Guilds in the transition to modernity: The cases of Germany, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands

Abstract

One important aspect of the transition to modernity is the survival of elements of the Old Regime beyond the French Revolution. It has been claimed that this can explain why in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some Western countries adopted national corporatist structures while others transformed into liberal market economies. One of those elements is the persistence or absence of guild traditions. This is usually analyzed in a national context. This article aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the development of separate trades in Germany, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands throughout the nineteenth century. We distinguish six scenarios of what might have happened to crafts and investigate how the prevalence of each of these scenarios in the three countries had an impact on the emerging national political economies. By focusing on trades, rather than on the national political economy, our analysis demonstrates that in each country the formation of national political economies and citizenship rights was not the result of a national pattern of guild survival. Rather, the pattern that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century was determined by the balance between old and new industries, and that between national and regional or local government.