European Review of Economic History, , –. C European Historical Economics Society doi:./S First published online March Gilding golden ages: perspectives from early modern Antwerp on the guild debate, c. – c. BERT DE MUNCK Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, bert.demunck@ua.ac.be This article contributes to the debate about the early modern craft guilds’ rationale through the lens of apprenticeship. Based on a case study of the Antwerp manufacturing guilds, it argues that apprenticeship should be understood from the perspective of ‘distributional conflicts’. Fixed terms of service and masterpieces guarded the guilds’ labour market monopsony, enabling masters to distribute the available skilled and unskilled labour among members (among other ways, through the restriction of the number of apprentices per master). Although from the perspective of product quality, this may have enabled masters to prevent adverse selection, the introduction of standardized apprenticeship requirements was the result of social and rent-seeking concerns. Some three decades of ‘guild rehabilitation’ have shown that guild regulations were neither necessarily at odds with economic growth nor by definition opposed to flexibility and innovation. The empirically established correlation between rising numbers of guilds and economic expansion (for instance, during the golden ages of the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic) suggests that economic growth and guild regulation could perfectly well go hand in hand. Moreover, economic historians, using concepts from ‘new institutional economics’ and game theory, have developed thought-provoking theories in which guilds are seen as helping (in the words of S. R. Epstein) ‘to overcome the persistent market failures caused by thin, underdeveloped, or non-existent markets’ (Epstein , p. ). Craft guilds appear to have played a relevant role, especially in skill- and technology-intensive industries producing high-quality goods (Pfister , pp. –). They are said to have been of major importance for the development and diffusion of (transferable) skills. According to Epstein, guilds could enable masters to recover the cost of training by paying wages below the marginal product of labour, while at the same time stimulating apprentices to train by means of bonds (entry fees) and end-term rewards (higher wages or a privileged entrance to the labour market as an employee For a recent state of the art see Epstein and Prak (). De Munck et al.(). For Italy see Mocarelli ().