The world of corporative work is an excellent domain in which to examine social relations and their political significance in pre-industrial urban societies. Guilds were sites of confrontation, mediation, and exchange between social groups and different economic interests; where competition occurred and conflicts emerged that could be disciplined, and then settled through accommodation or compromise, or could explode into uncontrollable clashes. This chapter presents results of a study dedicated to the role and transformation of the Venetian guilds between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, although most of the cases discussed relate to the last two centuries of the Republic.1 I will employ the Venetian guilds as a lens through which to observe social, economic, and political unease in the early modern Serenissima.
