Modest Households and Globally Traded Textiles: Evidence from Amsterdam Household Inventories

As the diversity of essay themes in this volume demonstrates so vividly, the contribution of Jan de Vries’ scholarship to the study of economic history has been distinguished not only by its exceptional creativity and quality, but also by the breadth of its range across a dizzying array of topics. His work includes historically significant contributions on: agricultural practices and the development of the rural economy, and of the Low Countries in particular; innovation in the provision of transport services; the timing, causes and consequences of European urbanization from the Middle Ages to the present; linkages between demographic phenomena and the standard of living; the peculiar characteristics of segmented labor markets; the production of art for the ‘golden age’ Dutch burgerlijke public; the early modern cultural discourse on luxury and vice; the contours of the global commodity trades of the company period; and perhaps most importantly for my purposes in this essay, the development of a theory which plausibly connects the hitherto orthogonal histories of production and consumption. To all of these projects he has brought to bear not only the technical skills of the quantitative social scientist and the theoretical tool-kit of neo-classical economics, but also the best kind of historical sensitivity to the lived experiences of his subjects as they might have understood them themselves. This combination has proved remarkably fertile, yielding a number of critical insights, often on subjects that had seemed tired and well-worn before he arrived to turn the standard historiography on its head

Commentaries: McCants

Mccants: It has now been more than a half century since the publication of Hobsbawm’s formulation of the seventeenth century as a time of crisis. Yet the historical questions that Hobsbawm raised, and the historiographical solution that he offered, retain their vitality despite the numerous fierce debates that they have spawned during the intervening years. Unlike others before him who had identified the various ills that befell Europeans who lived at that time, he did not see the seventeenth century as merely an age visited by the misfortune of numerous, but discrete, crises. Rather, he argued that it was fundamentally, structurally, a moment of crisis sui generis. Moreover, in keeping with his Marxist intellectual foundations, he invested this crisis with a purpose, discarding the lingering limitations (dare I say shackles?) of the old feudal order and thereby opening a space for the industrial capitalism that he understood to be the defining characteristic of the modern economy

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Edited by Patrick Karl O'Brien, Derek J. Keene, Herman Van der Wee, and Majolein't Hart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 361. $64.95.

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional case-study urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time? (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981 84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.