ABSTRACT
Professional organizations of the urban population headed by a headman and officers chosen from among their members emerged in Turkey at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were moulded into an allembracing system which served as an administrative link between the government and the urban population, and fulfilled various economic and social functions. A basic condition for the working of this system was the exclusiveness of each guild in its branch or sub-branch within the boundaries of a specific community. This was achieved by a framework of rules, partly unwritten but officially recognized and partly laid down in official regulations or orders, by which a variety of monopolies and restrictive practices was established. It is the aim of the following study to analyse this framework of rules and practices in detail.!
