Over the years, much research has been carried out into burgher occupations, relations between the state and the burghers, and the requirements set out by law governing the practising of trade and commerce. At a general level, the research has broadly examined the importance of occupational guilds for trade in the medieval and early modern periods in particular. In the wake of Douglass North, several researchers have seen these institutions organised among the burghers as part of an economic development process which, from the eighteenth century onwards, led to the birth of modern industrial capitalism (see e.g. Greif 2006; Epstein 2000; Ogilvie 2011).