Guild traditions, economic development and the formation of national political economies in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the 19th and early 20th centuries

In recent decades historians, sociologists and political scientists have attempted to explain why in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries some Western countries adopted national corporatist structures while others
transformed into liberal market economies. One of the explanatory factors often mentioned is the persistence
or absence of guild traditions. Yet how exactly guild traditions influenced the shaping of national political
economies largely remains unclear due to a lack of empirical evidence on their 19th-century development. This
paper aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the development of various trades in Germany, the
United Kingdom and the Netherlands throughout the 19th century. We distinguish six scenarios of what might
have happened to crafts during the transition to an industrial economy. Next we focus on the prevalence of
these six scenarios in the three countries and their influence on the emerging national political economies. We
conclude that the claims put forward in the literature about the importance of guild traditions are only partially
correct. By focusing on trades, rather than on the national or local political economy, our analysis
demonstrates that in our three sample countries a wide variety of trades – some in which guild traditions
survived, others in which these traditions had never existed or were destroyed in the 19th century – existed
side-by-side. Decisive in the formation of national political economies and citizenship rights weren’t general
national patterns, but which of these trades came to dominate the development of national political
economies by the end of the 19th century.