A Tale of Two Theories: Monopolies and Craft Guilds in Medieval England and Modern Imagination.

Two fields of thought evolved simultaneously, but scholars in one ignored the evolution of the other. The first was the theory of monopoly, whose broad nineteenth-century definition narrowed considerably during the twentieth century. Concepts contained in its original incarnation attained independence when the Chamberlain-Robinson revolution introduced the modern lexicon of industrial organization. The second was the theory of guilds, originally devised when monopoly's definition was vague and rigidly maintained as its modern denotation developed.