M12 - Entrepreneurship, Craft Guilds and Transformations

Author(s)

Mathijs Speecke (Ghent University)

Keywords

Textile Industry, Industrial Space, Urban Transformations

Abstract

It is beyond doubt that the textile industry was one of, if not the most important industrial activity in the county of Flanders during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Contemporaries were well aware of this fact, to the extent even that the success of a city was measured against the state of this particular branch of the economy. Following the ground breaking edition by Georges Espinas, Henri Pirenne and Henri De Sagher of documents related to this industry in the first half of the 20th century, innumerable studies have indeed been published addressing the rise and decline (or perhaps better, the reorientation) of the Flemish drapery and the organisation of its production, to the point that by now everything seems to have been said. However, despite this stream of publications, surprisingly little is known on the location of the textile industry and the space it occupied within the urban environment, not only from a historical, but from an archaeological point of view as well. Moreover, it remains to be considered how macro-economic changes in the market and the demand for Flemish cloth affected the function, configuration and outlook of these sites of production. In this paper I will address this issue by presenting some new, exceptional data on the tentering and shearing of cloth in five different locations in Bruges between ca. 1280 and 1600. More specifically, I have collected evidence on the total surface occupied by tentering frames (or scheerramen in Dutch) onto which fulled cloths were hung in order to dry and to be stretched and shorn by shearers, before being dyed and sold on the market. These data not only serve as a proxy for long-term trends in the total output of cloth production, they also give us a unique insight into the changing scale and spatial presence of this industry within the urban landscape, and the ways in which the actors involved – city governments, craft guilds and artisans – coped with these changes.

Author(s)

Ward Leloup (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Keywords

Occupational Geography, Urban Environment, Leather Industry

Abstract

Since long, scholars have assumed that occupational clustering was characteristic of medieval cities, and that this was something that inevitably eroded during the late medieval or early modern period. However, these assumptions on the existence and evolution of ‘occupational quarters’ are hardly ever substantiated by in-depth research. To add to our understanding of the medieval urban geography, this paper empirically analyses locational patterns in the Bruges leather industry between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Bruges was one of Europe’s main commercial markets and a leading centre for export-oriented industries, leather was a basic product with a wide range of applications in any premodern society. Leather manufacturing in Bruges was therefore a persistent industrial sector, serving both a local and an international market, and its production process was controlled by various craft guilds: from tanners, over curriers, to cobblers and glovers.

 
To explore locational patterns, I have identified leatherworkers and retrieved them in fiscal records from ca. 1580 covering the entire city. The integration of these data in a GIS-environment offers a cross-section of the geography of leather manufacturing in late sixteenth-century Bruges. While the information for the preceding centuries – collected from guild archives and orphans’ registers – is patchier, it sheds some light on evolutions in the occupational geography. Starting from the patterns and evolutions exposed, I will explore the rationales behind industrial location and relocation. To explain the spatial patterns in the leather industry, and how these changed over time, the interaction of various factors is considered. These factors include the urban landscape itself, the organisation of the sector and its evolution, and regulations imposed by the urban government – especially in view of the polluting character of the industry. From the part of the artisans, their spatial interests and locational choices were prompted by their actual activities and place in the production chain, the search for economic benefits and their social standing within the craft. Finally, the social dimension of co-location should not be overlooked, and path-dependency is to be reckoned with.

Author(s)

Keti Leo (Università Roma Tre - Dept. of Business Studies), Giuseppe Stemperini (Università Roma Tre - Dept. of Business Studies) and Carlo M. Travaglini (Università Roma Tre - Dept. of Business Studies)

Keywords

Leather Tanners, Socioeconomic Conditions, GIS

Abstract

Italy is a latecomer country in the panorama of European 19th-century industrialization. Rome, capital of the Papal State until 1870, undertook a modernization and urban expansion process only during the last thirty years of the century. Typical ancien régime structures and characteristics persisted for a long time, suffice to mention the case of guilds, abolished between 1801 and 1806 by Pope Pius VII, and reinstated with Pius IX in 1854.
The goal of this paper is to propose a study of the leather tanners in the city of Rome in the long period, with a special focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. The research is based on the integration and critical analysis of different administrative and fiscal sources, developed in GIS environment, for analysing economic and social phenomena and their spatial dimension.

The study will examine the reasons that have determined, at least since the first half of the sixteenth century, a strong concentration of tanners in a specific area of the city, Regola district, and further on will investigate the factors that led to their displacement in the Testaccio area, at the end of the nineteenth century. We highlight the complex relationships amongst the tanners’ guilds and the urban government, characterized, throughout the years, by intertwining conflicts and collaborations that have influenced the socioeconomic conditions of the neighborhoods. In an historical and economic context in continuous transformation, we examine the factors that favored some subjects and disadvantaged others, to the point of determining their exit from the sector.

The integration of the descriptive and quantitative historical data from different sources, through codified digitalisation and geolocalisation procedures, has enabled us to produce new complex historical information useful for mapping and interpreting socio-economic conditions and the distribution of economic activities in the urban space.

Author(s)

Mario Grassi (Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici of San Marino)

Keywords

Silk Industry, Urban Development, Public Order

Abstract

“Les villes sont autant de transformateurs électriques”, wrote Braudel, “elles augmentent les tensions, elles précipitent les échanges, elles brassent sans fin la vie des hommes”. In recent years, the study on the role of the city, considered not only as a mere stage of actions but as a real social actor, has made its way into the historiographic panorama. By interpreting the urban environment in these terms, historians began to consider the trinomial man-work-city in a new perspective; for this reason, new issues, such as the existence of industrial districts within the walls of the city, were highlighted. Among others manufactures, the one that had the greatest impact on the urban fabric of Italian cities was undoubtedly the silk one. The size and the noise of the machinery, the use of hydro-energy and the job centralization are peculiar elements of the urban morphology in the modern age “silk” cities, traits that on the one hand encouraged the society to modify the urban fabric to its advantage and, on the other, settled relevant social phenomena in motion (i.e. creation of neighbourhoods dedicated to artisans, relocating manufactures from the city centre).

Piedmont was one of the last bastions of the luxury production in the ancien régime: it reached the highest standards in the manufacture of silk products only in the eighteenth century. With this paper I would like to highlight relevant issues like the professional concentration, focusing on the wide social inequalities that existed at the urban level between craftsmen employed in the various stages of the silk fabrics production. Thanks to an archive-based research on the city of Turin, the young capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, I would like to demonstrate how silk has been able to heavily modify the urban fabric of the entire city. This will be possible by mapping shops and residences of the silk workers, thus showing the attempts at zoning and centralizing the manufacture of silk products in districts and entire areas of the city.

Author(s)

Margaret Lindley (University of Western Australia)

Keywords

Entertainment, Theatre, Guilds

Abstract

My concern is with industrial production in search of a home, with the emergence of what would now be called an entertainment industry. This was an industry which began with relatively static appearances in joyous entries, supplemented by displays in market places on privileged occasions. Groups representing their guilds were augmented by those who wandered from town to town, hoping to make a living through what they believed to be their ability to entertain and amuse.

In 1398, a group of Parisian artisans presented a passion play so impressive that they were able to raise funds to create a permanent theatre, an urban space for the production of spectacle. Such a theatre would also have been a site of ideological reproduction and a potential source of disruptive performativity, on the part of both players and audiences, so permission was denied to the men who called themselves the Confrérie de la Passion (Brotherhood of the Passion). 

Their determination was rewarded a few years later, when Charles VI gave them what amounted, for the times, to a theatrical carte blanche. They seized the moment, and established their theatre at the Hôpital de la Trinité, by the Gate of Saint Denis. It was a space they held until 1539. 

In Venice, the compagnie delle calza (companies of the hose) who enter the historical record in 1364 were part of a street tradition which produced the commedia dell’arte. Their claims on urban space were tested when a newly arrived player tried to set up a theatre at the Rialto, the city’s commercial heart, in 1508. The attempt was regarded as so outrageous that further dramatic performances in the city were banned.

In the decades that followed, theatre after theatre was built in Italian towns. Ramshackle structures acquired permanence, then grandeur. By the time the Teatro Olimpico opened in Vicenza in 1585, theatres were part of the industrial landscape of western European towns. Over the next two centuries, as players moved off the streets, the most celebrated performers remained disruptive elements, whose arrival altered the urban landscape.

Author(s)

Taichi Kochiya (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

Keywords

Transaction of Business Rights (Realgewerberecht), Socioeconomic Disparity, Capital Accumulation

Abstract

This paper studies the transaction practice of business rights, which made a background for the relocation of urban industry, including breweries, in and around Munich from the late 18th to the early 19th century. It brings out the socio-economic impact of a liberalization process of the Bavarian urban trade system as a measure for creating the earning opportunities of the increasing urban population.

In Bavarian urban industry and commerce, organized as a guild in the 18th century, the acquisition of Realgewerberecht (specific business right) was necessary to open and operate a business. Since this kind of right was to occupy just one per person invariably belonging to the guild and was regarded in some occupations, such as brewers, as "sticking" to land and facilities, one could hardly expect to possess any number of it or to transfer it elsewhere in order to expand his own business.

Although the Bavarian economic liberalization in this period eventually failed and the Realgewerberecht seemed to survive as before, there appeared merchants and master artisans in Munich possessing multiple rights and moving out their workshops to the suburbs. Considering that there was some change in the nature of the business right, this paper analyzes its institutional character and transaction practice. As a result, it will become evident that the speculative transactions of Realgewerberechte, typically of breweries, were put in practice, which partially had a characteristic of investments in land and property because of its “sticking” nature.

This paper suggests a hypothesis that, while this economic practice was to be comprehended as a procedure of the modern capital accumulation of Munich’s major industries, because it was primarily the prominent entrepreneurs, including the brewers, who were involved in this practice, it also caused, on the other hand, the monopolization and price soaring of the Realgewerberechte. Thus reduction of earning opportunities for lower classes occurred to increase the socio-economic disparity and inequality.