The European Guilds review by Josh

I ain't gonna lie; this was not a fun book to read. The book is meticulously researched, and Ogilvie thoroughly convinced me of pretty much all of her claims about the guilds. She also makes a lot of points with potential implications for modern economics. Hence 5-stars. But it was also incredibly dry.

The first thing to note is that this is not a narrative-driven history. Over the decades, Ogilvie has assembled two data sets of "observations" about guilds. The first consists of 12,051 qualitative observations (for instance, a guild in a specific time and place banned women from becoming masters). The second consists of 5,333 quantitative observations (for example, the daily rate of journeymen in a particular time and place). These observations derive from over a thousand scholarly articles and books.

Ogilvie brandishes this immense database to correct many mistaken theses that other scholars have put forth about guilds. I was somewhat surprised by the number of Panglossian academics who defended guilds - arguing that they were economically efficient institutions (because pre-modern European economies obviously functioned so well).

Ogilvie's positive argument is pretty simple: Guilds were cartels that sought to promote the interests of the people running them (namely master's). They extracted cartel rents at the expense of the rest of the economy.

A lot of the book is about discrimination: guilds systematically discriminated against women, ethnic and religious minorities, bastards, non-citizens, and pretty much anyone else they could get away with discriminating against. As she says early on, "Economists are puzzled by discrimination. They cannot agree even on whether it is consistent with economic rationality, let alone what causes it and what policies might address it." (Kindle Locations 450-451).

The most interesting part of the book to me was that Ogilvie positions these forms of discrimination as part of a broader web of barriers to entry, along with training requirements (which tended to be far longer than was necessary to learn the trade), membership fees, trade barriers, etc. In aggregate, these functioned to drastically limit competition and allow a small group of elites to make a lot of money (by the standards of the time). In other words, discrimination wasn't a weird economic anomaly; it was a rational move by the people in charge of institutions (even though it was harmful to the economy as a whole).

Those are my initial thoughts. I'm sure I'll be mulling this book over for another couple of months and maybe I'll update this review by and by. In the meantime, I'm going to try to find some trashy fun palate cleanser.