Craft Guilds, apprenticeship, and technological change in preindustrial Europe

• 成果类型: Review
• 署名作者: University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700021124
• 发表日期: 1998
• 页码: 684-713
• 关键词: western-europe; LABOR; 18th-century; INNOVATION; industry; ORGANIZATION; invention; PROPERTY; england

摘要

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 I-ether than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.