The Debate about Guilds

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of guilds and an overview of the debate surrounding them. The effects of guilds on economy and society have always attracted controversy. Contemporaries held strong views about them, with guild members and their political allies extolling their virtues, while customers, employees, and competitors lamented their misdeeds. Modern scholars are also deeply divided on guilds. Some claim that guilds were so widespread and long-lived that they must have generated economic benefits. Other scholars take a darker view. Guilds, they hold, were in a position to extract benefits for their own members by acting as cartels, exploiting consumers; rationing access to human capital investment; stifling innovation; bribing governments for favours; harming outsiders such as women, Jews, and the poor; and redistributing resources to their members at the expense of the wider economy.