Modest Households and Globally Traded Textiles: Evidence from Amsterdam Household Inventories
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Author(s)
McCants, Anne E. C.
Date Issued
January 2010
Journal
Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400-1800, Essays in Honor of Jan De Vries
Citation
McCants, Anne E. “Modest Households And Globally Traded Textiles: Evidence From Amsterdam Household Inventories.” The Birth of Modern Europe. Ed. L. Cruz & J. Mokyr. Brill. 109–132.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. History Section
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004189348.i-259.25
