Outside Italy too there was a flight of manufacturing activity from the cities to the countryside. North of the Alps, economic historians have given this phenomenon a positive gloss, seeing in it the symptoms of a process of proto-industrialization. There indeed, when manufacturing shifted from city to countryside it actually escaped from the controls of the city guilds and its innovating efforts generally gained the benevolent support of the Crown. In Italy, on the other hand, the city’s overweening power over the surrounding countryside sustained the city guilds’ ability to interfere. This spelled ruin for the few paltry attempts by enterprising operators to introduce innovations. As a result, Italian manufacturing firms remained prisoners of the past.