of `specialized training' provided by English guilds combined with the ... (which, of course, does not imply that craft guilds actually did promote ..... 1600-1800', presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in San ..... Archimedean screw and the fire engine linked with a suction pump, a hose ...
Guilds, guildsmen and technological innovation in early modern Europe: the case of the Dutch Republic
Karel Davids
Introduction From the end of eighteenth century till the last decade of the twentieth century it was commonly assumed that craft guilds were a barrier to technological innovation. Shortly after the Batavian Revolution in The Netherlands in 1795, the newly-established `Committee of General Welfare’ in the city of Haarlem declared that under the Old Regime `entrepreneurs were restrained from using their wits, or if they by sheer inquisitiveness still managed to think out improvements, they could not fail to remember the odious guild laws and either had to renounce their innovations altogether, or to disclose their knowledge to their envious fellow-guildsmen’1. The Committee’s view has echoed in learned studies until almost the present day. In his modern classic on the rise and decline of nations published in 1982, Mancur Olson stated as an established fact that `guilds delayed technological innovation’. According to Olson, `The myriad rules intended to keep one master from advancing significantly at the expense of others undoubtedly limited innovation’.2 Joel Mokyr claimed in The Lever of Riches (1990) that craft guilds in Europe, though `originally often the promotors of new techniques’ , after 1500 in their striving to `protect their turf’ increasingly became `a conservative force’.3 There were dissident voices to this chorus of censors of craft guilds, to be sure. In one of the finest and most thoroughly researched books on guilds in the early modern period to appear before the onset of the Welle of studies on corporatism in the 1990s, Richard Unger in 1978 convincingly argued that Dutch shipcarpenters’ guilds up to 1600 encouraged rather than restrained technological improvements. But outside the world of maritime history his seminal contribution remained largely unnoticed. 4 In recent years, the orthodox view has come increasingly under attack. In line with the general shift of focus in the study of guilds from the description of official norms to the analysis of actual practice, the impact of guild regulations on technological development has been subjected to closer scrutiny as well – and traditional conceptions have been found wanting. Evidence that guilds were set against technological innovation pure and simple is extremely sparse and even if guilds under certain circumstances took a stance against the introduction of particular innovations or specific sorts of innovations, the effect of such opposing attitudes was in reality normally not as stifling as used to be thought, because guilds by no means exerted an all-embracing grip on economic life; the impact of other relevant actors, such as capitalist entrepreneurs, city governments or the state has to be taken into account as well. Formal regulations could be bent or bypassed in various ways, including by subcontracting.5 The indictment of guilds by the `Committee of General Welfare’ in Haarlem on closer
1
Adres aan de Nationale Vergadering: 8-12. Olson 1982: 124-25. 3 Mokyr 1990: 191, 298. 4 Unger 1978: 69-82. 5 Farr 1997, Epstein 1998, Prak 1999: 108-10. 2
2 inspection turns out, not surprisingly, to have been rooted in prejudice rather than fact, too. There is ample evidence that innovating entrepreneurs in this city in Holland in the second half of the eighteenth century were not restricted by `guild laws’ at all: they received permission from the city government to remain outside the grasp of guild regulation if they wanted.6 The revisionist tendency in research on the relationship between guilds and technological innovation has now in some cases resulted in a reformulation of Unger’s position in more general terms, stating that craft guilds in the early modern period have de facto furthered technological innovation in such ways as maintaining institutional facilities for training and education, keeping up regular arrangements for geographical mobility of craftsmen or providing a protective setting for inventors to reap the rewards of their efforts at invention. Craft guilds thereby created unintentionally a favourable environment for the advancement of technical knowledge.7 In S.R. Epstein’s view, it was the high level of investment in human capital `ensured’ by the high number of guilds which in part explains the economic success of the Dutch Republic in the Golden Age and it was the persistence of `specialized training’ provided by English guilds combined with the relative decline of `restrictive legislation’ for the benefit of corporations after the Civil War, which `may have given post-Restoration England the technological edge over the Continent’.8 Thus, reflection on the relationship between guilds and technology has. now entered a new, more adventurous phase. The debate on the role of guilds in technological innovation has got under way at last. This article aims to give a further twist to the argument, not by trying to stage a revival of the orthodox point of view, but (taking the disproof of the outright conservatism of guilds as given) by attempting to bring the relative importance of guilds in technological innovation more sharply into focus. Did crafts guilds really make a positive contribution to technological change and if so, to what extent and how ? Thus, I am not concerned with the question of resistance to specific innovations, or to particular sorts of innovations, but with the issue of the extent and manner of the contribution of guilds to the advance of technology in general. The role of guilds in technological innovation varied as circumstances differed. This variation of roles took place on a spectrum running from `very prominent’ to `very modest’. The chances to find a prominent role of craft guilds in technological innovations in the early modern period, I would suggest, are highest in those cases where alternative facilities for technical training and education, such as curricular teaching in groups, technological literature or collections of models were scarce, where the possibilities for mobility of skilled people outside the framework of the corporate system were low and where alternative ways for securing benefits from innovations in the form of patent rights or rewards from public authorities were close to non-existent (which, of course, does not imply that craft guilds actually did promote technological innovation – the incidence of innovation after all also depended on many other variables). In cases where these facilities, possibilities and alternatives were not negligible at all, however, the role of guilds in technological innovations accordingly may have been much more reduced (which, of course, does not imply that technological innovations were absent). The extent to which this last-named condition was fulfilled depended (one might hypothesize) on such variables 6
Davids 1995 b :350-51; other examples can be found in the Vervolgen op de keuren en ordonnantien der stad Haarlem (Haarlem 1793) 118, 120, 121 (steel manufacture, tapestry manufacture, 1778) (I owe this information to dr.Jaap Vogel). 7 Epstein 1998: 684-85, 704. 8 Epstein 1998: 698, 701; Epstein’s statement on the Dutch Republic is based on De Vries and Van der Woude 1997: 694-95, but expands on it, by linking the investment in human capital with the high number of guilds (which De Vries and Van der Woude have refrained from doing).
3 as the level of economic development and the growth of a dense network of relatively autonomous towns, which shared an integrated market of skilled labour. The prime example of a region in early modern Europe at this latter end of the spectrum was the Dutch Republic. The United Provinces between the late sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century reached a much higher level of economic (and technological) development than other countries of Europe and saw the rise of an urban system which at its peak, about 1675, did not only enclose more than 40 % of the total population of the Republic (and even more than 60 % in the province of Holland), but also exhibited strong ties of interdependence between towns, as appears, for instance, from the high incidence of passenger traffic between cities. It was the Dutch Republic that in De Vries and Van der Woude’s view truly deserved the epithet `first modern economy’.9 The Netherlands moreover in this very period witnessed a massive expansion in the number and membership of guilds.10 It is in the Netherlands, therefore, that I will put the above ideas about the role of guilds in technological innovation to the test by looking into the three related fields which are now in the centre of the historical debate. The first section deals with facilities for training and education, the second one discusses formal and informal arrangements for the geographical mobility of artisans, while the third one is concerned with protective provisions for technical secrets. The conclusion will summarize the findings in the case of the Dutch Republic and address the question in what directions future research on the relationship between guilds and technological innovations might be pursued.
1. Training and education Apprenticeship played a key role in the transition to modernity, Nicole Pellegrin has written a few years ago in her introduction to the special issue of the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine devoted to this particular form of training and education between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In a pioneering case-study on apprenticeship in Paris in the eighteenth century, which formed the piece de resistance of this issue, Steven Kaplan claimed that apprenticeship was `une des pierres angulaires du système de reproduction du monde des arts et métiers’, which primarily served for the transmission of knowledge and skills but also contributed to the survival of the corporate system by acting as a vehicle of socialisation. Apprenticeship, according to Kaplan, was based on a notion of reciprocity between master and apprentice which found concrete expression in a contract drawn up before a notary. But each contract had a corporate and public dimension as well: corporations were not only normally co-signatories of the contract, but also acted as its supervisors and guarantees.11 According to S.R. Epstein the provision of `adequate skills training through formal apprenticeship’ should even be considered `the primary purpose of craft guilds’. This support of craft guilds for investment in skills, he argues, was (although unintentionally) conducive to `technological invention and innovation’. 12 The question is whether the institution of apprenticeship under the aegis of craft guilds in reality can bear the weight that is being placed upon it in recent historical studies. In what ways and to what extent did guild rules on apprenticeship really contribute to technological advance, even if in an unintended way ? Turning to our 9
De Vries and Van der Woude 1997: passim, De Vries 1978:.347-49. Lucassen and Prak 1998; Davids 1995 b. 11 Pellegrin 1993: 353-55, esp. 355; Kaplan 1993: 436-37, 455-57. 12 Epstein 1998: 684. 10
4 testing ground, the Dutch Republic, it should first of all be observed that in The Netherlands, as elsewhere in Europe, bye-laws of guilds never regulated anything about the content of the training of apprentices, although they contained prescriptions on the number of apprentices and the length of the apprenticeship. The competence of an apprentice, as Epstein has remarked, could only be assessed `ex post’, by the requirement of producing a masterpiece as a precondition for admittance to the mastership.13. It might therefore be useful to know whether regulations on the masterpiece may have conducive or obstructive to technological change. But neither in The Netherlands nor in other countries in Europe has this aspect of guild history figured prominently in studies on corporatism. In so far as the issue of the masterpiece has been considered at all, attention mostly has been focused on the timing of its introduction as a requirement for admission to a guild rather than on the contents of the proof itself.14 The exception is Unger’s study on Dutch shipcarpenters’ guilds between c.1400 and 1800. Unger found that formal tests of competence were not adopted by shipcarpenters’ guilds in the Northern Netherlands until the 1570s and at first in only three towns: Amsterdam, Arnemuiden and Dordrecht. Among this triad, it was solely the Dordrecht guild which laid down a complex proof requirement. Whereas applicants for the mastership in Arnemuiden, for instance, according to the guild letter of 1575 were required to take `a plank 24 or 25 feet long out of a ship and then [to replace] the same plank along the ribband so that it fits properly and [to make] a hulk mast and [to help] to step it’, candidates in Dordrecht according to the guild letter of 1587 had to perform the following six tasks: 1) finish the bow of a new ship so that is is strong, along with its mast-knee, 2) build a boat with curved posts of four or six tons and 3) complete three out of the following repair tasks: take a board out of an old boat and replace it with another, take a plank out of a ship either fore or aft and replace it, put a post in a ship, make a fore windlass and an after windlass and put them in place properly, make and step a mast and sprit and make a rudder `and all that pertains thereto’.15 In the seventeenth century, the number of shipwrights’ guilds with formalized tests of competence increased, while the Amsterdam guild repeatedly extended its proof requirements until c.1630. And yet, as Unger points out, none of these regulations rivaled the complexity of the rule prevailing in Dordrecht and none of the guilds in the Dutch Republic ever went so far as to adopt, like the shipcarpenters’ guild in the German city of Lübeck, the presciption that applicants to the mastership should also show the ability to draw the plan of a ship.16 Although the case of the shipwrights’ guilds differed from that of many other crafts guilds in The Netherlands in the relatively late emergence of regulations on the masterpiece, it was not exceptional in the variety of formal requirements that existed within the same craft and the relative stability of the descriptions of those requirements during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This inference can be drawn from a survey of regulations on master pieces made by guilds in Dutch cities that organized crafts which were in the early modern period were in the forefront of technological advance, viz. carpenters and joiners’ guilds, blacksmiths’ guilds and guilds of St. Luke (which, beside painters and sculptors, often comprised a variety of other `artists’ as well, like as glaziers, embroiderers, pump makers or compass makers)17. As in the case of the shipwrights’ guilds, the degree of complexity of the proof requirements differed somewhat from one city to another. In addition to a window-frame, a cross-beam, a measuring-staff or a table, carpenters and joiners’
13
Epstein 1998: 694 note 43. Cahn 1979:10-12, Epstein 1998: 693. 15 Unger 1978: 76, 133, 138. 16 Unger 1978: 91. 17 Hoogewerff 1947. 14
5 guilds sometimes also requested the making of another tour de force such as a staircase or a mantelshelf. A masterpiece of blacksmiths’ guilds could consist of a sledgehammer or a double lock, but might also include a driving punch or a bunch of square nails. More strikingly, descriptions of masterpieces after 1600 were hardly ever changed, once they had been embedded in a bye-law of a guild. A specification of a given proof rarely underwent a drastic adaptation.18 The stability of proof descriptions did not imply that tests of competence hardly changed at all. The evolution of proof requirements could take place in two different ways. The first way consisted of differentiation rather than transformation. In this case, proof requirements did not change by alteration of the rules on the contents of the masterpiece as in the emergence of new proofs in subdivisions of the same guild. The guild of St. Luke in Haarlem, for example, introduced a separate proof for pump makers in 1685. The carpenters and joiners’ guild saw the number of different proofs expand from two in 1590 to five in the early eighteenth century.19 In the blacksmiths’ guild in Amsterdam the number of separate proofs increased from five in 1554 to seven by 1700. In the carpenters and joiners’ guild the number of different tests grew from four in 1524 through eight around 1640 to twelve by the end of the seventeenth century.20 The second way in which tests of competence could evolve was by an in-built flexibility in the description of the proof itself. Whereas in some trades the quality of a masterpiece was assessed by comparison with a fixed physical model kept in possession by the guild, the descriptions in other crafts were characterized by a certain `open-endedness’, which left room for innovation within the margins of a broad, liberal formula. When in 1711 a separate proof was described for the loom-makers in Haarlem (who belonged to the carpenters and joiners’ guild but had been exempt from the tests of competence for carpenters and joiners since 1602) the regulation determined the type of the masterpiece but did not prescribe that it had to correspond to the specifications of a standard model; it was only required that the item should be made in such as way that it could `pass the examination’.21 It is not unlikely that this very combination of specialization and flexible testing may have facilitated innovation in the making of textile equipment. During much of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Haarlem was known as the leading centre of production of one of the most advanced pieces of textile machinery before the Industrial Revolution, the ribbon frame. In the 1660s the `most expert masters in the making of ribbon frames’ in the Dutch Republic were said to be found in Haarlem. Ribbon frames from Haarlem were still much in demand in other countries in Europe as late as about 1775.
22
By then, the construction of
these devices had been improved to such an extent that the productivity per man-hour was several times higher than around 1605, when the first model had appeared on the market. The increase of productivity was particularly striking in the first half of the eighteenth century.23
18
See for example Archiefdienst Westfriese Gemeenten (AWG) Hoorn, Archief timmermansgilde 1; Gemeentearchief (GA) Amsterdam 366 nr. 1441, nr.1480, Noordkerk 1748-1778: vol. III 1366-1372; GA Delft, Oud Stadsarchief, Keurboeken 6 f. 5-6v, Bibliotheek 67 D 22; GA Gouda, Oud Archief 2529 f.86-90, 155-158v, 219-220; GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven nr. 315 , Stadsarchief 1581-1795 rood 60 G f.193v – 200, Keuren en Ordonnantien 9 nr.16 and 10 (1, 2 and 3), Regionaal Archief (RA) Alkmaar, Stadsarchief 31 f. 182-199v, 32 f. 1-3, 112-125v and Kolman 1993: 108-09. 19 GA Haarlem, Stadsarchief 1581-1795 rood 60 G f.193v – 200, Keuren en Ordonnantien 9 nr.16, 10 (1), Gildenarchieven, nr. 315. 20 GA Amsterdam 366 nr. 1441, nr.1480, cf Wagenaar 1760-1768: II, 458-60. 21 GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven, nr. 315. 22 Vogel 1987: 25-42; GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven, nr.327.
6 The role of guilds as supervisors of the training of craftsmen should not be overdrawn, however. Many craftsmen were not bound to comply with guild regulations on apprenticeship or tests of competence because they were not organized in a guild at all. Training of craftsmen did not only take place in a corporate context, as Epstein remarked.24 The absence of a guild structure did not preclude the growth of specialization and the appearance of regular patterns of instruction. The rural district of the Zaanstreek, which in the seventeenth century led the way in the development of industrial windmills, has hardly known any guilds at all.25 Yet, this very region saw the emergence and expansion of a distinct group of craftsmen specialized in the making and repairing of mills, who boasted their own routes of training. A millwright Pieter Johannes de Vries from Zaandam, who in 1769 applied for a job as master millwright in the service of the Dutch East-India Company, sought to establish his credentials not by reference to a succesful completion of a formal proof but by the presentation of a CV stating that `from childhood he had been taught by his uncle Jan Douwes de Vries the art of drawing and the making of all sorts of mills and gear of mills’ and that in the mean time `he had made such progress that for a few years past he had built with success a number of mills in the Netherlands as a master millwright himself (lastly in Flushing in 1768)’26. A survey conducted in 1800 reveals that the villages along te Zaan then numbered ten workshops of millwrights, each of which, apart from the master millwright, employed 20 to 30 adult craftsmen and five boys.27 In the cities, training of craftsmen was not always embedded in a corporate structure either, even if guilds were much more widespread. Apprenticeship did not only exist in trades or crafts that were organized in the form of guilds. Of the 163 apprenticeship contracts in Amsterdam dating from the period 1590-1670 collected by J.G. van Dillen, no more than 64 (39 %) related to occupations which at the time of the drafting of the contract were subject to guild regulations. The vast majority (61 %) concerned trades or crafts which at the time of drafting were not yet organized in a guild or which were never organized in a guild at all (such as watchmaking, diamond cutting or gold- and silver-wire-drawing).28 In export industries, notably textile manufacture, apprenticeship could be supervised by neringen instead of guilds. Neringen were organizations established by a town government, which were charged with regulating and controlling a particular branch of export industry. In contrast with guilds, they knew no formal membership but included all persons working in a specific sector of production . They were administered by a board consisting both of entrepreneurs and of representatives from the urban government.29 Regulations with regard to neringen usually covered the subject of apprenticeship as well. The order on the nering of gold- and silver-wire-drawing issued by the government of Amsterdam in 1696, for instance, stipulated that all apprentices had to be registered and that apprentices were
23
Vogel 1987: 34-36. Epstein 1998: 688-89. 25 According to the survey of guilds in the Netherlands by Lourens and Lucassen 1994: 61, the number of guilds in the Zaanstreek amounted to no more than three; Unger 1978:5, 84-85. On the role of the Zaanstreek as an exporter of windmills, millers and millwrights since about 1620 see Davids 1990 a :38-41, Davids 1998: 23031. 26 Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA) Archief Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) 277 27 April 1769. 27 Van der Woude 1973: 132, 136, 151, 159, 170, 179, 202, 218. The informed guess on the size per shop is based on the figures about the shop of Pieter Schram & Co in Zaandijk. 28 Calculated on the basis of the sources published in Van Dillen 1929-1974 (excluding declarations on apprenticeship). Information on guild-regulated crafts was derived from Van Eeghen 1965 and Lourens and Lucassen 1998:157-59. The survey of apprenticeship contracts published by De Jager 1990 has an in-built bias towards guild-regulated crafts, as it only concerns painters and gold- and silversmiths. 29 Davids 1996: 95-97. 24
7 obliged to complete the agreed term of service.30 By-laws of neringen in Leiden from the late sixteenth century onwards normally contained clauses on the number of apprentices per master, the length of apprenticeship and the procedure of registration at the beginning and at the end of the apprenticeship period.31 In contrast to eighteenth-century Paris, it was evidently possible in Amsterdam to conclude formal arrangements concerning occupational instruction between a individual master and the parents or guardians of a prospective pupil even if there was no corporate institution which could test and certify its outcome. Guilds were not necessary agencies for the enforcement of apprenticeship contracts . If one of the parties defaulted, the aggrieved person could always have recourse to the courts. 32 Next to apprenticeship contracts, which were concluded for a specified period of time – often for two or three years, sometimes for three, four or five years, but seldom longer - , there were also contracts which arranged for instruction on a particular piece of knowledge. On 28 November 1642, for example, Hendrick Wildens in Amsterdam bound himself by contract to teach Jacob de Coninck the art of borax refining in the same manner as he had taught Johannes van Ceulen for the sum total of 150 guilder.33 This was not an a-typical agreement. These contracts for instruction `by the piece’ always related to operations which, like borax refining, remained outside the orbit of guild regulation, such as soap boiling, lacquer making or the manufacturing of saltpetre. 34 But the transfer of know-how did not only take place in the form of apprenticeship arrangements or similar provisions for individual instruction on a private basis. The main alternative route of training consisted in facilities for learning knowledge and skills by way of curricular teaching in groups. The first `schools’ for technical education in The Netherlands provided for training for employment in the `service’ sector rather than in the sector of crafts and industries. From the late sixteenth century onwards, skills needed for trades like surveying, gauging, book-keeping, designing dikes, locks, houses, fortifications or public buildings or navigating a ship across the ocean could be learned not only through personal instruction from a `practised hand’ but also by attending classes taught by private schoolmasters or lecturers paid from the public purse, who were mostly established in the urban centres in the western and northern parts of the United Provinces. In Amsterdam, for instance, it was easy to find private instructors who were willing and able, at good pay, to teach a variety of courses on mathematical topics, ranging from gauging and book-keeping to surveying and the art of navigation. Although a number of cities had separate guilds of schoolmasters35, most of these entrepreneurs in the education business were never included into the corporate system.36 Moreover, several universities or other institutions of higher learning in the Netherlands provided courses, taught in Dutch, on practical mathematics for a non-academic public. At the `Duytsche mathematicque', founded as a branch of Leiden University in 1600 at the instance of Prince Maurits, instruction was given on surveying, gauging and fortification. At the university of Franeker, Dutch courses on surveying, fortification and the art of navigation were offered since 1600. At the Athenaeum Illustre in 30
Noordkerk 1748-1778: vol. I, Ordonnantie op de neeringe van het goud- en zilverdraadtrekken en voor het werkvolk, 11 July 1696, 1096, art. 11 and 12. 31 Posthumus 1910-1922: passim. 32 In notarial deeds concerning conflicts about the implementation of apprentice contracts no reference is made to intervention by a guild, see for example Van Dillen 1929-1974 vol III: 63-64, nr.134, 91 nr.187, 109-110 nr.224. 33 Van Dillen 1929-1974 vol.III: 353 nr. 680. 34 Van Dillen 1929-1974 vol. III, 437 nr. 840, 488 nr.942, 508 nr. 977, 677 nr.1440. 35 For example in Gouda, Middelburg and Leiden, see Hulshof 1996: 139-44,. Briels 1972: 90; GA Leiden, Bibliotheek nr.50840 Ordonnantie van het schoolmeestersgilde binnen der stad Leiden (Leiden 1689). 36 Davids 1991: 39, 41-44; Davids, Van der Veen and De Vries 1989.
8 Amsterdam, teaching in Dutch on the art of navigation was, with a few interruptions, provided from 1635 until 1838.37 The importance of this link between the worlds of the scholar and the craftsman should not be slighted. At least a third of the students at the `Duytsche mathematicque’ in the early seventeenth century consisted of masons, stone-cutters and carpenters. Among the 187 surveyors registered by the Court of Holland, Zeeland and WestFriesland between 1602 and 1641, 69 are known to have received their training at this department of the university of Leiden; of the 160 surveyors registered by the Court of Friesland between 1641 and 1811, eighty were educated at the university of Franeker.38 Later on, the `school’-model of technical education was extended to parts of the manufacturing sector as well. Ads for courses on chemical subjects began to appear in the official newspaper of Amsterdam, the Amsterdamsche Courant, from the 1680s onwards
39
In the eighteenth century, an increasing
part of the technical education was sponsored by newly-established private or semi-public foundations and societies.40 Another bypass of the guild structure in the domain of training was created by the rise of technological literature and collections of models as aids for the diffusion of technical knowledge. A crucial change in this respect can be discerned at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first decades of the eighteenth century. While the supply of technological literature in Dutch up to that time was largely restricted to spheres of knowledge and skills that remained outside the scope of guild regulation (like surveying, gauging, book-keeping, fortification and the art of navigation), the period between c. 1680 and 1740 saw the appearance of book-length descriptions concerning domains of technical practice, which – in the cities, at least – could be claimed to lie within the realm of competence of craft guilds. The outstanding example were the so-called `mill books’. The first mill-book was brought out by the Amsterdam publisher Justus Danckerts in 1686. It had been composed by a Swedish millwright, Pieter Linpergh, who had come to The Netherlands with the express purpose of studying Dutch windmills. The Architectura Mechanica Moole boek contained both images and verbal explanations of the exterior, gear and annexes of various types of windmills. Linpergh’s book, which was reprinted in 1727, was in the 1730s supplanted by two new mill-books composed by millwrights from Holland itself, which surpassed the work of their predecessor in both the quality and quantity of descriptions: the Theatrum machinarum universale, of groot algemeen moolen-boek by Johannis van Zyl (with engravings by Jan Schenk) and the Groot volkomen moolen-boek by Leendert van Natrus and Jacob Polly (with engravings by Cornelis van Vuuren) In these millbooks, every type of windmill was carefully described and depicted, with measures and all; the engravings, printed on folio size pages, showed almost every relevant detail. Van Zyl’s book was later extended with an equally detailed manual on the construction of other feats of the carpenter’s craft, such as the making of staircases.41 A similar expansion took place in the use of models. `Models’ in the sense of three-dimensional representations of real (or potentially `real’) constructions on a reduced scale were not unknown in The Netherlands in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, however, that models became increasingly used as instruments for the diffusion of knowledge by the formation and display of large numbers of new or representative specimens of technical capability. The Amsterdam bookseller, theologian and architectural writer Willem Goeree around 1680 boasted a large collection of
37
Davids 1990 b: 5-6. 8, 12. Muller and Zandvliet 1987:125-26, 150; Davids 1990 b: 5-6. 39 Van Nierop 1930: 271, 300. 40 Muller and Zandvliet 1987: 27-37. 41 Davids 1990 a: 43-44; Van Zyl 1734. 38
9 `architectural models and instruments of force and practice, most accurately drawn in their measures and use’ , which he had opened for public view. In addition to copies of all sorts of buildings and building components, this collection included models of locks, sluices, bridges, cranes, drop hammers, windlasses, pumping devices, minting presses and mechanisms of mills.42 In the eighteenth century, such `cabinets’ of technical models and instruments were also established at public or private institutions such as naval boards,
universities and
43
scientific societies.
The natural inclination to dismiss the importance of technological literature and models as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge before the later phase of industrialization should be suppressed. There is abundant evidence that these treasures of information were eagerly sought after and indeed found their way to interested, technologically literate publics both at home and abroad.
44
It was not by chance that the estate of a Rotterdam
carpenter and millwright Maarten Nederdijk, who died in 1809, contained - among a hundred-odd books - copies of the works by Van Zyl and Van Natrus & Polly as well as a large number of models, including `a fine wheel of a drop hammer’, `two small drop hammers’, `a fine ingenious winding staircase’ and ` a small mill-wheel’. 45
Thus, the evidence from the early modern Netherlands does not suggest that guild rules on apprenticeship were, intentionally or unintentionally, very conducive to technological advance. Their direct or indirect contribution appears to have been small. Apprenticeship was surely an important institution for the transmission of technical knowledge and skills, and this institution was indeed in part controlled by craft guilds.46 Supervision and enforcement by craft guilds were no doubt useful instruments in reducing the incidence of free-riding and thus helped in solving the problem of coordination which is inherent in the provision of a public good like the transmission of knowledge and skills. But this arrangement was by no means the only way to ensure that this public good would be supplied in a socially efficient quantity. The analysis of the Dutch case has revealed a number of alternative solutions to the coordination problem. A first alternative, exemplified by the Zaanstreek, was informal cooperation based on a dense network of inter-firm relations and family connections.47 A second alternative was formal supervision and enforcement by government agencies such as neringen and civil courts. A third alternative arrangement consisted in the sale of technical knowledge by profit-seeking producers such a private instructors or commercial publishers. A fourth solution was the supply of technical knowledge by government-sponsored teachers or by private non-profit institutions or organizations (such as collections of models or scientific societies), which made free-riding into a non-issue by offering access to knowledge for free. True, the first alternative was probably more effective in the context of industrial districts than in the setting of larger towns and the last two solutions could not completely replace the function of guilds, as they
42
Goeree 1681:Preface; Van den Heuvel 1997: 167-69. Lindqvist 1984: 24-26; Lemmers 1996:, 15-42; De Clercq 1987; l’E. Turner: 173-186. 44 Davids 1990 a: 43-44; Davids 1998: 229-30; Davids 1991:10. 45 GA Rotterdam Hs. 834, probate inventory Maarten Nederdijk. 46 The relationship between apprenticeship and guild control in The Netherlands is more fully examined in my article `Apprenticeship and guild control in the Netherlands, c.1450-1800’ in the forthcoming volume on apprenticeship in early modern Europe, edited by Hugo Soly, Steven Kaplan and Marc Jacobs. 47 The transmission of knowledge and skills in the Zaanstreek is more fully examined in my (as yet unpublished) paper `Windmills and the openness of knowledge. Technological innovation in a Dutch industrial district, the Zaanstreek c. 1600-1800’, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in San Jose, October 2001. 43
10 were more geared to the diffusion of formalized knowledge than to the transmission of tacit knowledge and skills. But the limitations of guilds should be borne in mind as well. The role of guilds in training and education after all hardly extended beyond the transmission of tacit knowledge and skills; normally it did not enclose knowledge and skills of a more formalized, mathematical nature.
48
Guilds were as a rule not concerned with
monitoring, enforcing or promoting competence in measurement, computation and the understanding of theoretical learning that might be useful for the practical arts. Moreover, there is no compelling reason why – other things being equal - the function of guilds in training and education could not entirely have been replaced by government agencies: in other words, why the second alternative ceteris paribus should have been less efficient than the operation of craft guilds. The point was of course, that other things were not equal. Given the fact that guilds by a variety of actors for many different reasons were thought to be valuable institutions, it will often have been a matter of convenience to leave to them in large part the role of supervision and enforcement in the transmission of tacit knowledge and skills as well.
2. Geographical mobility of artisans Technological innovation always has also depended on the movement of people. In the growing body of literature on guilds, a considerable number of studies in the past twenty years or so have been devoted to the role of travelling by journeymen to the advance of technology in Europe. Journeymen’s migrations first emerged in the Late Middle Ages and in the later sixteenth century in large parts of Europe (in particular Central Europe) often assumed an obligatory character by the introduction of Wanderzwang or Wanderpflicht, supervised by guilds and/or local or teritorial governments. The argument has been proposed that journeymen’s travels in the framework of the corporate system, whether deliberately or unintentionally, made a significant contribution to technological progress because they served as a regular medium to transfer advanced knowledge and skills from one city or region to another. 49 In the case of Hungary, for example, Ottó Domonkos has claimed that `die ungarischen und ausländischen Wandergesellen’ unmistakenbly `zur vermindering des ziemlich großen Rückstands des ungarischen Handwerkes gegenüber dem westeuropäischen beigetragen haben’.50 In recent studies, the importance of journeymen’s migrations for the transfer of technology has been toned down. Epstein has pointed out that journeymen’s travels mostly did not cross linguistic and national boundaries and therefore could only serve as a medium for technology transfer within a limited area. Rainer Elkar has cast even further doubt about the impact of journeymen’s travels in this respect by arguing (1) that the operation of labour markets in preindustrial crafts and trades was hemmed in by various institutional, religious and other cultural restrictions, which starkly reduced the probability that `besonders geignete Gesellen und Meister zueinander fanden’, and (2) that the free flow of knowledge and skills through `travelling’ was often expressly probibited in the very crafts and trades that were considered to be the most technologically advanced. Besides, he has wondered whether journeymen’s travels for the transfer of technology can have been that important, when all the 48
An interesting exception is the St..Luke’s guild in Haarlem, which according to its by-law of 1631 also included practitioners of `the mixed arts’, such as `architects`, `surveyors’ and `mathematicians’, see Miedema 1980: vol. I, 97-98, vol. II, 422. 49 Leeson 1979; Reininghaus 1981;Bade 1982; Domonkos 1982; Elkar 1983; Pallach 1983; Sonenscher 1986; Reininghaus 1988; Ehmer 1989; Reith 1994. 50 Domonkos 1982:111.
11 travelling by German journeymen before the nineteenth century did not result in a significant reduction of the technological gap between Germany on the one hand and England and the Dutch Republic on the other.51 Even if tramping obligations on balance would have been favourable to the diffusion of technological innovations, however, this factor cannot have been of consequence for the technological advance of the Dutch Republic, as such obligations hardly existed in The Netherlands at all. There is scarcely any evidence that guilds in Dutch cities introduced formal rules on Wanderschaft or that journeymen cultivated traditions of support to travelling `brothers’ similar to those obtaining, for example, in France or England. Among the many guilds and journeymen’s associations in the United Provinces studied by Sandra Bos, the only one which did know a tramping obligation was the hatters’ guild in Utrecht. 52 The virtual absence of tramping obligations did not imply that the geographical mobility of artisans in the Dutch Republic was low. In many crafts that were subject to guild regulation in Amsterdam, the vast majority of newly married masters and journeymen in the seventeenth century turn out to have been born outside the city, viz. in other parts of the United Provinces or beyond. Among tailors, bakers, cobblers, hatters, clothshearers, blacksmiths or masons the percentage of `aliens’ even amounted to some 70 to 90 %. Bibi Panhuijsen found that in the period 1730-1811 the majority of master-tailors in Amsterdam still consisted of immigrants from Germany. The influx of foreigners was certainly eased by the fact that the entrance fees for Dutch guilds, especially those in Amsterdam, were relatively low compared to the charges levied in their country of origin.53 More specifically, the virtual absence of Wanderzwang did by no means entail the absence of mobility of journeymen. Although the absolute size of migration flows of journeymen in The Netherlands will probably never be known, it is nonetheless possible to get some idea of their relative importance from data collected in guild archives in Haarlem where a few records on the entry and/or departure of journeymen from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century have been preserved. Of the twenty journeymen registered by the coppersmiths’ guild between 1703 and 1715, thirteen left the city after a year or less and another three after two years. Only four of them stayed in Haarlem.54 In the period 1740-49 the bakers’ guild registered 28 journeymen, of whom 22 (or 79 %) were natives. In the period 1780-89 the total of registered journeymen had grown to 205, of whom only 84 (41 %) are known to have been born in the city itself. 55 Given the vast increase in the number of journeymen and the continued decline of the total population of Haarlem after 175056, the majority of them (especially the foreigners) will sooner or later have moved to other places in the Dutch Republic or abroad. For the confectioners’ guild, the registers of annual contributions reveal that in the decade 1693-1702 no more than sixteen out of 56 journeymen (or 29 %) made their payment more than once, in other words: stayed as a confectioners’ journeyman in Haarlem more than one year; the percentage among the natives was twice as high as among the foreigners. In the period 1770-1779 the percentage of those who paid a contribution more than once was much greater than before (66 out of 107, or 62 %), but no more than 35 % made their annual payment twice. The difference in persistence between natives and foreigners after two years by and large remained: the percentage of Haarlemmers who paid their contributions three times or more was much higher than that of journeymen who had been born outside the city. The interruption in the annual payments only to a small part can 51
Epstein 1998: 703;. Elkar 1999:216-24. Lucassen 1995: 397-98; Lucassen and Prak 1998: 66; Bos 1998: 173. 53 Knotter and Van Zanden 1987:.406-08; Panhuijsen 1997:. 134-36; Lucassen and Prak 1998: 66. 54 GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven, nr. 111. 55 GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven, nr. 21. 52
12 be explained by the promotion of journeymen to the rank of master. Of the 56 contributing journeymen in the period 1693-1702 only seven were ever admitted as master-confectioner in Haarlem, of the 107 in the period 1770-1779 no more than seventeen ( needless to say, the chances for natives were better than those for foreigners). 57 These data suggest that at least from the late seventeenth century onwards a substantial proportion of journeymen in Dutch craft guilds regularly travelled from one city to another, even if there was no formal obligation to do so. The evolution and geographical pattern of these journeymen’s travels certainly deserve further study. It would equally be interesting to know why this pattern of migrations did not give rise to a comparable system of rules, customs and rituals among journeymen themselves as that in England or in France.58 But the relevant point in the context of discussion here is, that even if there was a substantial mobility of journeymen in the Dutch Republic and even if this mobility may have been conducive to the diffusion of technical knowledge and technological innovation, it was not linked to craft guilds or associated organizations in any direct way. Moreover, masters and journeymen were not the only craftsmen on the road. In addition to artisans working in crafts or trades that were subject to guild regulation, there were various other sorts of `travelling people’ who could act as carriers of technical knowledge. Although the Dutch Republic lay outside the area from which the crafts and trades of Augsburg normally recruited their journeymen, for example, the introduction of calico printing into this South German city was nevertheless effected by the migration of people, namely citizens from the Reichsstadt who in 1688/89 travelled to Holland (and England) and served an apprenticeship with a calico printer to learn the `tricks of the trade’.59 Calico printing in The Netherlands was never included into the guild system. The case of the technological travellers from Augsburg is but one part of a much larger pattern of diffusion of technical knowledge inside the United Provinces and between the United Provinces and other countries in Europe through the mobility of people. While some of the carriers of technical knowledge were guildsmen, such as weavers, dyers, pottery makers, shipwrights or urban carpenters, many did come not under the competency of a corporate organization at all. These free-floating individuals included, on the one hand, workmen from The Netherlands specialized in crafts or trades which remained outside the guild system, such as engineers, pilots, bleachers, paper makers, madder growers or millwrights from rural areas, and, on the other hand, foreign merchants, engineers, scientists, officials and the like who came to the United Provinces to study at close quarters the processes, skills and devices which were perceived to be the foundation of Dutch technological leadership in Europe.60 Guilds in the early modern Netherlands thus did not promote the transfer of technology through the movement of people. They did not obstruct it either. Outflow of knowledge and skills was not opposed by guilds. They did not prevent their members from moving to other towns in the Republic or from leaving the territory of the United Provinces altogether. When the recruitment of Dutch craftsmen for employment in other European countries after c.1750 by order of the States General was finally restrained, this departure from the tradition of openness was not in any sense due to pressure or demands from the side of guilds. The change of policy was
56
De Jongste 1984: 58-61. GA Haarlem, Gildenarchieven, nr. 82. 58 . Hobsbawm 1964; Leeson 1979: ch.6, Dobson 1980: esp.ch. 3; Sonenscher 1986; Truant 1994. 59 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Weberakten 146 (Färber) , 170 (Tuchscherer);.Dirr 1911: 30-31;Reith 1988: 110-132. 60 Davids 1990 a; Davids 1991 a; Davids 1998; Davids 1995 a : 333-48. 57
13 rather dictated by the growing fear in the States General and other higher decision-making bodies in the Republic that the continued emigration of skilled labour (not only in guild-based crafts) and the constant export of vital equipment would do serious harm to the Dutch economy and thus damage the interests of the Dutch state as a whole.61
3. Protection of secrecy Guilds in the Dutch Republic were no bastions of secrecy. Although `craft secrecy’ , transmitted through apprenticeship systems, was indeed, as Pamela Long has written, an important form of protection of `intellectual property’ in the late medieval and early modern periods 62, I would not concur with Epstein’s suggestion that `the capacity to capture the rents provided by a technical secret’ was in general `the most significant premodern incentive for invention’ and that `the most effective source of these rents was the craft guild’.63 The case of the early modern Netherlands again shows the importance of alternatives. In so far as there is any evidence of intentional protection of craft secrets in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Netherlands, the prime mover of `secretiveness’ did not reside in corporate organizations. Individual apprenticeship contracts sometimes stipulated that pupils were not allowed to reveal the `art’, `practice’ and `secrets’ learnt from the master to anyone else, but these clauses appeared both in contracts from crafts subject to guild regulation and in contracts from crafts that remained outside the corporate system and they were not a standard element in contracts that belonged to the former category.64 The first known collective contract involving a group of guildsmen to protect the secrecy of their craft was clearly an exceptional case. It was an agreement concluded in 1678 for the duration of six years between the city government of Haarlem and six local makers of ribbon frames. The agreement in essence provided that the makers of ribbon frames would teach their art only to their own children and apprentices, that they would not emigrate from Haarlem or repair any frames outside the boundaries of the city (and would also hold back their pupils from doing so) and that they would duly inform the urban authorities about all frames (or parts thereof) sold to local customers, while the magistrates undertook to pay the six incumbent makers 900 guilders, to restrict new admissions to their craft and to keep a close watch on all extant ribbon frames to prevent that any equipment left the city.
65
Yet, foreign
travellers to the United Provinces often were surprised about the ease with which they could gather information about industrial technology, compared with the resistance they encountered in other countries in Europe, including England. Openness of knowledge was for a long time de facto the rule in the United Provinces as far as matters of technology were concerned.66 It was not until the last decades of the existence of the Republic that the practice of openness began to decline. But this reversal of attitude was not due to a growing preference for concealment on the part of craft guilds (as I argued out above) but to a change of judgment on the part of the political elites and to an increased secretiveness of entrepreneurs active in branches of industry that mostly remained outside the orbit of the guild system. Beside textile production, the branches of manufacture in the 61
Davids 1995 a: 344-47. Long 1991:.865-71, 874-75, 879, 881; Long 2001: 88-93. 63 Epstein 1998: 703-04. 64 Compare for example Van Dillen 1929-1974: vol. III, p.332 and p.579. 65 GA Haarlem, Stadsarchief Loketkast 7-15-7- 1 contract 18 November 1678. 62
14 Dutch Republic where the tendency to secrecy made its furthest advance after 1750 were paper making, bleaching and the chemical industries.67 When it came to protecting rents provided by technical secrets, craft guilds were in The Netherlands not the most active agents. In the United Provinces, moreover, the role of guilds as communal protectors of income from technical inventions probably was less important than in other European countries, first, because Dutch guilds did not prevent their members from migrating to other places, and second, because the capacity to capture the rents provided by technical secrets in the Dutch case was not the most significant incentive for invention anyhow. The alternative way of securing the gains from inventions, namely by means of patent rights, cannot as easily be dismissed as for the Dutch Republic as for other countries in Europe before the end of the eighteenth century. Between the decline of patenting in Venice in the middle of the sixteenth century and the rapid expansion of this practice in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic was the state with the most flourishing patent system in Europe.68 In the period between c.1580 and 1620 the system became increasingly refined in the sense that provisions were introduced both to protect the interests of private inventors and to secure the interests of society at large. The interests of private inventors were guaranteed by the granting of exclusive rights to put their innovations into practice, the penalization of offenders, and the liberty to treat patents as alienable property which could be bought, sold, donated or inherited. 69Any benefit that might accrue from the legal recognition of the property right to an invention had to be reaped by the inventors themselves. In contrast with France, it was rare to find a public authority in the Dutch Republic support inventive activities by the grant of a premium or reward.70 The interests of society at large, on the other hand, were safeguarded by fixing a term during which the exclusive rights of patentees would apply (first usually five to twelve years, but after 1650 gradually settling on fifteen) and the obligation imposed on patentees to put their inventions into practice within a fixed period of time after the patent had been granted. From 1617 onwards, the length of this period normally was put at one year.71 In common with a practice developed in Venice and various states in Germany, patentees in the United Provinces were moreover up to the 1620s in a number of cases explicitly obliged to grant a license to anyone who wished to make use of their invention and was willing to pay a reasonable price to do so.72 Thus, the patent system allowed only a restricted form of secrecy. Patents were granted for inventions in a variety of fields. During the heyday of Dutch patenting, between c.1580 and 1720, the vast majority of patents granted by the States General and the States of Holland related to inventions in the fields of hydraulic equipment and installations (water-raising mills, pumps, water supply systems, dredging equipment, bridges, sluices and the like), military technology (canon and shot, fortifications), heating equipment (kettles, furnaces, stoves and chimneys) and industrial windmill technology.
73
Not every patented
invention was put into practice, of course. But it does not follow that the patent system therefore can be discounted as an important incentive for invention. Apart from the obvious rejoinder the relevance of the patent system in presentday societies is not been dismissed even if today not all patented inventions are put into practice either, there are 66
Davids 1995 a: 336-44. Davids 1995 a:339, 344-5. 68 Davids 1993:.95-96, and a more general overview in Davids 2000. Cf. on patent law and the practice of patenting in Venice and England Long 2001: 93-96, and MacLeod 1988. 69 Davids 2000: 265-268, Doorman 1940: 21. 70 Doorman 1940: 29-30; Davids 1986: 82. 71 Doorman 1940:.20-28. 72 . Silberstein 1961: 21, 86; examples in Doorman 1940: 96, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125. 67
15 several other good reasons to take due account of the significance of patent rights as a means of reaping the gains from inventive activity. First of all, many inventions protected by patent law were really widely brought into practice, including, among others, such seminal innovations like the wind-powered sawing mill, the horsepowered dredging machine equipped with a rotating chain of scoops, the drainage mill fitted out with an Archimedean screw and the fire engine linked with a suction pump, a hose and a pressure pump.74 Secondly, the most relevant question from the inventor’s point of view was, if benefits that might accrue from the legal recognition of the property right to an invention could actually be cashed. It did not matter (ceteris paribus) whether the inventor realized the gains by bringing the invention into practice himself, by granting a license to others or by selling (parts of) the patent altogether. In the heyday of the patent system in the Dutch Republic this commercial use of patent rights was not at all exceptional. Indeed, patents were thought to be such useful assets as to give rise to a number of legal disputes. 75 Thus, patent rights could definitely serve as a practical source of profitability. Given the virtual absence of
communal protection of technical secrets by guilds and the ready
availibility of an alternative way to secure benefits from inventions in the form of patent rights, it is natural to expect that guildsmen in The Netherlands who made technical inventions may have had recourse to the patent system, too. Among those who sought and obtained a patent from the States General of the provincial estates there must have members of guilds as well. Aggregate data on the occupational backgrounds and geographical origins of patentees in the period 1580-1719 suggest that this has indeed been the case. Among the 270 patentees of whom the occupational status is known (out of 692 patentees in all) about 50 % belonged to the category of craftsmen, most of them wood-workers (23 %), metal-workers (10.7 %), instrumentmakers (4.4 %) and masons (2.6 %). The vast majority of the nearly 700 patentees came from urban centres in Holland (mostly Amsterdam, Haarlem, Rotterdam or The Hague)76. As guild membership was in this period commonly a prerequisite to exercise the carpenter’s, blacksmith’s, gold- and silversmith’s or mason’s trade in towns in Holland, it is highly probable that many of the craftsmen who obtained a patent indeed did belong to a guild. In most cases, it is impossible to prove conclusively that they really did so because the relevant membership lists and/or lists of new masters simply do no longer exist. But in a few cases the matter can be clinched. Hendrik Cornelisz de Keyser, who took out patents from the States General for artificial marble (1612) and an improvement in bridge construction to ease the flow of shipping traffic (1596), proves to have been a master in the masons’ guild in Amsterdam.77 Gijsbert Jansz Keyser, who in 1613 received a patent from the States General for a brick heatingapparatus which would considerably reduce fuel costs in breweries, soap-works and sugar refineries, and Caspar Panten, who in 1617 took out patents from the States General for a drainage device and a new kind of stucco ornament, can be shown to have been members of the Amsterdam masons’ guild as well.78 Adriaen Jansz Nieng, who in 1651 jointly with his father Jan Claesz received from the States General and States of Holland an extension of a patent on a dredging engine first patented by his father in 1631, turns out to have delivered his
73
Davids 2000: 265-66. See e.g. Davids 2000: 276-78; Davids 1993: 88-89; Davids 1998: 227. 75 Davids 2000: 267, 273-77. 76 Davids 2000: 268-71. 77 Doorman 1940: 95, 121; GA Amsterdam 366, nr. 1349 register of master-masons and their apprentices 16101662 f. 2v 15 May 1611, f. 6 20 April 1613, f. 9v-10 10 January 1616. 78 Doorman 1940:124, 134-6; GA Amsterdam 366, masons’ guild nr. 1349 register of master-masons and their apprentices 1610-1662 f. 3 11 September 1611, f. 11 8 January 1617. 74
16 masterpiece in the carpenters’ guild in Hoorn in 1645.79 And Dirck Bosch, who in 1673 obtained a patent from the States of Holland for an invention to redress the coinage in the province of Holland, was a leading member of the gold- and silversmiths’ guild of Amsterdam: he served as a guild officer from 1652 till 1656 and in 1663 received authorization to act as a representative of the interests of the guild with the States of Holland. 80 This evidence on patents and patentees in the early modern Netherlands thus permits two important conclusions. First of all, guild membership in The Netherlands did not preclude efforts to reap gains from technical inventions by securing private property rights in the form of patents granted by public authorities. Secondly, guild members evidently made a contribution to the technological leadership of the Dutch Republic between the late sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century.
Conclusion The result of this analysis of the Dutch case is clear. The contribution of craft guilds to the advance of technology was indeed rather modest.81 Although craft guilds as organizations in some respects (notably opportunities for specialization through separate, flexible tests of competence) certainly have played a stimulating role in technological advance and individual guildsmen definitely have made a contribution to the technological leadership of the Dutch Republic, the evidence does not permit to conclude that guilds played an important part in technological innovation in The Netherlands between the late sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, as far as facilities for training and education, regular arrangements for the geographical mobility of artisans or protective provisions for technical secrets are concerned. Or to formulate the conclusion in a counter-factual mode: technological innovation in the Dutch Republic would – other things being equal not have taken a much different course if there had been no craft guilds at all, because the role of guilds in technological advance could also be fulfilled by other sorts of institutions and arrangements. There were sufficient alternatives available. The Dutch Republic was in a sense an extreme case, of course. The Netherlands was after all between the end of the sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century economically and technologically more developed than other countries in Europe and it possessed one of the most dense and compact urban systems. As far as the role of guilds in technological innovation in general is concerned, the Dutch case thus represented the outer end of the spectrum of possibilities rather than the middle. In different circumstances, the relationship between guilds and technological advance may have been different as well. The role of guilds may have been much more prominent when alternatives were rare or non-existent. It would therefore be relevant in future research to look both at cases that were presumably near the `Dutch’ end of the spectrum, such as late medieval Italy and Flanders or eighteenth-century England, and at cases that were probably more at the opposite side, such
79
Doorman 1940: 185, 222, 292; AWG Hoorn, Archief timmermansgilde Hoorn 2, register of guild members, nr. 380 26 January 1645. This dredging engine, of which a model has been preserved, is discussed in Conradis 1940: 53-54. 80 ARA Archief Staten van Holland, nr. 1625 25 August 1673; GA Amsterdam 366 nr. 337 lists of officers of the gold- and silversmiths’ guild; Van Dillen 1929-1974: vol. III, 707 nr.1506 14 March 1663. 81 On the other hand, guilds were not in any direct way responsible for the stagnation of technological advance in The Netherlands in the later eighteenth century either, see Davids 1995 b : 349-53 and Davids 2000: 278-79.
17 as countries in the Baltic area or in Central Europe in the early modern period. Further comparisons can only deepen our insight in this classic problem.
18
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