Guild
A guild is a professional association of artisans and merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular territory. The word derived from medieval Europe where guilds were probably at their most extensive, but it has been used to describe similar groups before and after that period and in other parts of the world. Typically the key "privilege" was that only guild members were allowed to sell their goods or practice their skill within a city. There might be controls on minimum or maximum prices, hours of trading, numbers of apprentices, and many other things. Critics argued that these rules reduced free competition, but defenders maintained that they protected professional standards.
Early history
, grandson of Sargon of Akkad who had unified Sumeria and Assyria into the Akkadian Empire, promulgated common Mesopotamian standards for length, area, volume, weight, time, and shekels, which were used by artisan guilds in each city. Code of Hammurabi Law 234 stipulated a 2-shekel wage for each 60-gur vessel constructed in an employment contract between a shipbuilder and a ship-owner. Law 275 stipulated a ferry rate of 3-gerah per day on a charterparty between a ship charterer and a shipmaster. Law 276 stipulated a 2-gerah per day freight rate on a contract of affreightment between a charterer and shipmaster, while Law 277 stipulated a -shekel per day freight rate for a 60-gur vessel.collegium or corpus were a type of guild active in Ancient Rome times. Although a collegium was any association or corporation that acted as a legal entity, many were organised groups of merchants who specialised in a particular craft and whose membership of the group was voluntary. One such example is the corpus naviculariorum, a collegium of merchant mariners based at Rome's La Ostia port. The Roman guilds failed to survive the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Middle ages and early modern period
Role
Evolving from earlier fraternity groups for protective or religious purposes, also called guilds, merchant and craft guilds developed into structured organizations that regulated trade, upheld product quality and protected members’ economic interests becoming more common across Europe during the High Middle Ages as urban economies became more specialized. Merchant guilds dominated commercial activity and urban governance in many towns. The craft guilds transmitted skills through formal systems of apprenticeship, journeymanship and mastery, and oversaw the production of goods ranging from textiles and metalwork to glassmaking and baking. In major cities such as Florence, Paris, Barcelona, and the German free cities, guilds became central to economic and civic life, often numbering in the dozens or even hundreds.Guilds also fulfilled important social and political functions. Many exercised influence within municipal governments, especially in the prosperous cities of Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, where they sometimes challenged patrician elites. They maintained welfare funds for sick or elderly members, supported widows and orphans, organized feasts, and reinforced communal religious life. Their authority rested on charters or letters patent granting them legal privileges, including monopolies on production within their locality and the right to enforce professional standards. These privileges often restricted entry into skilled trades and shaped urban societies around tightly controlled economic hierarchies.
Women's Participation
Women's participation in medieval guilds was diverse and often constrained: while guild membership granted economic and social opportunities, most craft and trade guilds were male-dominated, typically allowing women to enter only through marriage or as widows or daughters of masters and generally excluding them from guild offices. Nonetheless, evidence from England and the Continent shows that women did engage widely in guild life—London silkwomen could inherit property and run businesses, and Étienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers records several Parisian guilds as female monopolies, with others open to women such as surgeons and glass-blowers. In Rouen women had participated as full-fledged masters in 7 of the city's 112 guilds since the 13th century. In cities like Rouen and Cologne, women held full master status in select guilds and dominated certain trades, though restrictions persisted, especially in medical guilds, where religious and secular authorities often opposed female practitioners. Historiographical debates, notably following Alice Clark’s 1919 study, highlight contrasting interpretations of whether medieval guild structures ultimately empowered women or, increasingly in the early modern era, limited their economic roles.Historians disagree sharply on whether women’s participation in guilds declined during the early modern period: while Alice Clark’s “decline thesis” argues that women became economically marginalized in the 17th century, later scholarship counters that domestic life did not dictate women’s labor and that women remained active in markets, crafts, and wage work. Research by Clare Crowston highlights that women in several trades—such as linen drapers, hemp merchants, seamstresses, and flower sellers—formed independent guilds and in some regions gained expanded rights, as seen in 17th- and 18th-century Paris, Rouen, Dijon, and Nantes. However, in parts of Germany, historians like Merry Wiesner document a real decline driven by economic specialization and cultural norms, with guilds increasingly restricting women’s roles and barring their employment, a pattern reinforced by Ogilvie’s work. Despite these regional contrasts, exclusively female guilds proliferated in the 17th century—especially in Paris, Rouen, and Cologne, where some guilds had been predominantly female since medieval times.
Fall of the Guilds
thinkers such as Adam Smith argued that guild monopolies inhibited free trade, innovation, and technological progress. As centralized nation-states expanded their authority, new systems of patents and economic regulation weakened guild control. The French Revolution accelerated this decline with the abolition of guilds in 1791, and most European countries gradually followed during the 18th and 19th centuries as industrialization made guild-based production less viable. Historians continue to debate the economic impact of guilds: some regard them as monopolistic and rent-seeking, while others argue they facilitated training, quality control, and technological adaptation.Guilds outside Europe
Outside Europe, guild-like organizations of artisans and merchants developed in a variety of forms:- Ancient and early medieval India saw powerful corporate bodies of craftsmen and traders known as śreṇi.
- The Ottoman Empire had the Akhiya fraternities.
- Late-imperial China saw merchant and craft guilds such as the gongsuo became prominent from the 17th century.
- Medieval and early-modern Japan had trade and craft guilds known as za, and later kabunakama, secured monopolies in particular markets, before being transformed or dissolved with the Meiji-era reorganization of commerce.
- In the Aztec Empire, the pochteca had merchant guilds.
Modern guilds
Though most guilds died off by the middle of the nineteenth century, quasi-guilds persist today, primarily in the fields of law, medicine, engineering, and academia. Paralleling or soon after the fall of guilds in Britain and in the United States professional associations began to form. In America a number of interested parties sought to emulate the model of apprenticeship which European guilds of the Middle Ages had honed to achieve their ends of establishing exclusivity in trades as well as the English concept of a gentleman which had come to be associated with higher income and craftsmanship
Licensing and accreditation practices which typically result from the lobbying of professional associations constitute the modern equivalent of a 'guild-privilege', albeit in contrast to guilds of the Middle Ages which held a letters patent which explicitly granted them monopolies on the provision of services, today's quasi-guild privileges are subtler, more complex, and less directly restrictive to consumers in their nature.
Nevertheless, it can be argued quasi-guild privileges are in many cases designed not just to serve some notion of public good, but to facilitate the establishing and maintaining of exclusivity in a field of work.
There are often subtle dichotomies present in attempting to answer the question of whether modern licensing and accreditation practices are intended to serve the public good, however it be defined. For medieval guilds this dichotomy is exemplified by differing explanations of the same phenomena; of limiting work hours among guild members. Sheilagh Ogilvie argues that this was intended to mitigate competition among guild members, while Dorothy Terry argues this was to prevent guild members from working late into the night while tired and when lighting is poor and therefore producing low quality work. In modern times, while licensing practices are usually argued to in some way protect members of the public, it usually can also be argued that these practices have been engineered to limit the number of 'outsiders' who gain entrance to a given field.
As argued by Paul Starr and Ronald Hamowy, both of whose focus is on the development of medicine in America, the tying of medical licensing practices to universities was a process intended to do more than protect the public from 'quackery', but was engineered to be unnecessarily prolonged, inefficient, and a costly process so as to deter 'outsiders' from getting into the field, thereby enhancing the prestige and earning power of medical professionals.
The university system in general continues to serve as a basis upon which modern quasi-guilds operate in the form of professionalism. 'Universitas' in the Middle Ages meant a society of masters who had the capacity for self-governance, and this term was adopted by students and teachers who came together in the twelfth century to form scholars guilds. Though guilds mostly died off by the middle of the nineteenth century, the scholars guild persisted due to its peripheral nature to an industrialized economy. In the words of Elliot Krause,
"The university and scholars' guilds held onto their power over membership, training, and workplace because early capitalism was not interested in it...the cultural prestige of knowledge itself helped keep the scholars' guild and the university alive while all other guilds failed."Though in theory anyone can start a college, the 'privilege' in this case is the linking of federal aid to accreditation. While accreditation of a university is entirely optional, attending an accredited university is a prerequisite to receiving federal aid, and this has a powerful influence on limiting consumer options in the field of education as it provides a mechanism to limit entrepreneurial 'outsiders' from entering the field of education. George Leef and Roxana Burris study the accreditation system for which they observe is 'highly collegial' and potentially bias in the fact that accreditation review is performed by members of schools who will in turn be reviewed by many of the same people who they have reviewed. They further question the effectiveness of the methods involved in accreditation,
- Elliot Krause, The Death of Guilds
"Although accreditation is usually justified as a means of giving students and parents an assurance of educational quality, it is important to note that the accreditors do not endeavor to assess the quality of individual programs or departments.... The accreditation system is not based on an evaluation of the results of an institution, but rather upon an evaluation of its inputs and processes. If the inputs and processes look good, acceptable educational quality is assumed. It is as if an organization decided which automobiles would be allowed to be sold by checking to make sure that each car model had tires, doors, an engine and so forth and had been assembled by workers with proper training—but without actually driving any cars"Taken in the context of guilds, it can be argued that the purpose of accreditation is to provide a mechanism for members of the scholars guild to protect itself, both by limiting outsiders from entering the field and by enforcing established norms onto one another. Contriving means to limit the number of outsiders who gain an entrance to a field and to enforce work norms among members were both distinguishing feature of guilds in the Middle Ages.
- George C. Leef and Roxana D. Burris, Can College Accreditation Live Up To Its Promise?