Craft in the 18th century (europe)

[sickle]

Dear folks, I have a question, I'm sorry for the apparent lack of 'revolutionary viewpoint'
Enfin,

From a book:

"Because of the population growth there was an abundance of apprentices, but the guild masters, always fearful of competition kept the numbers of companies limited."

It might be a terribly stupid question but, why were the number of 'companies' (what'd be the concrete definition in this context?) limited?

Result would be that many artisans throughout their lives remained apprentice or journeyman.

Thanks

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I can't totally answer your question, but apprenticeships in the 18th century were largely live-in. The family unit was very different then, with middle-class families often having a live-in apprentice who would be treated as part of the family, and invested in as such. It was an expensive initial outlay to have an apprentice.

With the advent of industrialisation, many formerly middle-ranking peasants moved to urban centres and the practice of this sort of family-style live-in apprenticeship declined, coinciding with the rise of the enclosure movement (bigger farms, centralisation of ownership in fewer hands) which made the practice of having such apprentices an economically illiterate decision for teh formerly middle class family.

[Tim Finnegan]

Result would be that many artisans throughout their lives remained apprentice or journeyman.
This was very much the case, yes. The prototype of the modern factory system was found in the workshops of this era, in which masters were able to employ a dozen or more journeymen at a time, and began reorganising the labour process into a broken down into a primitive assembly line. Adam Smith describes this occurring in his own era, IIRC taking the specific example of a pin-maker, which was easily broken down in this manner because production was already traditionally done in batches. (Being who he was, of course, he thought this was an unqualified Good Thing, and advocated more of it.) This goes hand in hand, as The Boss describes, with the de-domestication of the apprentice, who shifted from being a junior member of the household to an employee.

Eventually industrialisation came along, and we saw a shift in economic clout from the old masters to the new industrialists. This lead to the old restrictions becoming a hindrance rather than an advantage; the cost of entry was such that there was no threat of competition from any old journeymen, so it became more advantageous to manufacturing capital to fence itself in behind the remnants of guild-monopoly.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The process Tim describes in the first paragraph has, I believe, been updated since the time of Adam Smith. Search for 'proto-industrialisation'; essentially, as said above, the process where 'small-time' bourgeois merchants would hire agricultural labour on a part-time basis, so that exploited labour was essentially dividing its time (but certainly moving FROM agriculture TO industry) between the agricultural work it needed to get by, and the industrial work that would lead to an increase in income. Be careful when researching this, though, some boneheads have tied this into something called the 'industrious' revolution and supposed that it led to some greater, moral, 'hard-working' character amongst ordinary Britons.