ABSTRACT
The renewed international interest in craft guilds has led to new ¿ ndings and interesting insights in several ¿ elds. Not all aspects of guilds, however, have received equal consideration from historians in recent years. Some areas have been largely neglected. The issue referred to here as ‘corporative capital’ is a case in point. Very little is known at this time about patterns of ownership and investment among craft guilds and related corporative representation strategies.1 One of the main reasons for the dearth of studies on forms of corporative capital is that good sources are lacking. The number of inventories of guild property is not very high. This is because such archives were assembled only very sporadically and mainly under exceptional circumstances, such as con¿ scation, reorganization, or suspension of the organization concerned. These inventories of assets and estates are nonetheless interesting, because they reÀ ect the guild’s material wealth at a certain point in time. One of the disadvantages is that the vast chronological range, across which most of the remaining inventories of guilds were compiled, complicates comparative analysis. There were, however, a few times when collective inventories were made up in the Southern and Northern Netherlands. We refer to the con¿ scation of corporative gold and silver in 1578,2 as well as the seizure of the possessions of the guilds at the end of the eighteenth century in the Southern Netherlands (1795) and the Northern Netherlands (1798). The written records from the con¿ scation of 1578 are incomplete and concern only one aspect of the material wealth of the guilds.3 As for the con¿ scation of the possessions of guilds
in the Southern Netherlands of 1795, the problem is that the central con¿ scation ¿ le is not preserved in the Belgian archives.4 For the Northern Netherlands, the situation is clearer: the central ¿ le is at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague; it has been catalogued by the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).5
