Beyond Markets and Hierarchies in Pre-Industrial Europe: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective

Starting in late medieval times western Europe witnessed revolutionary changes in the way individuals interacted and governed their common interests. Coinciding in time with commercial expansion and urban revival, individuals across very diverse settings began to formalize their collective undertakings vis-à-vis feudal authorities. This dissertation analyzes the process of establishment and long-term change of these historical institutions for collective action.
Building on previous historiography as well as on recent advances in the social and experimental sciences, the development of intense cooperation at the local level is regarded as one of the most distinctive attributes of European exceptionality – the so-called Ostromian-Tocquevillian framework. Contrasting with earlier approaches focusing on either secure individual property rights or inclusive state organizations, this dissertation argues that looking at the European special path from this framework necessarily draws the attention to a set of three interrelated questions: (i) Why did cooperation thrive during late medieval times, (ii) How did local communities preserve robustness in the long run?, (iii) How did corporations interact with emerging state structures from early modern times onwards?
The dissertation sketches a theoretical framework suggesting preliminary answers to the first two questions. Subsequently, quantitative and qualitative evidence on craft guilds and commons, arguably the most significant examples of formalized cooperation before 1800, is analyzed in order to test a number of hypotheses stemming from the framework.
The analyses suggest that the expansion of a writing culture associated with the establishment of universities and growing bureaucratic complexity, as well as supportive political institutions often created favorable conditions at the macro level for processes of bottom-up institution building. It was the process of market expansion and population growth what is likely to have represented the definitive stimulus – probably via changes in relative prices and subsequent higher payoffs to formalized cooperation. At the more micro level, however, recent attempts to account for the main motivations behind the establishment of these institutions, particularly craft guilds, reveal as unsatisfactory– pointing in turn at the limitations associated with strong agency-based explanations.
Once they had been formalized, the evolution of these institutions over the very long term followed some common patterns. The first stages in the life of these institutions were hardly indistinguishable from the processes of boundary demarcation and design of internal collective-choice arenas. In later stages, a differentiation between ‘slow-moving rules’ (those regulating management and governance activities) and ‘fast-moving’ ones (those regulating the daily activities of the members) emerged. All in all, the ability of these institutions to adapt in front of changes while still performing their basic functions built upon well-functioning feedback mechanisms able to link undesired outcomes with changes in rules based on the pool of current and past users’ knowledge.