Introduction

In this chapter I shall deal with the tailors' guild in Turin at the end of the seventeenth and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The analysis proposed is based on a desire to understand the nature of trade associations and the factors which led individuals and different social groups to come together in such associations, and which contributed to their success or to their decline. The association, rather than the trade itself, is the focal point of this paper.

Studies about guilds, even recent ones, have tended to identify the activities of a trade with the organizations representing it. By failing to separate their analysis into two parts, such studies have implicitly postulated complete identity between guild and trade. In fact they have tended not to separate the two aspects – guilds and trades – and thus have in effect implicitly postulated a complete identity between the two. This is also the case for studies of conflicts between guilds and their base, since these conflicts have been analysed purely in an economic, or in any case a trade context. Once broad chronological periods dictated by political history are identified, the trajectories of individual guilds are analysed principally in terms of the economic context of the trade or productive roles and mercantile politics. (In the case of Piedmont the periodization substantially follows the lines of that widely proposed for France – and hence has centred on progressive phases of subjection of the guilds to royal authority.)