Sheilagh Ogilvie: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think the guilds improved the history of Western art or damaged it? If you look at Florence, there are some notable commissions. Arguably, Dutch municipal buildings may have benefited from guild investment. Were there any offshoot public goods, or there was more damage done? I think definitively the damage greatly outweighed the benefits, but it’s a bit like the German Hanseatic League. If you go to those amazing Hanseatic cities in northern Germany and Scandinavia — beautiful architecture, amazing — just glorious use of the rents. You wouldn’t want there to have been serfdom, but the beautiful palaces built by incredibly rich Eastern European aristocrats are an enduring legacy. You could say it’s something that the state does. Not everything the state does is good, but early modern princes built the Palace of Versailles, and we’re happy that those monuments still exist, but I’m not sure that we would want to get back to that social framework. There’s something called the European marriage pattern. You’ve written on this extensively. To what extent did it contribute to later European economic growth?…

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