From Clio Infrastructure
Guilds and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action
Economic historians have increasingly realised that corporations were fundamental in the organisation of production and exchange. The emergence of a variety of forms of corporate collective action – besides guilds also beguinages, commons, friendly societies, waterboards – all during the late Middle Ages and in the Low Countries suggests that this kind of collective action may have been essential for the specific political and economic development of Europe.
Data on guilds, commons, water boards and other forms of corporate collective action from a number of European countries (and China) will be standardized and published on a website, which will be located at Utrecht University. This hub will largely be funded by the Netherlands Science Foundation, which provided a grant early 2007, enabling the collection of a basic dataset about the emergence, spread and disappearance of guilds in the Low Countries, England, Italy and China and of other forms of corporate collective action (commons, beguinages, waterboards) found in the Low Countries only. This hub aims to integrate all the datasets that will be collected for this project and to adapt them to the standard protocols of CLIO-INFRA concerning metadata, GIS and HISCO.
Participant(s) involved
Research Institute for History and Culture
Utrecht University
Janskerkhof 13
3512 BL Utrecht
The Netherlands
+31 30 2538239
ogc@let.uu.nl
http://www.let.uu.nl/ogc
