Building Wealth? The Material Culture of Building Craftsmen in Early Modern Amsterdam and Antwerp (16th-18th centuries): Paper presented at the European Social Science History Conference 2018 in Valencia

It is amazing how much and how little we know about building craftsmen. Their nominal wages are well documented in institutional accounts and have been used for decades as the point of reference for workers’ incomes and living standards. Two fundamental questions, however, need to be addressed in order to fully understand the real evolution of living standards. 1) How representative are institutional accounts for the reconstruction of building craftsmen’s wages? 2) How did building craftsmen spend their wages or adapt their consumption patterns to changing circumstances in their lives?

This session wants to explore the real evolution of living standards by a systematic, comparative and longitudinal analysis of household inventories of building craftsmen. Although the evolving social and demographic bias of post-mortem inventories is well known, we are convinced that the exploration of a wide range of inventories can help, at least in part, to overcome this bias, thereby revealing a more realistic image of living standards. In our paper, we will compare post-mortem inventories preserved in the archives of the Burgerweeshuis (the Burgher’s Orphanage) in Amsterdam, the Orphan Chamber and notarial archives in Amsterdam and Antwerp with inventories of insolvencies and bankruptcies in both cities, thus capturing households in different stages of their careers and fortunes. By including labour contracts preserved in the notarial archives we will offer a more realistic image of income variations depending on the kind of works executed, levels of experience of the craftsmen and differences in labour organisation.

Theoretically, the expansion of the material culture and consumption of building craftsmen should offer a good indicator of their evolving living standards. Amsterdam and Antwerp are particularly interesting cases since these commercial and industrial centres were at the vanguard of consumption changes in their respective regions. Additionally they were characterised by a divergent economic evolution during the period under consideration.

The paper will test for the validity of changing consumption patterns as an indicator of changing living standards by comparing 1) inventories (and more specifically the material culture) of carpenters and masons, 2) their evolving opportunities on the labour market; 3) their evolving wealth position within the urban population. It will pay particular attention to heuristic and methodological issues related to using inventories in a comparative research over time and space: Amsterdam and Antwerp (16th-18th centuries).