To understand the economic nature and impact of apprenticeship, we have to be alert to its features as an economic institution. Skills are often tacit or ‘implicit’ knowledge. Moreover, the apprenticeship contract is an unequal and non-repeated exchange between two parties, where the master teaches in the expectation that the apprentice will repay him through his work. The informational asymmetry led to contractual issues that required institutions that each had their own agendas and challenges. Guilds might want to limit entry, but their members also needed skilled workers; private contracts might be difficult and expensive to enforce and for outsiders to observe. Still, these institutions together allowed large numbers of youngsters to be apprenticed outside their family circle, with potentially large human capital effects. After 1500, the institutional forms of apprenticeship contracts in Europe were decisive in determining the rate at which innovations could spread across the larger environment and across communities.

England was the only pre-modern European country with national legislation covering apprenticeship (the 1562 Statute of Artificers), setting unusually long and uniform seven-year terms. England was also unusual because around three-quarters of all English urban apprentices went to London for their training. Apprenticeships were regulated by a combination of guild rules and private contracts. The latter set individual conditions within the general framework. English apprenticeship fees varied widely, depending on the trade and the master’s reputation. Apprentices were rarely tutored by relatives and commonly choose other trades than their parents had exercised. Many apprentices left their masters early; only those aspiring to become masters themselves stayed on for the whole seven-year period. There was no formal examination at the end, nor other form of certification.

In Spain, apprenticeship was regulated locally. In Madrid, the local guilds played a crucial role in the organisation of apprenticeship, but alternatives were also available. This chapter examines artisan apprenticeship in Madrid during the early modern age. The main body of research comprises a sample of 4,570 indenture contracts elicited from the Historical Notarial Archive of Madrid. They correspond to over a hundred trades and cover the period 1540–1830, with the central focus on the eighteenth century. In addition, apprenticeship channels alternative to the traditional guild-like model are also explored, which impinged overall on women. A relatively small percentage of apprentices paid their master for the training. Remuneration of the apprentice’s work happened mostly in kind, as room and board, but increasingly also in cash. The majority of Madrid’s apprentices did not follow in their parents’ trade, but rather opted for a different trade. Most apprentices in Madrid completed their training, but relatively few managed to become masters. The masters’ ranks were mostly filled by immigrant journeymen. During the second half of the eighteenth century, state policies pried open the grip of the guilds on the apprenticeship system, allowing more women to acquire craft skills.

The mid-fifteenth century provides a good vantage point from which to locate the salient characteristics of Europe’s economies after a long period of adversity. For nearly two centuries, Europe had suffered repeated harvest failures, famines, and epidemics (including, in 1347–1353, the notorious Black Death); abandoned fields and deserted villages; diminished manufacturing and mining output; disrupted domestic and international trade; destructive wars and rebellions. Conditions had not been uniformly difficult. Epidemic disease spared some areas; elsewhere, post-plague labor shortages boosted many workers’ wages; peasants were able to add vacant land to their holdings; new crops, crafts, and commercial areas developed.

During the long sixteenth century, discrepant trends marked European agriculture. Though data are not available for all areas, recent studies indicate that more intensive use of land and labor as farmers experimented with crops and methods boosted both productivity per hectare and overall output from the early 1400s to the later 1500s, yet agricultural labor productivity dropped by up to a third. In the decades before 1600, however, the coastal provinces of the nascent Dutch Republic were something of an exception in terms of productivity and innovation, and parts of England showed signs of upturn as well.

Beginning in 1450/1470 and continuing for about a century, Europe experienced swelling agricultural and industrial output, increasing domestic and international trade, sustained demographic expansion and urbanization. Broad advance was followed by nearly as general deceleration: by 1620/1650 the upswing had ground to a halt virtually everywhere. Though chronologies, characteristics, and intensity varied among regions and sectors, historians consider the “long sixteenth century” of growth and slowdown an integral period encompassing all Europe’s economies.

Increasing agricultural and industrial output, burgeoning trade volumes, proliferation of new products, adoption of novel processes, extension of proto-industry, shifts in occupational structure, rising population and urbanization levels: multiple benchmarks demonstrate that, pace neo-Malthusians, early modern European economies were capable of growth and – albeit unevenly, unsteadily, and diversely – often achieved it. Intensive methods contributed: more systematic application of commercial, agrarian, and manufacturing best practices; adoption of more productive equipment; more efficient layout of property or closer integration of workshops; heightened specialization and division of labor.