Professor Peter Stabel (University of Antwerp, IASH Fellow):
“Guilds or no guilds, is that the question? On the role of craft guilds and urban space in medieval Western Europe and the Islamic World”
Abstract
The role of guilds is a burning issue in historiography in the past decades, dividing scholars in two very distinctive camps. On the one hand “pessimists” tend to assess their importance as negative for economic development or interpret their social role as overly exclusive, allowing rent-seeking craft elites to monopolize markets and excluding others, raising in this way transaction costs. But most scholars are looking at the social and economic effects of European guilds with from a more favourable perspective, stressing the role of associations in providing security, guaranteeing quality and economic durability, offering tools for the management of skill, etc., lowering in effect transaction costs. Some of these debates will be tackled in the talk, while addressing examples from the Low Countries and the Islamic World, where according to most scholars guilds were not present or only had a symbolic importance before the rise of the Ottomans in the 15th century.”