Summary:The main reason for the decline of craft guilds in Antwerp should not be sought in the labour market but rather in the product market. Apprenticeship systems, master pieces, and trademarks were conducive to a labour market monopsony but at the same time to the representation of product quality. On the one hand, product quality was legitimized through the superior manual skills of masters; on the other, it was objectified through the attribution of quality marks to the characteristics of the raw material used. This strategy was successful for the sale of the durable, expensive, luxury products Antwerp was renowned for until the first half of the seventeenth century, but economic elites and customers stopped favouring corporative regulations when demand shifted towards less expensive and more fashionable products. As guild-based skills were not necessarily superior in reality, and consumer loyalty ultimately depended upon the masters' trustworthiness, the craft guilds were bound to lose credibility.

One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper, we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. These data offer an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers and, by implication, of their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centers. Our understanding of guild “monopolies” and exclusivity is in need of serious revision.

This article examines the problem of illicit labour from the perspective of transformations in the (local) distribution channels. Rather than large masters circumventing the guilds' rules regarding labour market entry or large merchants shifting from a Kauf to a Verlag system, early modern manufacturing guilds in Antwerp confronted mercers and wholesalers who entered into production without being masters. In response, the guilds extended their rules, so that their regulations actually matured in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than (labour market) deregulation and proto-industrialization, the issue was the disappearance of the straightforward link between production and retailing, tied together by mastership.

No abstract

The relationship between bibliographic and archival research, on the one hand, and object-based study, on the other, forms a very important basis for research into historical production techniques. Several written sources provide insight into the recipes for dyeing black in the past. Yet, this does not guarantee that these written recipes are representative of an entire society or were used in the dyers practice. The way to assess how closely practical dyeing and written sources are aligned entail the chemical analysis of historical textiles. This article focuses on the identification of the ingredients used to dye wool black in the case of well-preserved and dated (1650-1850) historical textiles from five Belgian archives and some remaining historical artefacts. The results are compared with the technical knowledge of dyeing and the ingredients mentioned in written sources from the same period. The aim is to refine the knowledge of the different black dye ingredients used in practice in Northwest Europe during the period. Resumo A relação entre a investigação bibliográfica e arquivística e a investigação baseada em objectos históricos constitui um ponto de partida fundamental para o estudo de antigas técnicas de produção. Várias fontes documentais dão uma imagem de como se tingia de preto no passado. Contudo, nada garante que estas receitas sejam representativas de uma sociedade no seu todo ou que fossem praticadas pelos próprios tintureiros. A análise química de têxteis históricos constitui um método eficaz para verificar a proximidade entre práticas de tingimento e fontes documentais. Este artigo foca-se na identificação dos ingredientes usados no tingimento de lã com cor preta num conjunto de têxteis históricos datados (1650-1850) e em excelente estado de conservação de cinco arquivos belgas e noutros objectos históricos. Os resultados são comparados com o saber tecnológico associado aos métodos de tingimento e aos ingredientes descritos segundo as fontes documentais da época. O objectivo é o de afinar o conhecimento sobre os ingredientes usados no tingimento de preto no noroeste da Europa durante o período em questão.