The rise and fall of the merchant guilds: Re-thinking the comparative study of commercial institutions in premodern Europe

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 477-511

  Grafe, Regina ^a   Gelderblom, Oscar ^b  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953491254     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/jinh.2010.40.4.477     Document Type: Article

References (102)

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79. Arguably, a sixth category in which merchants delegate control over their capital to the guild-as was common for joint-stock companies like the English, Dutch, and French East India Companies-could be added. That these companies operated in markets outside Eu rope makes comparisons with organizations of Europeans problematical. In the eighteenth century, new joint-stock companies were created in the Netherlands, Germany, and England to fund insurance and public utilities, but, again, their business does not warrant comparison with the organizations of long-distance wholesale traders.
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81. idem, The "Mother of All Trades": The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden, 2002)
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93. De Smedt, Engelse natie. Gelderblom, "Resolution"
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96. For an example of the methodology employed in political science, see Larry M. Bartels, "Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: The Reagan Defence Build Up," American Political Science Review, LXXXV (1991), 457-474.
97. See Grafe, "Fairs," in Stanley Engerman et al. (eds.), The History of World Trade since 1450 (New York, 2005), 281-283, for another type of merchant enterprise.
98. For a similar argument on craft guilds, see Grafe, review of S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (eds.), Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400-1800 (New York, 2008).
99. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XL (2009), 78-82
100. A sufficient sample size (generally >100) is crucial in multinomial models; given the sample size in this study, an exclusion of the nonsignificant time dummies considerably improves the quality of the probit estimates
101. Greif, Institutions, 91; idem, Milgrom, and, Weingast, "Coordination."
102. We have run alternative specifications of the same model, substituting more sophisticated measures of market size for town population. Introducing a measure that estimates purchasing power in the markets with which a town had regular trade by multiplying population by silver wages yields similar results.