Jews, Women, Soldiers and Neophytes: the Practice of Trade Under Exclusions and Privileges (Rome from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries)

Besides being professional groups and centres of economic interest, the crafts were social groups which were increasingly consolidated and legitimised through permanent processes of aggregation and separation, solidarity and marginalisation. These processes often surpassed the confines of the working world and ventured into areas that involved identifying principles related to different classification orders, often characterised by conflictual paradigms with respect to the logic which governed the world of trades. This created interdependencies in which work experience was, on the one hand, relevant to the configuration and transformation of the ways in which membership in a social, political, or economic group was established. On the other hand, however, it was modulated according to the division of rights which regulated membership in a guild (consider the exclusions or the limits determined for foreigners, Jews, women, etc.).