Transferring useful knowledge. Quality mechanisms in European apprenticeship

Human capital is central to current debates about the sources of growth and divergence in the premodern economy. Apprenticeship, the key formal arrangement by which occupational skills were transferred in this period, has in the past often been associated with guild monopolies and exclusion, implying a drag on the accumulation of human capital. Several stimulating recent contributions have pointed to apprenticeship as a potentially important explanation for English or European advances in manufacturing and technology in the run up to industrialisation. In this paper, we explore mechanisms that helped improve quality among artisans. We focus on one in particular: the selection of training masters by apprentices

Citizenship among the historians

Around the time of the establishment of Citizenship Studies, historians had a straightforward picture of what it was, and how it developed. Citizenship had been invented in Ancient Greece, where philosophers like Aristotle had outlined its main features, which remained basically unchanged until the twentieth century. Citizenship was a male prerogative, closely related to political participation and for a long time only available to Europeans. Only in post-colonial regimes could the rest of the world develop its own forms of citizenship. This picture is hard to square with the contents of Citizenship Studies, and historians have indeed moved on, as the discussion of three major books demonstrates. Such changes have, however, not come about as a result of the impact of the journal among historians, because that has been very limited so far. The paper speculates about other explanations of this parallel developmen

Citizenship for sale in pre-modern Europe

Starting in the Middle Ages, this chapter demonstrates that investment migration is hardly new. It looks at the micropolitics of citizenship acquisition through monetary grants in a rage of cases across Europe. Indeed, it was the most popular lawful way to acquire the citizenship of mediaeval cities outside of marriage

Transferring useful knowledge: Quality mechanisms in European apprenticeship

Human capital is central to current debates about the sources of growth and divergence in the premodern economy. Apprenticeship, the key formal arrangement by which occupational skills were transferred in this period, has in the past often been associated with guild monopolies and exclusion, implying a drag on the accumulation of human capital. Several stimulating recent contributions have pointed to apprenticeship as a potentially important explanation for English or European advances in manufacturing and technology in the run up to industrialisation. In this paper, we explore mechanisms that helped improve quality among artisans. We focus on one in particular: the selection of training masters by apprentices