Early modern economic history by Patrick Wallis
Accounts of structural change in the pre-modern British economy vary substantially. We present th... more Accounts of structural change in the pre-modern British economy vary substantially. We present the first time series of male labour sectoral shares before 1800, using a large sample of probate and apprenticeship data to produce national and county-level estimates. England experienced a rapid decline in the agricultural share between the early seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, associated with rising agricultural and especially industrial productivity; Wales saw only limited changes. Our results provide further evidence of early structural change, highlighting the significance of the mid-seventeenth century as a turning point in English economic development.
Apprenticeship, human capital and training by Patrick Wallis
Science in Context, 2019
Argument Apprenticeship was probably the largest mode of organized learning in early modern Europ... more Argument Apprenticeship was probably the largest mode of organized learning in early modern European societies, and artisan practitioners commonly began as apprentices. Yet little is known about how youths actually gained skills. I develop a model of vocational pedagogy that accounts for the characteristics of apprenticeship and use a range of legal and autobiographical sources to examine the contribution of different forms of training in England. Apprenticeship emerges as a relatively narrow channel, in which the master's contribution to training was weakly defined and executed conservatively. The creation of complementary channels of formal instruction was constrained by cost and coordination problems. When we consider a range of British youths who obtained advanced skills as artisan practitioners (and engaged in invention or pursuing natural philosophical interests), we see the importance of individual agency over institutional structures. For these youths, training could involve rejecting apprenticeship, engaging in periods of advanced study, including time in multiple workshops after the end of apprenticeship, and parallel campaigns to access scarce books and communities of scholarship. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2017
Preindustrial apprenticeship is often considered more stable than its nineteenth-and twentieth ce... more Preindustrial apprenticeship is often considered more stable than its nineteenth-and twentieth century counterparts, apparently because of the more durable relationships between masters and apprentices. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that many of those who started apprenticeships did not finish them. This paper examines how often individuals who had begun the process of qualification for skilled work failed to complete it, and how many conversely achieved local mastership. We provide new evidence on the completion of over 7,000 contracts across several cities in three countries. Even though apprenticeship regulation varied, in all cases a substantial minority of youths entering apprenticeship contracts failed to complete them. We consider the nature, frequency and causation of these failures. At least some exits reflect the balance of opportunities that youths faced, while obtaining mastership was affected by local and kin ties. By allowing premature exits, cities and guilds sustained labour markets by lowering the risks of entering long training contracts. Training flexibility was a pragmatic response to labour market tensions.
Continuity and Change, 2010
The Journal of British Studies, 2012
This paper describes a very different, and entirely neglected, side of apprenticeship in London: ... more This paper describes a very different, and entirely neglected, side of apprenticeship in London: the city’s system of contract dissolution. I suggest that easy dissolution played a vital role in sustaining apprenticeship in London, and was apparently echoed in a weaker form elsewhere in England. Contact dissolution was, it must be emphasised, normal. Metropolitan apprenticeships frequently ended prematurely. As I show, the city of London possessed a formal institutional process in the Lord Mayor’s Court which gave apprentices a simple, cheap and effective means to cancel contracts, and then to recover a proportion of their financial investment in training. The activities of the Court rebalanced the asymmetries of power involved in apprenticeship. It reduced the risks involved in entering training contracts in which prospective masters and apprentices had limited information about each other or about future conditions that might affect their capacity to work or train. The activities of the Court profoundly alter our interpretation of the effects of formal institutions on apprenticeship in this period. That the city’s institutions possessed a major role as a portal for exit seriously complicates earlier views of institutions as agents of enforcement in apprenticeship, and draws our attention from work of the guilds to that of its central authorities in this sphere. The court’s activities imply the operation of a different economic model of training to that normally imputed to apprenticeship, one that can accommodate premature ending of contracts. And they alter our understanding of the political and social character of the city and its institutions, locating apprenticeship far closer to accounts of order based on negotiation and accommodation than has been traditional in analyses of the formal rules of service.
Social History, 2011
This paper explores the education and training received by the sons of the English gentry in the ... more This paper explores the education and training received by the sons of the English gentry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using information from the herald’s visitations of four counties, it offers quantitative evidence of the proportion of gentry children who entered university, spent time at one of the inns of court or became apprentices in London. We find that over the period there was little change in the educational destinations of gentry sons: university and apprenticeship absorbed roughly equal proportions; the inns of court slightly less. We also find that a son’s position in the birth order had a very strong influence on the kind of education he received. Eldest sons were much more likely to go to university or one of the inns of court. Younger sons were much more likely to become apprentices in London – as we show, trade clearly was an acceptable career for the gentry. There is little sign of a change in the status of different educational choices in this period. Our findings confirm some traditional assumptions about the importance of birth order and normative expectations in determining the life-courses of gentry children in the seventeenth century: historians should not over-state the autonomy of elite children in deciding their futures.
The Journal of Economic History, 2011
Journal of Economic History, 2008
This paper re-examines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data s... more This paper re-examines the economics of premodern apprenticeship in England. I present new data showing that a high proportion of apprenticeships in seventeenth century London ended before the term of service was finished. I then propose a new account of how training costs and repayments were distributed over the apprenticeship contract such that neither master nor apprentice risked significant loss from early termination. This new account fits both the characteristics of premodern apprenticeship and what is known about the acquisition of skills in modern and premodern societies.
Explorations in Economic History, 2013
Training through apprenticeship provided the main mechanism for occupational human capital format... more Training through apprenticeship provided the main mechanism for occupational human capital formation in pre-industrial England. This paper demonstrates how training premiums (fees) complemented the formal legal framework surrounding apprenticeship to secure training contracts. Premiums varied in response to scarcity rents, the expected productivity of masters and apprentices, and served as compensation for the anticipated risk of default. In most trades premiums were small enough to allow access to apprenticeship training for youths from modest families.
Guilds & Citizenship by Patrick Wallis
European Review of Economic History, 2019
Citizenship was the main vehicle through which urban authorities granted political and economic r... more Citizenship was the main vehicle through which urban authorities granted political and economic rights to their communities. This article estimates the size of the citizenry and citizenship rates for over 30 European towns and cities between 1550 and 1849. While the extent of citizenship varied between European regions and by city size, our estimates show that citizenship was more accessible than previously thought.
This paper explores the role of non-state actors in organising and financing welfare provision in... more This paper explores the role of non-state actors in organising and financing welfare provision in early modern England. It looks beyond the well-understood history of the poor law to examine the significance of guilds and the relationship between guild and friendly societies in providing welfare, engaging with two hypotheses. First, recent work has demonstrated that guilds made an important contribution to the provision of mutual welfare to their members in the Netherlands and some other parts of Europe in the 16th-18th centuries, giving their members entitlements to support and assistance during periods of unemployment, sickness or disability. Second, a long-standing tradition has argued that the Friendly Societies – key providers of mutual insurance in industrializing England – were the direct successors of craft guilds. To test the validity and applicability of these arguments, I explore whether guilds played a similar role in establishing mutual insurance in early modern England. A study of the rules and practices of a range of guilds from London and provincial towns indicates that craft guilds in England had no visible involvement in providing mutual insurance during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They did, however, provide substantial volumes of charity, much of which was directed to members of the guild who fell into poverty. Secondly, mutual insurance emerged on a large scale in England with the Friendly Societies. However, there is no evidence that these Societies had any direct or indirect connection to craft guilds, except in seeking to project a form of conceptual kinship with a medieval fraternal past. Welfare structures outside the poor law thus show a series of discontinuities in the English case, discontinuities which were masked by attempts by to use history to secure the reputation and trustworthiness of mutual societies.
To be published in Philip Hellwege, ed. volume in Duncker & Humblot in the series ‘Comparative Studies in the History of Insurance Law’
Journal of Social History
One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness... more One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. This data offers an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers, and by implication their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centres. Our understanding of guild ‘monopolies’ and exclusivity is in need of serious revision.
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This chapter seeks to shed some light on premodern artisans’ capacity to produce facts about the ... more This chapter seeks to shed some light on premodern artisans’ capacity to produce facts about the world through a consideration of one arena in which they were regularly engaged in establishing durable conclusions about aspects of the material world: economic regulation. In artisanal economic regulation, making and knowing converged and – unusually - might be recorded. Artisans were regulated by artisans. The backdrop to most regulatory encounters was the interplay of their personal experience, technical ability and perceptual authority in judging the qualities of things. The methods of enquiry utilized in regulation reflect the epistemological assumptions of artisans as well as their economic, institutional and social capacities. As the outcomes involved potentially heavy penalties for those found to be at fault, the findings of artisan examinations needed to become more or less stable local technical facts that could travel across different regulatory and legal contexts where appeals might be lodged. Regulation therefore offers us a chance to examine the balance of ritual, social context, formalised procedure and propositional and tacit knowledge in one element of the world of the skilled craftsman. The chapter explores regulation in England across a range of trades, with a detailed case study of the Society of Apothercaries and the College of Physicians of London.
Wallis, Patrick, and Catherine Wright. 2014. "Evidence, Artisan Experience and Authority in Early Modern England." In Ways of making and knowing: the material culture of empirical knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers and Harold J. Cook, 134-158. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
How did company regulation of crafts and trades work in early-modern London? This issue has long ... more How did company regulation of crafts and trades work in early-modern London? This issue has long been at the heart of debates on guilds and companies across Europe. The ability of companies to regulate and discipline their members and restrict who practised their trade is central to interpretations of their economic and social impact, while their failure - or not - to do so is an important part of discussions of their 'decline'. In this chapter, I examine guild regulation in detail in the Society of Apothecaries and the Stationers Company of London. I argue that to understand the manner in which companies executed their duties we need to locate them in a wider context of contemporary approaches to law and order. In companies’ minutes of search and punishment as much as in the records of the Quarter Sessions we can discern the marks of a culture in which, as Robert Shoemaker has suggested, the punishment of misdemeanours operated in 'instrumental terms', aiming not at punitive or arbitrary justice but at regulating and defining appropriate behaviour and securing compensation. Companies' actions are best understood as attempts to reform present and future behaviour and to reintegrate offenders, all of which relied on a broad range of interventions and sanctions; final judgements and heavy punishments were pursued only when the dialogue between offender and court broke down. This allowed more flexible and diverse forms of economic behaviour (and misbehaviour) than the ordinances might suggest. In part this was a pragmatic retreat in the face of both the commercial realities of early-modern London and the political uncertainties that frequently surrounded company authority. But it also reflected the ongoing importance within corporate life of an idiom of fraternity marked by compassion, confession and forgiveness, and the importance of the longer term prospects and attitudes of freemen for companies engaged in charitable relief and dependent on fees, quarterage and gifts for their funds. Interpretations which judge company regulation as either strong or weak are therefore somewhat misleading, and ignore the subtleties of contemporary approaches to policing behaviour - be it in the marketplace, workshop or elsewhere. This is not to suggest that companies' internal efforts to control their members' behaviour could not still fail. Negotiation and accommodation were only tenable strategies as part of an ongoing process of regulation, and when this broke down the limits of companies’ powers could be exposed. How companies dealt with their weakness in the face of resistance raises the question of their relationships with other authorities in the city and country, and the implications this had for their regulatory autonomy and internal coherence.
GUILDS, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN LONDON 1450-1800. Edited by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis(London, Centre for Metropolitan History: 2002)
Economy and Practice of early modern Medicine by Patrick Wallis
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Early modern economic history by Patrick Wallis
Apprenticeship, human capital and training by Patrick Wallis
Guilds & Citizenship by Patrick Wallis
To be published in Philip Hellwege, ed. volume in Duncker & Humblot in the series ‘Comparative Studies in the History of Insurance Law’
WORKING PAPER VERSION
FORTHCOMING AT JSH
Wallis, Patrick, and Catherine Wright. 2014. "Evidence, Artisan Experience and Authority in Early Modern England." In Ways of making and knowing: the material culture of empirical knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers and Harold J. Cook, 134-158. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
GUILDS, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN LONDON 1450-1800. Edited by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis(London, Centre for Metropolitan History: 2002)
Economy and Practice of early modern Medicine by Patrick Wallis
To be published in Philip Hellwege, ed. volume in Duncker & Humblot in the series ‘Comparative Studies in the History of Insurance Law’
WORKING PAPER VERSION
FORTHCOMING AT JSH
Wallis, Patrick, and Catherine Wright. 2014. "Evidence, Artisan Experience and Authority in Early Modern England." In Ways of making and knowing: the material culture of empirical knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers and Harold J. Cook, 134-158. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
GUILDS, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN LONDON 1450-1800. Edited by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis(London, Centre for Metropolitan History: 2002)
The papers in this section address a common question: how likely were sick people in early modern Europe to seek care from a medical practitioner? The evidence they present reveals a level of engagement with commercial medical provision that varied substantially across Europe, but that for the most part shared one striking characteristic: growth. While the likelihood that someone would turn to a medical practitioner for help was markedly higher in the urban Mediterranean than in the countryside of North West Europe, in all three of the locations that these papers study we see the use of care rising over the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In short, people across Europe grew ever more reliant on commercial medical practitioners—individuals earning a living from their work in health care— in the early modern period. These findings substantially advance our understanding of developments in medical consumption over time. By shifting attention from goods to services, they provide a major complement to our understanding of consumption more generally. And they also present us with the challenge of explaining how these profound shifts in the medical economy connected with and contributed to wider economic, social and cultural developments. In turning to the task of identifying and measuring long run changes in the demand and supply of medical services, these papers move on from the essential work of uncovering the variety and abundance of medical care and medical practice that historians have undertaken in a series of studies over the last forty years.