ABSTRACT
Underlying every geographical comparison of the craft guilds is a quantitative dimension. According to a now popular view, craft guilds were primarily an ‘empty’ organizational framework concealing a range of functions and used for different purposes by various groups of actors, both within and outside the guilds. In the historical debate, ‘À exibility’ has replaced the legal rigidity and conservatism that historians have previously attributed to guilds for a very long time. This view of guilds as ‘À exible institutions’ might easily lead one to conclude that a quantitative analysis of guilds has little, if any analytical value — certainly not if we want to make comparisons over a long time-span and across a large geographical area. This is not the case, however, for two reasons which are directly related to the de¿ nition of ‘craft guilds’ used in this book. First, these organizations were of¿ cially recognized. As a result, under the Old Regime a craft guild could not simply be set up or dissolved; nor could its statutes be easily amended. On the contrary, as a rule a guild — once established — led a resilient institutional existence. Secondly, a craft guild is de¿ ned here primarily as an economic organization of fellow tradesmen whose purpose was to defend their shared interests. Whatever other functions craft guilds might have had (and there could be many: religious, military, insurance, and so on), the enforcement of an economic monopoly by fellow tradesmen was a prerequisite for inclusion in our analysis.1
