Urban historians will be both fascinated and frustrated by this book, which is the companion volume to Ogilvie's 2011 monograph, Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds 1000–1800 (Cambridge University Press). Whereas that volume dealt with merchant guilds, this one considers craft guilds. Both seek to demolish the arguments of those historians (notably Stephen Epstein and Maarten Prak) who have presented guilds as positive forces for socio-economic development in pre-modern Europe. In each volume, Ogilvie presents what she considers the key arguments made in favour of guilds and then attacks them, through a mixture of economic argument and empirical examples. She presents ‘particularized’ social capital, such as that provided by guilds, as inefficient and socio-economically damaging, compared to ‘generalized’ social capital – namely institutional forms which allow the market to apply equally to all parties and extend any rights/supports to everyone, not simply members of particular organizations. Guilds survived, she argues, not because they were efficient and valuable to society as a whole, but because of an alliance of self-interest between monopolistic guild leaders and authorities to whom they offered funds or various types of service. To her, this is not simply a matter of good history but of good economics, challenging current arguments which present the guilds as a model for developing ‘particularized’ social capital through civic society, which she rejects in favour of open markets and universalized rights.

Urban historians, hoping to learn more about European guilds functioning in towns, should therefore note that the subtitle promises ‘an economic analysis’ not a historical one, hence Ogilvie is always seeking to establish generalizations about the nature and impact of the guilds. She has no interest in explaining how any specific guild contributed to, or can be explained by, its urban context, nor in drawing systematic distinctions between guilds in different occupations or economic contexts. A frustrating reflection of this priority is the index which, while capturing every nuance of economic issue, contains absolutely no entries regarding places, countries or occupations, so urbanists interested in a place or occupation will have to skim the whole book (the index to the 2011 book records some place references, but misses most of them). Alternatively, although this is not signposted except to careful readers of p. 31, they can consult the two online databases of information on guilds (one of qualitative statements and one of quantitative data), drawn from secondary literature, which can be searched by place or occupation, as these contain both a note of the ‘information’ taken from each secondary source and of the tables and pages in the text where this is used. This admirable feature gives the industrious reader the opportunity to identify and judge the empirical evidence for Ogilvie's claims that her hypotheses about the nature and effects of guilds are more historically accurate than those of her opponents. But the status of the tables drawn from her database of examples is unclear. To be able to find perhaps a hundred (and often less) examples of a practice across thousands of guilds over hundreds of years does not demonstrate that this was typical, unless her sources each establish what was representative, not exceptional, but this is not the case. Hence the ‘quantitative’ presentation of evidence in the numerous tables based on the database used to buttress the argument seems largely rhetorical. Yes, Ogilvie can find examples of some guilds in some places at some times acting in certain ways, but it does not follow that these are typical patterns of behaviour or effect as Ogilvie asserts.

Furthermore, a case-study of the database raises concerns. Being a historian of Bristol, I examined the database entries for that town. This revealed a number of problems. First, almost all the references were either from Lipson's 1915 study of medieval English economic history (not the enlarged 1937 edition, curiously), or from two articles by Ben-Amos published in 1991 on apprenticeship and women's work: Lipson summarized information from a number of primary printed sources or early studies of specific Bristol guilds, while Ben-Amos’ work was based on civic apprenticeship and freedom records rather than guild records, apart from a civic compilation of guild ordinances. No use is made (in either book), of Sacks’ or McGrath's work on Bristol guilds, particularly the Bristol Society of Merchant Venturers (1557), whose history, like that of other merchant guilds established in late Tudor towns, casts doubt on her 2011 claim that England merchant guilds were dying out by 1500, so enabling English trade to expand unfettered by such bodies. The Bristol information drawn from other secondary sources is also problematic. Susan Wright's 1985 citation of the proportion of female apprentices in the published calendars of Bristol apprentices for 1532–42 and 1542–52 is wrongly stated to refer to the period ‘1608–14’, perhaps because Wright also refers to Salisbury data from 1603–14. A citation from Goldberg's book on York is noted as showing that the Bristol weavers’ guild prohibited maidservants’ work – in fact Goldberg notes that ‘craft guilds’ in general prohibited such work, citing the Little Red Book of Bristol. As it happens, this prohibition did actually relate to weavers, and Lipson's summary of the same source is also noted and used as one of only two English sources for table 5:13 with its claim that guilds prohibited women's work. But the text is a 1461 civic ordinance, not a guild one, noting that the Weavers were setting to work or hiring to others ‘their wives, daughters and maidens’ so taking work from men with military as well as weaving skills, hence weavers should not employ women except their wives who were already getting their livelihood from weaving: this is a civic provision associated with wider urban concerns about male employment during a civil war, not a guild-driven restriction, though the guild is then expected to enforce it. The other English source in table 5:13 is also a Bristol example, drawn from Ben Amos’ 1991 article on women's work, where she discusses the 1652 ordinance setting up the tobacco-pipemakers guild, which she states prohibited the employment of ‘women or maids or any women stranger’. This might seem a straightforward case of women's work being prohibited, but in fact the rest of Ben-Amos’ paragraph shows that this is an incorrect reading, because women comprised a fifth of the initial membership of the guild and not all of these were freemen's widows: this other information is also noted in the database and in another table (5.6) on the existence of ‘mixed guilds’, but the contradiction is not noted. There are several other examples of details being wrongly summarized, while several statements in Lipson and Ben-Amos which run contrary to Ogilvie's arguments are not recorded in the database. For example, Ogilvie questions whether craft guilds were committed to the protection of consumers by ensuring the quality of goods through supervision of workmanship, but does not record the three separate passages in which Lipson evidenced that Bristol guilds were doing precisely this. In short, judging by this sample, a significant proportion of her examples are questionable, while counter-evidence even from the same sources, let alone from detailed work directly on the guild records, is not included, so reinforcing the point made above that the representativeness of her quantitative tables is very unclear.

Urban historians of Britain and the Low Countries may also wonder about her argument, in both books, that their economic growth was because their states were first to weaken guilds’ power and substitute ‘generalized’ forms of support for trade and industry. In England's case, remembering national policies such as the exclusion of the Jews from 1290 until 1653 (Ogilvie accuses guilds of being anti-Semitic), the statutory provision for seven-year apprenticeships (Ogilvie regards long apprenticeships as pointless from a training perspective and largely a device by guild masters to reduce access and extort extra work) and the manipulation by the crown of monopolies and patents (which Ogilvie presents as a superior means to support innovation than guild regulation), none of them the product of guild lobbying (indeed often the opposite), one wonders whether the nation-state was necessarily more socio-economically progressive than guilds, especially before a parliament disproportionately made up of urban representatives began to control state policy after 1688. Nor is it clear, at least before 1750, that economic growth was driven by towns that had escaped guild involvement: the growth of London, Bristol, Norwich, Exeter, York and Newcastle appears to suggest otherwise. One might argue that such growth took place despite the strong guild presences in these places, but this would require an engagement with the specifics of urban history which is not on offer here. Ogilvie's two studies should certainly be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the topic, particularly for the range of challenging arguments which she deploys so systematically, but most urban historians may wish for a more ‘particularized’ account of the place of guilds (and indeed other forms of civil society) within urban society.