Medieval and early modern merchants and artisans faced a wide variety of economic challenges, resulting in a repertoire of solutions. Sometimes, the same solution was used to tackle different problems; sometimes, different solutions were found for the same problem. This timely collection of essays, originating from a workshop and a conference session, and edited by Karel Davids and Bert De Munck, two specialists in the field of early modern guilds and technological history, examines this variation by exploring how different institutional arrangements favoured innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities.
The 14 essays on cities and industries in Italy and the Low Countries are introduced by the editors, who provide a brief but useful historiographical outline of the research field. The following chapters address the volume's underlying question: when, how and why did regulations put in place by urban institutions, either authorities or guilds, enhance or impede technological innovation, skill formation and the circulation of people and knowledge? The answers are not straightforward, although almost all the authors put the freedom and possibilities of urban authorities and guilds to devise economic strategies effectively in response to changing broader political and economic conditions into perspective.
Broad in its scope, the volume underlines historical and regional divergences, first of all with regard to regulation and innovation. Corine Maitte demonstrates that guilds facilitated innovations in the glass industry of early modern Venice and Altare, whereas (urban) authorities had little influence on the mobility of artisans and the transfer of techniques. On the other hand, Alberto Grandi stresses the role of local demand and institutional settings in the diffusion of soap production in north-central Italian cities. The introduction of new technologies in the textile industries of Padua was sometimes hampered, according to Andrea Caracausi, by the intricate power relations at different institutional levels and in different market conditions. The complex relations between authorities, guilds and industries are further addressed in Eduardo Demo's essay on the silk industry in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Vicenza (eventually organized into a guild under Venetian pressure), as well as in Francesco Ammannati's careful analysis of the activities of the Florentine wool guild in the early modern period. In the eighteenth century, the role of the state became more decisive, as Alida Clemente shows for Bourbon Naples, a capital city that promoted the development of the ceramics industry by attracting technically skilled migrants and responding to changing consumption patterns. The effectiveness of the Habsburgs’ efforts to develop Trieste as a manufacturing and port centre, as Daniele Andreozzi makes clear, was dependent on local officials and entrepreneurs.
Another strand of essays concerns the role of citizenship and/or guild membership in attracting highly skilled artisans, regulating skill formation or limiting access to training and work in certain sectors. Jan De Meester analyses the granting of citizenship to artisans in early modern Antwerp, while De Munck, Davids and Ellen Brum present a comprehensive overview of entrance requirements for masters and apprentices in 19 cities and towns across the Low Countries. They find little evidence supporting the idea that citizenship and guild membership were used to stimulate innovation, or even regulate the labour market in the first place. Janneke Trump draws similar conclusions in her essay on the coopers’ guilds of Rotterdam and Haarlem, as does Raoul De Kerf, who shows how the Antwerp coopers’ guild lost its position as a contract-enforcing authority and mediating institution. Annelies De Bie's essay on the diamond industry of early modern Antwerp illustrates how the guild and apprentices struggled to adapt to changing economic circumstances. Fascinating is Dries Lyna's chapter on Antwerp's Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1663, which became a training centre for artisanal creativity. Finally, innovative in its approach is Claartje Rasterhoff's spatial analysis of the clustering of painters and publishers in the Dutch Republic, which deserves further empirical application to allow for theoretical refinement.
The originality and quality of the individual essays is generally very good, providing solid case-studies for further (comparative) research. However, despite what the volume's title suggests, the geographical spread of the contributions is rather uneven, with over a third on the city of Antwerp alone. Also, the essays mainly deal with (the conditions for) product and organizational innovation, yet the less tangible concept of creativity is hardly addressed at all. Finally, nearly all the authors introduce the same historiographical debate on guilds, resulting in somewhat repetitive introductory paragraphs for those who read the book cover to cover.
Commendably, the authors engage directly with Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy (2008), a volume edited by Stephan Epstein and Maarten Prak, which put the relation between guilds and innovation at the forefront again, but a collective point of Innovation and Creativity is that the question is not so much whether or not guilds were conducive to innovation and economic growth, but rather in which contexts they provided more workable solutions, and in which they provided fewer. As such, the authors wisely urge looking ‘beyond the guilds’, as they were only one part of the mix of contextual factors determining economic developments. Thus, for now, the elegance of economic theory gives way to historical complexity and variation.
