(^242) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
rise of a private factory sector shows. By 1860 an estimated 4 million
people were working for wages, plus an indeterminate number of peas
ant households engaged in industry on a seasonal or part-time basis.^15
In effect, the jobs found the workers and bent them to the task and,
in some instances, to the lash. Whether the jobs got the skills needed
was another matter.
It is not clear, then, that general emancipation of the serfs in Russia
in 1861-66, usually seen as the great economic watershed, made much
difference to the supply of bodies; but by obliging enterprises to hire
free wage labor (or keep the labor they had), it compelled better treat
ment and more careful recruitment and opened the way to new tech
nologies and higher standards.^16 Opened the way... The way was
tortuous and thorny, especially in those branches and enterprises that
had long been managed by the state and its agents. Emancipation here
was initially partial and halfhearted. Some workers were freed; others
kept on. Managers found consolation in illusions: if the best workers
left, they were too old anyway and were not interested in making and
doing; if the worst drifted away, well, where was the loss? The country
was suffering from a massive institutional hangover, caught between
new and old, anticipating by its dualism the schizophrenia of much
Third World development in the twentieth century.
The Organization of Manufacture
A second medieval legacy was the organization of industry into
guilds or corporations. These were bodies of masters and workers, or
ganized perhaps for social or fraternal reasons, but quickly transformed
into business associations and collective monopolies.
Guilds were to be found all over the world—in Europe, but also in
Islamic lands, India, China, and Japan. The economic objectives were
to control entry, typically via obligatory apprenticeship and limitations
on mastership; to uphold quality standards (no amateurs or "botchers"
(bunglers) allowed); and to restrict competition both within (limita
tions on size of workshop and numbers employed) and without (pro
hibition of nonguild manufacture within the jurisdiction and exclusion
of all imports from outside).
Behind this array of rules lay a set of moral principles, themselves de
rived from the values of the rural village community and transposed to
the urban context. Two considerations dominated: first, the sense of
limited resources, whether in land or custom (market demand), hence
of a zero-sum game (one person's gain is someone else's loss); and sec-
nora
(Nora)
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