Craft guilds were organized through regulations. By controlling conditions of entrance into a craft, guilds limited the labour supply. By defining wages, hours, tools, and techniques, they regulated both working conditions and the production process. Quality standards and prices were also set. Monopolistic in nature, the guilds, either singly or in combination, sought complete control over their own local markets. In order to attain and protect their monopoly, the guilds acquired a political voice and in some locations achieved the right to elect a number of their own members to the town council. In some towns, such as Liège, Utrecht, and Cologne, guilds achieved complete political control. The 32 craft guilds in Liège, for example, so dominated the town after 1384 that they named the town council and governors and required all important civic decisions to be approved by a majority vote of their membership。

　　Craft guilds reached their peak prosperity in the 14th century. Specialties had become so differentiated that larger towns typically had more than 100 guilds. In northern Europe, for example, at the beginning of the period, carpenters built houses and made furniture. In time, furniture making became a new craft, that of joinery, and the joiners broke from the carpenters to establish their own guilds. The wood-carvers and turners (who specialized in furniture turned on a lathe) founded guilds also. Those who painted and gilded furniture and wood carvings were also represented by a separate guild。

　　This era of intense specialization was marked by a countermovement toward amalgamation of different crafts-a tendency that reflected the growth of the market and the desire of enterprising masters to expand their trading abilities. This came at the expense of the handicraft function. As craft differentiation proliferated, numerous crafts wound up producing the same or similar articles. This stimulated competitive forces among craftsmen who needed to assure themselves of raw materials and a market. Because of this, masters were tempted to employ members of other crafts, and conflicts inevitably arose。

　　The same widening of the market led to differentiation of classes within a craft. As the trading function grew more important, those who remained craftsmen fell into a condition of dependence upon the traders. Eventually, merchant guilds-originally representatives of traders only-absorbed the craft guilds。

　　手工业公会与商业公会的关系

　　The craft guilds also suffered a breakdown in structure. Because the masters sought to retain the profits of the growing market for themselves, they made it increasingly difficult for journeymen to enter their class, preferring instead to employ them as wage workers. Apprentices similarly had little hope of rising to mastership. Thus, the master-journeyman-apprentice relationship gave way to an employer-employee arrangement, with the master performing the functions of merchant while his employees did craftwork. Conditions for development of the early industrial system rose out of the disintegration of this craft-guild system. The excluded journeymen eventually became a class of free labourers who practiced their craft for wages outside the town walls-and outside the limitations of the guild regulations。

　　手工业公会的逐渐解体与资本主义萌芽

　　How Ancient Trade Changed the World

　　Nowadays, if you need something, you go to the closest mall, shell out a few bucks and head home. Thousands of years ago, the process wasn't nearly as simple. If you or someone in your town didn't grow it, herd it or make it, you needed to abandon that desire or else travel for it, sometimes over great distances. For many towns, the effort of trade was too much. Those ancient towns make only rare appearances in our history books。

　　When the first civilizations did begin trading with each other about five thousand years ago, however, many of them got rich…and fast。

　　Trade was also a boon for human interaction, bringing cross-cultural contact to a whole new level。

　　Luxury goods

　　上古时代，贸易只是自给自足经济处理剩余产品的手段。温饱之余，剩余产品自然可以用来换取奢侈品。

　　When people first settled down into larger towns in Mesopotamia and Egypt, self-sufficiency - the idea that you had to produce absolutely everything that you wanted or needed - started to fade. A farmer could now trade grain for meat, or milk for a pot, at the local market, which was seldom too far away。

　　Cities started to work the same way, realizing that they could acquire goods they didn't have at hand from other cities far away, where the climate and natural resources produced different things. This longer-distance trade was slow and often dangerous, but was lucrative for the middlemen willing to make the journey。

　　The first long-distance trade occurred between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in Pakistan around 3000 BC, historians believe. Long-distance trade in these early times was limited almost exclusively to luxury goods like spices, textiles and precious metals. Cities that were rich in these commodities became financially rich, too, satiating the appetites of other surrounding regions for jewelry, fancy robes and imported delicacies。

　　It wasn't long after that trade networks crisscrossed the entire Eurasian continent, inextricably linking cultures for the first time in history。

　　By the second millennium BC, former backwater island Cyprus had become a major Mediterranean player by ferrying its vast copper resources to the Near East and Egypt, regions wealthy due to their own natural resources such as papyrus and wool. Phoenicia, famous for its seafaring expertise, hawked its valuable cedar wood and linens dyes all over the Mediterranean. China prospered by trading jade, spices and later, silk. Britain shared its abundance of tin。

　　Pit stops

　　贸易中继站是文明交流并向周边辐射的中心

　　In the absence of proper roads, the most efficient way to transport goods from one place to another was by sea。

　　The first and most extensive trade networks were actually waterways like the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates in present-day Iraq and the Yellow River in China. Cities grew up in the fertile basins on the borders of those rivers and then expanded by using their watery highways to import and export goods。

　　The domestication of camels around 1000 BC helped encourage trade routes over land, called caravans, and linked India with the Mediterranean. Like an ancient version of the Wild West frontier, towns began sprouting up like never before anywhere that a pit-stop or caravan-to-ship port was necessary. Many of the better-known satellite towns of Rome and Greece were founded this way, stretching those fabled empires further afield until their influences crossed continents。

　　And in each of these places, foreign traders drank in port towns and shared stories and customs from back home, leaving more than just their parcels behind。

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