Abstract
How skills were formed, accessed, and rewarded constituted one of the fundamental problem of pre-industrial economies. This thesis investigates that problem through an integrated empirical analysis of wage structures and apprenticeship institutions in Italy and Europe between 1400 and 1800. By combining a cross-city panel of skilled and unskilled wages with individual-level contract evidence from Genoa and Venice, I connect the macro-level determinants of the skill premium to the micro-level processes through which training was organised, advanced, and disrupted.Taken together, the three chapters show that the returns to skill in pre-industrial Europe were shaped neither by technology nor by demography alone, but by the interaction of geography, institutional arrangements, social networks, and the sectoral structure of urban economies. By integrating cross-city wage series with individual-level contract evidence and reconstructed career trajectories, I offer new empirical foundations for understanding how human capital was generated and valued before industrialisation, and how the institutions governing that process could simultaneously foster economic development and reproduce inequality.
| Date of Award | Dec 2026 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | John Turner (Supervisor) & Arcangelo Dimico (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- apprenticeship
- labour markets
- wages
- guilds
- Early Modern Europe
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