The rise and economic behaviour of medieval craft guilds an economic-theoretical interpretation

The city-based craft guild organization was the specific form of pre-capitalist industrial organization in Western Europe from the 12th century up to the middle of the 19th century, when the craft guilds were abolished with the introduction of free trade. From the late Middle Ages and more and more during the 16th to the 18th centuries domestic industries, located in the countryside, grew strongly together with the putting-out system founded on domestic industries. This occured in competition with the craft guilds, which became successively more and more conservative. It is on the basis of these forms of production — not the craft guilds — that modern capitalist industry grew up.