Technological invention and innovation in the pre-industrial economy are still poorly understood. This is partly because of the difficulty in identifying the small-scale and anonymous innovations that dominated technical progress at the time. However, the problem is compounded by several long-standing assumptions about pre-modern manufacture, in particular by the view that from the fifteenth century onwards craft guilds – which provided European urban manufacture with its main institutional framework for over six hundred years – were organised rent seekers that systematically opposed technical innovation.

This chapter suggests that the prevailing view of craft guilds misrepresents their principal function and their technological consequences. It begins by analysing the guild structure from the point of view of individual producers and suggests that the primary purpose of craft guilds was to provide adequate skills training through formal apprenticeship. It then argues, from evidence of innovation and resistance to it, that technological invention and innovation were a significant, albeit mostly unintended, effect of the crafts' support for investment in skills. It concludes by briefly addressing the counterfactual question implied by the guilds' critics: if craft guilds were technologically regressive, why was guild-based craft production not out-competed by its major contemporary rival, rural proto-industry?

Rather than provide a detailed study of an individual craft or of a constellation of guilds in one town, the focus is on the broad outlines of a system that remained fundamentally unchanged for more than half a millennium.