As economic institutions, craft guilds have been judged unfavourably at least from the late eighteenth century onwards. In the view of the enlightened elites pressing for liberal reforms, craft guilds presented an obstacle to economic growth and welfare. In the course of the nineteenth century, both liberal and radical economists considered craft guilds as a paradigmatic institution of a pre-capitalist economy, while writers of the German historical school, such as Werner Sombart, viewed craft guilds as a materialisation of a typical pre-modern economic spirit. Prominent among the arguments put forward by eighteenth-century philosophes and nineteenth-century economists figures the supposition that craft guilds served mainly as cartels for the appropriation of monopoly rents for its members. At the same time, craft guilds are said to have resisted the transition from simple commodity production to more complex production regimes, which increased the control of entrepreneurs over production and enhanced productivity by applying new technology.

Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the economic effects of late medieval and early modern craft guilds. First, it has been argued that craft guilds prevented market failure (adverse selection) in long-distance trade. Bales of textiles, in particular, were characterised by considerable asymmetry of information, in the sense that a buyer would have had to assess quality by unrolling and inspecting each bale, which would require a lot of time. Since long-distance merchants, local retailers, and consumers might all need to assess quality individually, information costs were unavoidably inflated.

Economic institutions that foster technological innovation and diffusion and enable flexible adaptation to technical change enhance social welfare. In all these respects, early modern craft guilds have not been judged very favourably. It is generally believed that they were devoted to maintaining their members' rents by excluding non-members from the labour market and that they resisted labour-saving technologies. The marginalisation, demise, or abolition of craft guilds was therefore a prerequisite for successful proto-industrial and industrial development. The roughly contemporaneous demise of the craft guilds and rise of industrial manufacturing is seen as conclusive evidence of the restrictive practices and negative welfare effects of craft guilds.

While it is certainly true that craft guilds did oppose technical change under specific circumstances, the point is easily overgeneralised. In most parts of continental Europe, the dissolution of guilds from the late eighteenth century on had political rather than industrial motivations, even though abolition was often justified in economic terms. Arguments by economic historians based on the temporal coincidence between the demise of craft guilds and industrial developments hark back to those eighteenth-century debates and rely on highly aggregated evidence. Establishing a direct causal link between the dissolution of guilds and industrialisation without considering decision making at the level of individual craft guilds runs the risk of incurring an ecological fallacy, that is, of making inferences about individual behaviour on the basis of aggregated data.

Rudolf Braun's work on the social and cultural impact of cottage industry in the canton of Zurich before 1800 belongs to a group of studies which appeared around 1960 and opened the field of regional studies in social and economic history. A common feature of them was their stress on structures and processes bearing on the lives of the great mass of ordinary people, such as the family, demography, work conditions, popular culture and mentality. All were usually based on a detailed scrutiny of primary source material available for a limited regional context.

Whereas in France the Annales movement paved the way for this new paradigm and the Anglo-Saxon community itself had a long-standing heritage in social and economic history, such a background was lacking in German historiography. Hence, it is of little surprise that Rudolf Braun's Industrialisierung und Volksleben has many of its roo'ts outside historiography and, as the reader will note in the Introduction, rather in the specific Swiss academic tradition of Volkskunde (folklore). Thus, while being in general a study in the history of mentality, this work nevertheless stands outside the corresponding tradition initiated by French writers. However, it does not merely form an application of concepts derived from Volkskunde, but breaks new ground by focussing less on cultural tradition (as was the usual approach of the discipline) than on cultural change and innovation associated with the emergence of industrial structures.

As a consequence of its unique background this study, despite its academic popularity, has tended to remain outside the mainstream of social historical writing.

The territory of the canton of Zurich was acquired by the town of Zurich during the late Middle Ages mostly through purchase or mortgaging by declining feudal powers. During the Reformation a vast amount of church property was secularised and seized by the town. The latter was ruled by two town councils (a large and a small one, the latter being the governing body) with two Mayors at its head. It is the small council which is usually addressed as Your Worship in the sources quoted by the present book. The rural territory was administered by governors (Land-and Obervögte for the secular property, Amtsmänner for former church property; the translation invariably uses the term governor) chosen from among the members of the town council for a limited period of years.

On the local level, a clear distinction must be made between the village community and the church parish. The latter often encompassed several villages and, particularly in the Oberland, hamlets and scattered farmsteads not belonging to a commune. Its chief officer was the minister who, from the late sixteenth century onwards, had to be a burgher of the town of Zurich. He and the church eiders (Ehegaumer) chosen from among the parishioners formed a supervisory body (the Stillstand) watching over the moral life in the parish and administrating church funds, particularly with regard to Poor Relief.

The intermediary between the village community and the political administration represented by the governor was the bailiff (in the sense of an administrator; Untervogt) who usually was a member of the local upper class, i.e. a wealthy farmer.