Princeton University Press
The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis
Key Metrics
- Sheilagh Ogilvie
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691217024
- -
- -
- Business & Economics > Economic History
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
A comprehensive analysis of European craft guilds through eight centuries of economic history
Guilds 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 advantages of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds answers that question with vivid examples and clear economic reasoning. Sheilagh Ogilvie 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 others--desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. The European Guilds analyzes the toxic complicity between guild members and political elites, and shows how privileged institutions and exclusive networks prey on prosperity and stifle growth.
Author Bio
I grew up in the western Canadian city of Calgary, and have since lived in Scotland, Germany, England, the USA and the Czech Republic. I studied at the Universities of St Andrews, Cambridge, and Chicago, and was a Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge.
I then taught for 31 years in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the Chichele Professorship of Economic History at All Souls College Oxford in 2020.
Research Interests
I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. I’m particularly interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present day.
In recent years my publications have analysed guilds, serfdom, communities, the family, gender, human capital investment, consumption, and state capacity.
Source: University of Oxford
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