Apprenticeship in eighteenth-century Turin was a large ‘umbrella’ that covered a range of practices. These could be adapted and used by masters, by prospective apprentices and by their families, according to their needs. While many apprenticeships were contracted, others happened under the aegis of family networks. Guilds were formally involved in apprenticeship but were easily overruled by the state, which increasingly developed economic policies of its own. Guilds did provide a general framework, but the details were hammered out in private contracts between masters and the apprentices and their guardians. Disputes over apprenticeship were settled by the courts, not the guilds. In order to examine the three main educational options available in the city for the middle and low classes – apprenticeship under a master, training by a local charitable institution and training within the family – I use the records of the guilds, the Consolato di Commercio, Turin’s notaries, the main charity institutions and several series of population censuses and lists of workshops. The chapter pays special attention to the quality of the social relationships between the actors and to the different educational models proposed for boys and girls.

Apprenticeship has been discussed from two angles. The first sees apprenticeship as a response to the challenges of adolescence: how can unruly youths, primarily males, be tamed and prepared for adulthood? The second angle looks at apprenticeship as an economic phenomenon: how can youngsters be prepared for skilled jobs? Training usually happens on the job. But how it was organised, under what conditions and with what consequences for the youths and masters involved varied significantly in the past. A range of institutions such as guilds, private notarial contracts and public courts all influenced the structure of apprenticeship before the twentieth century. This book examines their roles, and the characteristics of the system they shaped: what were the social profile and the future prospects of apprentices? Despite the centrality of apprenticeship to the life cycle of Europe’s artisans and economic activity across the continent, there are remarkably few systematic comparisons or surveys of the topic. New quantitative and qualitative evidence helps the contributors to this volume to investigate apprenticeship in novel ways for a wide range of settings across Europe, and in this chapter we set out the main issues in understanding the social and economic history of apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship had economic objectives, but was equally important for the acquisition of social status. The rules and their application concerning masterpieces make little sense from an economic perspective, but a lot when seen as markers of status, in this case separating the master from his journeymen and apprentices. Guilds in the Habsburg Low Countries designed their apprenticeships in terms that made them exclusive but also allowed migrant apprentices to be easily incorporated. In the towns of the Southern Low Countries, apprenticeship fees varied according to the duration of the apprenticeship: long apprenticeships meant low fees; short apprenticehips, high fees. In the seventeenth century and especially the eighteenth century the opportunities for apprenticeships outside the guild structures increased. In the eighteenth century, moreover, some craft workshops started to attract numerous apprentices while many masters had none. Apprenticeship thus became less of a personal contract between two individuals.

As in other Italian cities, Venetian apprenticeship was primarily ruled by private contract between the master and his pupil and their guardians. A new data set of almost 6,000 contracts from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century for the first time allows a representative view of the profile of Venetian apprentices and apprenticeships. In terms of age (teens) and gender (overwhelmingly male), Venetian apprentices looked like their peers in other European regions. More than half originated outside the city and more than a third had lost their father. When it comes to the conditions of apprenticeship, two models existed side by side. The majority of contracts did foresee payment to the apprentice in return for his labour. In these cases the contract exceeded the term required by guild regulations. In a minority of contracts, no payments were made, but the apprentices could expect to finish their training early.

All European countries had apprenticeship systems, which were normally regulated and implemented locally. This involved three institutional actors: guilds providing a regulatory framework, notaries registering the contracts between individual masters and apprentices, and urban courts overseeing the practical implementation of these rules and arrangements. The guilds’ role has been often overstated, the urban authorities’ impact underestimated. Large percentages of pre-modern teenagers were educated, socially and technically, by this system. Most of them were males, who normally received their training from someone outside their immediate family circle. Apprenticeship was a mechanism for social, geographic and occupational mobility across Europe, but only a minority of apprentices could reasonably expect to become masters themselves. In the absence of a viable alternative, the pre-modern apprenticeship system continued in many countries after the abolition of the guilds, and even into the early twentieth century.

Apprenticeship in the German lands (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) was firmly attached to urban corporate structures, i.e. guilds. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century it was regulated by craft rules. In many ways apprenticeship in Germany resembled that of other nations, but three features stand out. There were more exclusionary rules, affecting women, religious minorities and people with ‘irregular’ backgrounds. German apprentices were required to travel to other places after their initial training; hence we see a lot of migration in the world of the artisans. And finally, completion rates for apprenticeship were remarkably high in Germany. If and how these three features were connected is as yet unclear.

Finland was a predominantly rural country before 1850. Its village communities, however, also required the services of craftsmen, notably blacksmiths, tailors and shoemakers. To regulate these artisans, the crown created a formal and regulated institution of ‘parish artisans’ in the 1680s that continued until the latter part of the nineteenth century. By 1700 a system had emerged of clearly organised craft training in the limited range of trades acceptable for ‘parish artisans’. This happened almost by definition outside the remit of guilds, which were located in towns. As a result, rural apprentices were not registered by any institution, but still abided by a set of rules that did not fundamentally differ from the formal rules that applied in towns. These included contracts, set terms, premiums, sharing of knowledge by the master and the apprentice accepting his authority.