Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe

This is the first European history of apprenticeship before the Industrial Revolution. It reveals how human capital formation - a key explanation for economic development - operated across the continent. A comparative set of cutting-edge local and national case-studies uncovers a European-wide system of skills education.

This is the first comparative and comprehensive account of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution. Apprenticeship was a critical part of human capital formation, and, because of this, it has a central role to play in understanding economic growth in the past. At the same time, it was a key stage in the lives of many people, whose access to skills and experience of learning were shaped by the guilds that trained them. The local and national studies contained in this volume bring together the latest research into how skills training worked across Europe in an era before the emergence of national school systems. These essays, written to a common agenda and drawing on major new datasets, systematically outline the features of what amounted to a European-wide system of skills education, and provide essential insights into a key institution of economic and social history.