Guilds, labour and the urban body politic : fabricating community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Guilds, labour and the urban body politic : fabricating community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800
(Routledge research in early modern history)
Routledge, 2018
- : hbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors - their political identity and agency being based upon their skills and trustworthiness.
In the long run, this corporative spirit and power inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate understanding of the development of European modernity - i.e., proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern economic and political thinking - requires taking seriously the ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was separated from the political, the individual from the social, and the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. Communal Revolts and the Politicization of Labor 2. The Fabrication of the Urban Body Politic 3. The Political Economy of Freeman Status 4. Corporatism, Proletarianization and the Patriarchal Order 5. Equality, Solidarity and the Decline of Brotherhood Epilogue: Dis/Assembling the Workplace and the Agora
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