I can help a bit with your question about guilds. They were very much there to manage competition. Businesses today usually think of a market as pretty wide (if you can't sell toothpicks in your country, try the country next door) and open to development ( try orange-flavored toothpicks, when the market for plain toothpicks is glutted). In the pre-industrial world there was much more a tendency to think of a market as narrow and fixed. There are only so many people in the village, and so also only so many who need toothpicks. There is therefore room for only one toothpick maker. If another toothpick maker appears, there's a danger that in their competition the two makers will work too hard and cut their prices to the point where neither can survive, and that in trying to survive they will also have to make cheap, bad toothpicks that leave splinters in people's mouths. The solution to this problem was a guild. It controlled how many toothpick makers can set up in the village, set a price, and set a standard for the quality of toothpicks. It could also do other things- it could help out a toothpick maker if he became sick, supply a useful pool of information on toothpick manufacture. The guild would be set up by the craftsmen in the town, with a charter of authority granted by the government ( like the king, or the local lord.) It would have officers, a clerk to keep records, and procedures and rules for settling disputes and collecting fees from its members. ( No, there was never a London Guild of Worshipful Toothpick Makers...this is only figurative)

This worked pretty well at first, because Medieval crafts tended to cluster: if you wanted fine metalwork, you went to Nuremberg, if you wanted books, Frankfurt. So, with many makers and large markets , the guilds in those towns could be quite powerful- and very useful, as there would be competition for many things beyond customers: good shop locations, skilled workers, materials and supplies. But outside of those towns, the guild had no power. And so when transportation became better and markets expanded, the guilds became less relevant, because they could only control competition within their town, and were not always very welcoming of innovation. For example, as watchmaking technology improved and developed during the 18th c., the watchmakers' guilds in Paris, London and Geneva were constantly dealing with cheaper imported watches- first, London dealing with cheaper Paris watches, then Paris dealing with cheaper Geneva watches, then Geneva dealing with cheaper watches made nearby in the Jura. With industrial production in the 19th c., guilds became pretty much defunct.

Smith, J. T. (2021). English gilds. The original ordinances of more than one hundred early English gilds: Together with þe olde vsages of þe cite of Wynchestre; the Ordinances of Worcester; the Office of the mayor of Bris. Generic. https://books.google.com/books/about/English_gilds.html?id=IcRZAAAAMAAJ