Work and Wages

by Sonenscher, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781107404144
• ISBN10: 1107404142
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-19
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This book was first published in 1989. In this original and extensive analysis of the urban trades of eighteenth-century France, the foundations are laid for a fresh approach to comparative studies of the workshop economy in modern European history. The book's conclusions are based upon two hitherto unexploited archival sources - the papers of the eighteenth-century civil courts and the records kept by French corporate labour exchanges. Together they have been used to reveal divisions of labour, patterns of employment, forms of legal argument and types of institution and belief that contradict many established images of artisan production. In general, the many facts of the world of trades revealed in the book make it possible to place the things that artisans said and did before and during the French Revolution in a wider variety of contexts than it has been usual to assume. This is a work which combines intellectual and institutional history with the economic and social history of the trades and, at the same time, presents a fuller and more historically precise understanding of the economics of workshop production.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations and units of measurement

Introduction

The limits of money

Images of artisans

Journeymen and the law

The world of the trades

Patterns of employment: the economy of the trades and the economy of the bazaar

Work, wages and customs

The Parisian luxury trades and the workshop economy

Conflict and the courts

Journeymen's migrations and the mythology of the 'compagnonnages'

Artisans, 'sans-culottes' and the politics of Republicanism

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

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