. Thus this  paper sheds new light on the relationship between economic personhood, political subjectivity, the agency of cities, and the production of knowledge.

Few theories have left their mark on urban studies to the extent that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has in the last few decades. Its background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), its critique of the explanatory value of such abstractions as 'class' and 'society' and its efforts to transcend society/nature and local/global binarisms inevitably challenged conventional views on cities, urbanization and urban phenomena. 1 Economic and Marxist approaches to the city in particular have been challenged, at least to the extent that they invoke the explanatory force of the economy or capitalism as a global social system and, thus, fall back upon the binarisms under attack from ANT. The network approach questioned architectonic explanatory models (substructure vs. superstructure) and deepened our understanding of actors and agency (both emerging from networks of humans and nonhumans). However, ANT has always been subject to criticism too. Because it placed the non-human on an equal footing with the human, ANT is often considered indifferent to issues of inequality and injustice, negligent of the forces of capital and capitalism (including the way they transform or destroy nature) and immodest and over-inclusive (due to the claim that nothing exists outside the networks). 2 Perhaps most disturbing of all was and is the perceived loss of explanatory force. Critics have rightfully wondered whether ANT allows for explanation at all, given the refusal to distinguish between 'determining' actors and processes and * Thanks are due to Simon Gunn for his stimulating suggestions.

This chapter examines the poor relief provisions of the Antwerp guilds from the perspective of both Katherine Lynch’s ideas on community building and Antony Black’s insights into the so-called ‘guild ethos’ for a period in which market forces appear to have overpowered the egalitarian ideals of the guilds. It is analyzed whether installing poor boxes was part of a strategy to guard the ‘guild ethos’ and to preserve the guild as a community in this period of rupture. My argument is that the foundation of poor boxes by craft guilds does not fit into the frame of community building, at least not if we understand ‘community’ in terms of ‘brotherhood’ or ‘confraternity’. In my view, rather than a device aimed at materialising community building ideas, the guilds’ poor relief schemes were the result of a disappearing guild ethos – i.e., disappearing notions of confraternity and (especially) equality. In the end, mutuality seems to have been fiscalized (i.e., paid with revenues transferred from private individuals to a public fund), not simply as the result of state formation, but within the guilds itself – the guilds being part of the state apparatus on the urban level.

This is the introduction to a volume on changing conceptions of value in the pre-industrial and industrial period. To date, the issue of value has mostly been addressed by historians investigating material culture and consumer preferences, who tend to lean on sociological concepts like ‘emulation’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and 'distinction'. These concepts often imply a shift from a situation in which material culture consolidates and reproduces the status quo of a society of orders, to a situation in which material culture, through innovation and fashion, helps dislodge these same orders. In anthropological terms, this is a shift from a patronage and gift economy to commodity exchange. Moreover, historical literature on material culture larges reduces value to a semiotic problem. The cultural turn, and post-structuralism in particular, has induced an approach in which objects are regarded as ‘signs’ and value is generally synonymous with meaning.
Either way, historical approaches risk constructing teleological views.
Our book therefore adopts a pragmatic approach and a focus on historically contingent repertoires and practices of evaluation. With the help of the economics of convention and actor-network theory we shed an entirely new light on the advent of modern market exchange and long term transformations related to the valuation of products and services. The introduction explains the added value of our approach and presents and assesses the results of the separate book chapters.