This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022050700021124

Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe

An econometric model of economic development is estimated with data from leading European countries between 1300 and 1800. The model explores the impact of population, enclosure, empire, representative government, technology, and literacy on urbanization, agricultural productivity, proto-industry, and the real wage. Simulations show that the main factors leading to economic success in north-western Europe were the growth of American and Asian commerce and, especially, the innovations underlying the export of the new draperies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The enclosure of the open fields, representative government, and the spread of literacy did not play major roles.

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Progress and poverty in early modern Europe

Guilds, efficiency, and social capital: evidence from German

In the decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how, in these debates, French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War. In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity. Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, non-traditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.

Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927

This dissertation is the story of how the English wrote the history of America between c. 1500 and c. 1700. Utilizing printed and manuscript sources, it argues that writing American history allowed English writers to navigate, negotiate, and contest the terms of a developing Atlantic empire. In doing so, the English created a vision of America to compete with the dominant Spanish narrative by the end of the seventeenth century. The existence of America gave the English an opportunity to explore the prospect of overseas empire. After the Columbian encounter, English thinkers and writers transformed their historical methodology to accommodate the existence of America and write its history in a distinctive English fashion. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Anglo-American histories imagined an English America in a Spanish Atlantic world. Translating Spanish-American texts and verifying them using humanist principles allowed the English to metaphysically construct the New World on their own terms. During the reign of Elizabeth, English writers began to carve their own space in America outside the dominion of the Spanish, both physically and textually, as they invented an English America. In the seventeenth century, the historical methods crafted by English scholars to deal with America began to clash with the experience English colonists were gaining in the Anglo-American colonies. The narratives they created stressed English authority to settle the New World and the importance of establishing a permanent presence in America. By the end of the century, a new imperial history developed in England in response to anti-American sentiments at home. Their arguments, which stressed the economic benefits of American empire to the detriment of colonists' agency in creating those benefits, pushed colonial writers to construct their own histories of America in an attempt to define more favorable terms of empire. The American histories they crafted on both sides of the Atlantic began to find a continental readership, competing directly with the dominant Spanish-American narrative.

The origins of American history in the early modern English Atlantic world

Introduction: situating identity 1. Imagining a metropolitan community 2. Livery companies and the metropolis 3. Companies and callings: the diversity of experience 4. Communication and company politics 5. Religion, economics and tolerance in the Grocers' Company 6. Economic competition and politics in the Weavers' Company Conclusion: Metropolitan communities Notes Bibliography Index.

Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Abbreviations and notes on the text 1. Introduction: the country and the city revisited, c.1550-1850 Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward 2. Imagining the metropolis in Elizabethan and Stuart London Joseph P. Ward 3. The peripatetic muse: internal travel and the cultural production of space in pre-revolutionary England Andrew McRae 4. The Cookes and the Brookes: uses of portraiture in town and country before the Civil War Robert Tittler 5. Digger writing and rural dissent in the English Revolution: representing England as a common treasury David Loewenstein 6. 'Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone': Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' and the contradictions of 'nature' Robert Markley 7. Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: of food, filth and slavery Nigel Smith 8. 'What is the country?': patriotism and the language of popularity during the English militia reform of 1757 Eliga Gould 9. Who's making the scene? Real people in eighteenth-century topographical prints Richard Quaintance 10. Imperial georgic, 1660-1789 Karen O'Brien 11. The gentleman planter and the metropole: Long's History of Jamaica (1774) Elizabeth A. Bohls 12. Crown forests and female georgic: Frances Burney and the reconstruction of Britishness Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook 13. 'Wild outcasts of society': the transit of the Gypsies in Romantic period poetry Anne F. Janowitz 14. Afterword: moving stories, still lives John Barrell Index.

The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850

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The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300-1800.

Between 1550 and 1750 London became the greatest city in Europe and one of the most vibrant economic and cultural centres in the world. This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles, as never before nor since. London incorporates the best recent work in urban history, contemporary accounts from Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to trace London's rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity, while examining how its citizens coped with those achievements. London covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor's Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city's pleasure-gardens, coffee-houses and taverns.

London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750

Introduction Steven Mullaney and Angela Vanhaelen Part I: Performative Spatial Pratices 1. What's Hamlet to Habermas? Spatial Literacy, Theatrical Publication, and the Publics of Early Modern Public Stage Steven Mullaney 2.English Coffeehouses and French Salons: Rethinking Habermas, Gender and Sociability in Early Modern French and British Historiography Brian Cowan 3. Viewing the Paper Stage: Civil War, Print, Theatre and the Public Sphere Rachel Willie 4. Place, Space, and Public Formation in the Drama of the Spanish Empire Margaret R. Greer Part II: Spaces Between: Transforming Journeys and Geographies 5. Assembling the Archipelago: Isolarii and the Horizons of Early Modern Public Making Bronwen Wilson 6. "Now through you made public for everyone": John Ogilby's Britannia (1675), the 1598 Peutinger Map Facsimile, and the Shaping of Public Space Meredith Donaldson Clark 7. "Exposed to Everyone's Eyes": The Urban Prospect and the Publicity of Representation in Israel Silvestre's Profile of the City of Rome, 1687 Elena Napolitano 8. Sensing Space and Making Publics Marlene Eberhart 9. Town and Country: The Geography of the English Literary Public Kevin Pask Part III: The Potential of the Private 10. Negotiating the 'forum politicum' and the 'forum conscientiae': John Calvin and the Religious Origins of the Modern Public Sphere Torrance Kirby 12. Painting the Visible Church: The Calvinist Art of Making Publics Angela Vanhaelen 13. Matrices of Force: Spinozist Monism and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World Meredith Evans 13. The Reformation of Space in Shakespeare's Playhouse Paul Yachnin

Joseph P. Ward

Papers

Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London

The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850

The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300-1800.

London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750

Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy