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

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.