The terms ‘work’ and ‘wages’ seem to belong together. Like a number of other associated terms, they form a natural couplet, stretching back into the mists of time. Unlike work on the land or in the household, it has been usual to think of work in urban trades as work for wages. In many of the urban trades of the eighteenth century, however, the relationship between work and wages was mediated by a variety of non-monetary customs and rights. This fact is relatively well known, although its implications have still to be developed. This essay is an examination of the meaning of the wage in such a context, formed in this case by the often-disputed range of rights and customary arrangements which existed within the trades of eighteenth-century Paris. Its aim is to suggest a perspective upon the structure and internal mechanisms of artisanal production in which non-monetary forms of power are given their due weight.

It has been usual to think of the rights and customs of the world of workshop production of the eighteenth century within a framework of analysis informed either by notions of ‘the popular culture’ of the ‘pre-industrial world’ or by a perspective centred upon the idiom of corporate organisation and its attendant cultural and political implications. The objective here is to resituate custom and right within the organisation of the workshop itself. The present emphasis upon popular culture or the idiom of corporate organisation as explanatory principles of custom and right has occurred because it has been usual to assume that the workshop was merely a unit of production.