Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
Textile workers in the Netherlands. Part 1: 1650-1810
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
International Institute of Social History
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
enm@iisg.nl
Introduction
Until 1568, the northern Netherlands had belonged to the Habsburg Empire. A combination of
economic crisis, power struggle between the Dutch gentry and the Spanish king over his policy
and taxes, and religious differences, led to the revolt of several provinces in the north against the
Spanish Crown. This revolt resulted in a war for independence that would last for 80 years, until
the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648. In 1588, seven provinces had proclaimed the Dutch
Republic of United Provinces (in the following: ‘the Republic’).1 The Republic was governed by
the Estates General, in which all provinces were represented. Despite the ongoing warfare,
relative peace existed in the economically most important provinces of the Republic, Holland and
Zealand, after 1585. In the southern Netherlands, the war against the Spanish troops continued,
resulting in the loss of their key position in trade and industry. Thousands of protestant migrants
fled from the southern parts of the Netherlands to the safer cities in the north. This migration
provided the northern Netherlands with a new labour force. Furthermore, many of the refugees
were rich merchants from cities like Antwerp and Ghent, who brought capital and knowledge,
giving an economical impulse to the Dutch cities in which they settled.2 The then unstable
international situation, with England and France at constant war, continued for almost a century.
Due to all these circumstances, the Dutch Republic became the centre of the world economy from
the 1580s until at least 1650. The Dutch leading role in shipping and trade led to the development
of a large staple market in the city of Amsterdam, where people dealt in goods from all over the
world.3
Because of the Republic’s primacy in world trade, historians have mainly focused on this
aspect of the early modern Dutch economy. Lately it is recognized, however, that industry has
also been very important for the economic development of this region.4 Especially the exportoriented textile industry was considerably large in certain parts of the Netherlands in the 17th and
18th centuries. Much of our knowledge of the textile industry in this period is based on the vast
work on the wool industry of the largest textile-producing city of Leiden, that N.W. Posthumus
wrote in the first half of the 20th century.5 Other research is also mainly regionally oriented. Here,
we will try to extend this knowledge, by looking at several textile-producing regions within the
northern Netherlands at the same time, and by analysing major shifts and interdependencies
between them.
The Dutch textile industry: general developments 1650-1810
The Dutch economy was actually on its way down after 1650, although several sectors continued
to flourish for quite some time. At the beginning of the 17th century, the production of woollen
cloth was carried out in most parts of the Republic, albeit not always export oriented production
on a large scale. However, the undisputed centre of woollen textiles had been Leiden, a city in the
province of Holland, on the west coast of the Republic. Most other cities of Holland could not
compete with Leiden, and in the first half of the century their production of woollens declined or
vanished. In cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, textile entrepreneurs started to specialize in
1
Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
the finishing and trade of cloth instead.6 The woollen industry in Leiden reached its peak in 1664.
From then onwards, the city was gradually losing its position as the main cloth-producing centre
of Europe. International competition increased, and within the Republic itself new production
areas rose as well. This happened especially in the more peripheral agrarian regions, where
labour costs were relatively low. For the spinning and weaving of wool, it was a village in the
south of the Republic, Tilburg, that became important. Especially in the course of the eighteenth
century, more and more villages on the countryside of Brabant developed a cloth industry.7
Nevertheless, Leiden remained the most significant cloth producer until the end of the preindustrial period.
The decreasing number of weavers’ guilds illustrates the decline of woollen weaving in the
Dutch cities (see table 1). Of course, these figures can only give an indication. Although in most
textile-producing areas there was a weavers’ guild, this was not the case in Leiden (abolished in
1561) and in Tilburg (only established in 1767), notably the most important production centres.
Table 1 - Number of wool weavers’ guilds in the Republic, 1600-18008
year
total
in the province of Holland
1600
25
7
1650
23
6
1700
18
3
1750
12
2
1795
12
1
Based on: Database Guilds IISH
After wool, linen was still the second most important textile product in the 17th and 18th century.
The Holland city Haarlem had been the leading linen producing area, but it declined rapidly after
1650. From the 1650s onwards, the production of linen in the peripheral eastern parts of the
Republic increased drastically.9 The Dutch production of cotton fabrics, on the other hand, was
still underdeveloped in this period. Cotton yarn was used in some sectors as an ingredient for
mixed fabrics like fustians or bombazines, but it was not produced in the Netherlands on a large
scale until the end of the 18th century. Only after the mechanization of the Dutch textile industry
in the course of the nineteenth century, the production of cotton yarns and fabrics became really
important. Therefore, we will mainly focus on the woollen industry for the early modern period.
Where possible, some remarks will be made on the production of cotton, which occurred in the
form of mixed fabrics and – again – mostly in the eastern part of the Netherlands.10
Size of production and work force
It is hard to measure the size of cloth production and the work force, because there are no
national statistics for production and labour in this period. Coherent series of total output cannot
be reconstructed with the scarce information that is available. In the city of Leiden, production
figures were probably best documented. Posthumus has produced series of numbers of woven
woollen cloth in Leiden for the early modern period (see figure 1). Although these figures are by
no means representative for the whole Republic, they do give us an indication of the economic
trend in cloth production in this period.
2
pieces of cloth
Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
Figure 1 - Production of woollen cloth in Leiden,
1650-1810
Based on: Posthumus (1939)
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
1650 1670 1710 1730 1750 1770 1790 1810
year
In Tilburg, the second most important cloth producing area in the Republic after 1650, the
general picture is somewhat different. Textile production was very much restricted outside the
cities. Furthermore, industrial products from the province of Brabant, where Tilburg was situated,
were heavily taxed. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs from cities like Rotterdam and Amsterdam tried
to stimulate woollen production in the area of Tilburg. In most cities of Holland, the finishing and
trading of cloth had become very important and the influential merchants were treated with
leniency by the central government when they sent their wool to be spun and woven in Tilburg,
where labour costs were much lower than in Holland, without being taxed. In 1687, in spite of
protests by textile-producing Holland cities like Leiden and Haarlem, the merchants even
managed to get an official agreement, which was called “the Concession of Tilburg”. From now
on, they were definitely free to put out their production on the countryside, albeit in this village
alone. Unfortunately, there are not many production figures for Tilburg, but it appears that cloth
production rose by more than 125% from 1650 to 1810. This was quite a lot, considering the fact
that the first technological innovations were introduced around 1800.11
With regard to the numbers of spinners and weavers we have some – though not much –
more information. The data are heterogeneous and hard to compare, but the textile industry was
certainly an important employer. In its heydays, it must have provided thousands of people –
men, women and children – with work. Posthumus estimates that around 1650, more than 36.000
inhabitants of Leiden must have been depending on the cloth industry.12 Unfortunately, solid
numbers are not known for the whole of the Republic. Although Leiden was the main production
centre, there was also weaving activity in many other cities and on the countryside – there were
still 23 wool weavers’ guilds in the Republic in 1650. Therefore, at least several thousands more
people must have been working in this industry at this time. Surely, this number declined
drastically during the last part of the 17th and the 18th centuries. Table 1 shows, for instance, that
in cities like Gouda and Utrecht, where a reasonable cloth production existed before 1650, there
were very few weavers left in 1671. In Leiden, the number of weavers dropped as well, from over
2500 in 1650, to not even 1500 around 1750 and less than 900 in 1810. Nevertheless, still more
than 13.000 people in the Netherlands worked as spinner or weaver in the woollen industry in
1810.13
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National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
Table 2 – Some numbers of wool and cotton weavers and spinners in the Dutch Republic,
1650-1810
no. of no. of no. of no. of
place
year wool
wool
cotton cotton
Source
weavers spinners weavers spinners
Leiden
c. 1650
2535
Posthumus (1939) 936-938.
Leiden
1661
3365
Posthumus (1939) 938.
Tilburg
1665
139*
205*
RHCT, 380-II
Leiden
1667
3400
Posthumus (1939) 938.
Gouda
1671
14
Geselschap (1972) 146.
Utrecht
1671
35
Klinkenberg (1991) 13.
Leiden
1749 1446* 1587*
VT 1749
Tilburg
1810
592
2466
VT 1810
Leiden
1810
880
3289
Jansen (1999) 306.
Twente
1810
1032 Jansen (1999) 316.
North-Brabant
1810
170
179 Jansen (1999) 318.
Netherlands total c. 1810
2781
9658
539
1670 Jansen (1999) 133.
* Only heads of households
Cotton, on the other hand, was on the rise. Until 1800, this raw material was mostly used for the
production of mixed fabrics. Large-scale mechanization of the industry would only take place
after 1810, but since the late 18th century some entrepreneurs in the peripheral regions of Twente
and North Brabant had introduced new machinery like the spinning Jenny. This innovation
accelerated after 1810, and resulted in a rapid increase of cotton spinners and weavers. With this
development, important conditions for the future were created. Twente and North Brabant would
remain the core of the Dutch textile industry until the second half of the 20th century.
Organization of production and institutions
In most cities of the Dutch Republic, industries and trades were regulated through guilds, which
had been established since the thirteenth century, with the rise of the cities in this area. These
guilds were corporative organizations, which operated with local government support to protect
the economic and social interests of the members of their specific trade. They were mostly
founded in cities, although there were some guilds on the countryside.14
Woollen weaving in the cities was also mostly organized within a guild. Therefore, the
presence of a guild can give us an indication of export oriented woollen industry in a certain city
or region (see figure 2).
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Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
Figure 2 – Woollen weavers’ guilds in 1650 (left) and 1780 (right)
In general, citizenship was required to be admitted to a guild. To prove his skill and obtain his
mastery in order to participate in the weavers’ guild, the weaver had to produce a ‘masterpiece’.
It was necessary to be trained by another master of the guild for several years before a weaver
was allowed to take this test. Once a master, the guild offered the weaver many advantages, like
the right to weave within the city, with more or less fixed prices, guarding against uneven
competition, and material support in case of sickness or death for him and his family. These
advantages of course had its price: a yearly contribution was required, and if a weaver violated
the guild’s regulations, he was (sometimes heavily) fined.15 Moreover, the guild system excluded
many groups in society. Non-citizens and unskilled workers could not join the club. Most guilds
were also reluctant to admit women. In some guilds, widows could take on their deceased
husband’s profession as a master, but married and unmarried women were usually excluded. This
monopolistic policy is supposed to have driven women out of the weaving profession in the late
Middle Ages. Spinning was, according to most sources, a predominantly female profession.
Exactly this gendered division of labour is also often mentioned as the reason why spinning was
hardly ever organized in a guild or otherwise.16 I will come back to this issue in the section on the
division of labour.
In spite of the importance of the guild system, the two major cloth producers of the 17th and
18th centuries did not have a guild for most of the period. In Leiden, the drapers’ guild had
already been abolished in 1561. This did not mean that cloth production was not regulated in a
corporative way. On the contrary, all the different woollen industries were organized as neringen,
and each nering represented a different kind of fabric, like serge, cloth, baize etc. The neringen
were established by the city council around 1585. All the workers of every stage of the
production process were subjected to the administration and regulations of their specific nering.
Furthermore, each nering had its own central building, the ‘hall’, where the workers brought their
pieces of cloth to be examined, measured, and sometimes even sold. The neringen were governed
by one or two superintendents and two to five governors. They had to make sure that all the
workers observed the regulations and they were also supposed to settle differences between
entrepreneurs and their employees.17
Until 1630, most Leiden drapers managed to stay independent entrepreneurs. The draper
led the production process, and he employed several weavers, spinners, and other workers. More
and more, however, some poor drapers came to lean on cloth finishers and merchants for their
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National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
subsistence. From 1630 to 1670, most drapers lost a great deal of their independence. They
started working as ‘middle men’ between a new group of capital owning entrepreneurs, the
reders, and the actual workers. The spinners and weavers worked at home, or they were
concentrated in small workshops. In the 18th century a new type of entrepreneur, the fabriqueur,
appeared on the scene. This fabriqueur employed many workers who produced for him at home
or in larger manufactures. It is likely that the fabriqueur was not a real merchant, but rather a
producer of cloth. The processes of producing and selling were more and more separated in the
course of the 18th century.18
In Tilburg, a woollen weavers’ guild was established as late as in 1767. Before this, cloth
production was organized in various ways. First, there were independent drapers, who bought
their own materials and sold their cloth themselves. Secondly, there were merchants from out of
Tilburg, who brought raw materials to the village to be spun and woven there on a commission
basis. In the second half of the 17th century, however, many independent weavers could no longer
compete with the production of wealthier entrepreneurs. More and more, they started to weave
for these ‘capitalist’ drapers and merchants in return for wages. The ‘putting out’ system that thus
came into being, made most Tilburg weavers dependent on wage labour.19
Apart from their interference with the guilds and the neringen, the local government hardly
meddled with textile production. Most occurrences of local government policy are meant to
improve the impoverished cloth industries.20 Even conflicts were usually not taken to court, but
resolved within the guild or, in the case of Leiden, by the governors of the nering. Most conflicts
were between individual workers and drapers or merchants, and the quarrel was almost always
about wages. Organized protests by a great number of workers against ‘capitalist’ employers
were remarkably rare or at least undocumented in this period.21 Central government policy
regarding textiles usually concerned trade and textile production on the countryside. Already in
the 16th century many cities in Holland complained to the Estates General about the competition
they experienced, and in the 17th century complaints and regulations were also enacted in Den
Bosch and some cities of Twente.22 In the long run, as we have seen above, nothing could be
done to stop textile production moving to the more peripheral and more agrarian parts of the
Dutch Republic.
The division of labour
We have already seen that there was an interregional division of labour in the Dutch woollen
industry. This division concerns the merchant cities of Holland, where the dyeing and finishing of
cloth were carried out and the area of Tilburg, where much of the spinning and weaving took
place. However, this was an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one. Leiden,
although on its way back compared to its heydays in the mid 1600s, remained a very important
weaving area within the Republic. In 1749, still approximately 1450 heads of households were
registered as weaver, a number that Tilburg would never reach during the pre-industrial period.
Still, in broad lines, major geographical shifts had started in the second half of the 17th century.
Tilburg and other rural areas of Brabant became an increasingly important cloth-producing region
during the 18th century.23 The decline of woollen weaving in the cities can be illustrated by the
rapid decline of the number of guilds in the 150 years between 1650 and 1800. Furthermore,
linen production on the Brabant and Twente countryside became more and more important.
Eventually, early in the nineteenth century, many textile producers in these regions would switch
to cotton, because the demand for this fabric rose rapidly, which led to the mechanisation of the
sector.24
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National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
Another division of labour must be taken into account: the division between the sexes. As I
have mentioned before, the general view on this issue is that men had taken over weaving during
the Middle Ages from women, who were left with the less skilled and more poorly rewarded
spinning. Furthermore, women could easily combine spinning with conducting a household and
raising children, and it was therefore supposed to be one of the few jobs suitable for them. There
is not much reason to doubt that it was men who did the weaving in the early modern Dutch
Republic. In most areas in 17th and 18th centuries, the few women I found weaving were widows,
and mostly linen weaving, not woollen. On the other hand, it does not seem that only women
spun in the Republic. In all areas of research, an important – though mostly no predominant –
part of the spinners were men (see table 3).
Table 3 - Division of labour in spinning according to sex
(only heads of households, except for the population registration of Tilburg 1810)
number of
number of
year
place
male spinners
% female spinners
1665
Tilburg
40
34
76
1712
Zwolle
11 13
71
1742
Zwolle
14
8
171
1749
Leiden
772 49
813
1775
Den Bosch
59 39
91
1810
Tilburg
297 18
1364
1810
Tilburg (incl. children)
626 25
1841
Based on: various tax and population registrations
%
66
87
92
51
61
82
75
How can these remarkable figures be explained, since it is usually supposed that only women
spun because they were much cheaper labourers? In my current PhD research, I am trying to find
explanations for this. The research is not finished, but here I can give a couple of hypotheses I
consider to be possible explanations.
There might be a methodological issue here to explain the high percentages of male
spinners, as presented in table 3. In most official population and tax records, only heads of
households were registered, which automatically leads to the under-registration of (spinning)
married women and children. Although this argument might reduce the relative importance of
male spinners, it does not explain why, in many cases, men were spinning in the first place. I
have found that most men who were spinning, were wool spinners. In linen and cotton spinning,
there are almost only women present. Obviously, the nature of the industry mattered a lot. Since
woollens were much more expensive than linens and mixed fabrics, it might be that even the
status (and perhaps the payment) of a spinner in this branch was higher than in the other. Another
factor could be the degree of organization of production. In Leiden’s archival sources, I have
found many subcontractors called “master spinners”, who take on a job for a certain draper and
let other people (men and women) spin for him. The master spinners were never female. Another
example of shifts in the sexual division of labour is wool combing, a ‘female’ profession in the
16th century25, which was taken over by men in the 17th. Around 1700, they even established a
wool combers’ guild, which was only accessible to male wool combers. Only occasionally, a
master’s widow was allowed to join the guild. Similarly, I have found a wool spinners guild in
city of Utrecht, established around 1700.26 Only men were taken as apprentices. Once admitted to
the guild, they were called “master spinners”. It is my hypothesis that these developments are
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National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
more likely to take place in a period of economic crisis. With the diminishing of the woollen
industry, which leads to a smaller demand for weavers, men take on work that is considered
‘inferior’ and ‘female’ (spinning). By adopting the title of ‘master’ or erecting a guild, they aim
to institutionalise the job and give it a higher standing. This new status attached to spinning
makes it a more acceptable profession for men.
The workers: ethnic background, age, labour and living circumstances, and work culture
Many historians think of the Dutch Republic as a typical immigrant country, with an outspoken
religious tolerance. Migrants from France and southern Netherlands were drawn to the cities of
Leiden and Haarlem to find work in the woollen and linen industries. Especially Amsterdam
attracted a lot of Portuguese, Spanish and eastern-European Jews, who had often fled their
countries because they were persecuted. Also, labour migration from Germany was very
common.27 Jobs like combing, spinning and weaving were of course easily accessible because of
their low capital intensity. In Leiden, this was perhaps even more the case, since one did not have
to be a citizen to go work in textile industry; the neringen – as opposed to the guilds - were free
to be joined by anyone. But were professions like spinning and weaving typical immigrant jobs
because they were low status? Van Zanden and Knotter have analysed marital records in
Amsterdam over a long period of time, and found out that immigrants did not necessarily have
inferior or low-paid jobs, compared to born citizens of Holland. It is probable however, that they
were the first to suffer from the depression in the second half of the 17th century, as appears from
the decline of the percentage of immigrants in the silk industry in Amsterdam.28 Among wool
combers (not the most rewarding profession) in Leiden, I come across a lot of French names
around 1700.29 It might be that immigrants were the first to take on less paid work like combing
and spinning, but this does not mean that spinning and weaving were typical immigrant jobs.
The age of Dutch spinners and weavers ranged from very young to very old. This was the
case throughout the entire period. At the beginning of the 17th century, orphans in Leiden were
contracted out to learn a profession at a master’s house. The master could have any job, but most
of them were working in the textile industry. These orphans were mostly taught spinning and
weaving by their master. It is remarkable that boys, who also often started to learn spinning and
spooling when they were little boys, were trained as weavers or shearers from the age of 14
onwards. Mostly, a contract was drawn up, in which was agreed that the boys were learning the
trade of weaving and would stay with their master for several years. This looks very much like
the formal training weavers’ apprentices received in other cities, where woollen weavers’ guilds
were present. The education of the Leiden orphan girls, on the other hand, mostly did not go
through this evolution: some girls were found spinning with the same boss from their early teens
until they were over twenty years old!30 It seems that women were not to be prepared for any
profession except spinning. In poor relief records of Zwolle around 1700, we see women and men
of all ages spinning.31 In 1810, the total population registration of Tilburg shows the same image
(see figure 3).
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Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
600
250
200
400
number
number
500
300
male spinners
200
female spinners
100
150
male weavers
100
female weavers
50
0
0
4-18 19- 3433 48
4-18 19- 34- 49- 64- over
33 48 63 78 78
49- 64- over
63 78 78
age group
age group
Figure 3 – Spinners and weavers in Tilburg 1810, according to age and sex
Living and working circumstances were harsh. Weaving and especially spinning are usually
associated with low pay rates and poverty. They worked long hours in the same physical position
in dark, badly ventilated rooms, for which most of them only earned a few stuivers per day. This
view is confirmed by Posthumus for Leiden, and Prak for Den Bosch, who have found out that
the vast majority of weavers and spinners belonged to the lowest ranks of these two cities’
income classes.32 In the city of Zwolle, the poor relief records show that of all 3524 records over
the period 1650-1700, 539 men and women (more than 15 percent of all records) were listed as
‘spinner’. Their earnings were strikingly low, from ‘almost nothing’ to a maximum of 30 stuivers
by a father and a mother spinning together, with which they could hardly pay the rent and feed all
members of their family. 33 We see many spinners living in basements, renting small rooms from
richer citizens, or living in special houses for the poor, offered to them by the city council. On the
other hand, there must have been a lot of spinners who did manage to get by without municipal
poor relief in the form of money or goods. When we compare data on poor relief in Den Bosch
with population registers, we find that more than half of the people who were registered as
spinner did not get any help from the city.34 Of course, this leaves out the fact that they could
receive informal support from family, neighbours or friends, which is unfortunately hard to track
in archival sources.
Finally, it is hard to tell much about work culture and professional identity. Spinners and
weavers often worked alone, or with members of their family, and it is difficult to find sources
that directly report about issues of work culture and identity. In most cities, weavers were
organized in a guild, which formed an institutional means to stand up for their rights and their
welfare within the city. Furthermore, through the guilds they formed networks of solidarity (e.g.
burial and sickness funds) and social life. The status and power of weavers was low however, for
as we have seen on a national level, the more important cloth shearers, dyers and merchants
usually got the better hand when it came to protecting their economic interests. With spinners,
who were hardly ever organized, it is even more difficult to define what particular work culture
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National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
existed and what status and identity was attached to the profession. Sometimes, female spinners
gathered together to spin in the same place. In these ‘spinning bees’, women spun, sang songs,
told each other tales, and young girls were even allowed to meet their possible future husbands.35
As was noted above, there are not many indications of massively organized labour protests or
upheavals in the pre-industrial period. We will now turn to the industrial period, to discover
whether, and under what conditions, this all changed.
NOTES
1
See: I. Schöffer e.a. (ed.), De Lage Landen van 1500 tot 1780 (Amsterdam, 1991) 140.
A standard work on southern Netherlands migration to the Republic is: J.G.C.A. Briels, De Zuid-Nederlandse
immigratie, 1572-1630 (Haarlem, 1978). See O. Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de
Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578-1630) (Hilversum, 2000) 15-28, for a good overview of the discussions on the role
of Flemish merchants for the Republic’s economy.
3
J.I. Israel, Dutch primacy in world trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford, 1989); C. Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van
de Opstand. Kooplieden, commerciële expansie en verandering in de ruimtelijke economie van de Nederlanden ca.
1550-ca. 1630 (Hilversum, 2001).
4
J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, Nederland 1500-1815. De eerste ronde van moderne economische groei
(Amsterdam, 1995) 322.
5
N.W. Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie (3 delen) ('s-Gravenhage, 1908-1939) 3 volumes.
6
L. Noordegraaf, ‘The new draperies in the Northern Netherlands 1500-1800’, in: N.B. Harte (ed.), The New
Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300-1800 (Oxford, 1997) 183.
7
National Archives, Archives Department of Internal Affaires, 1796-1813, inv. no. 783.
8 Note that the total number of guilds increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The decline of the number
of weavers’ guilds can thus not be explained by an overall decrease in corporative organization.
9
See for Haarlem: F. Mulder, ‘De Haarlemse textielnijverheid in de periode 1575-1800’, in: H. Rombouts (ed.),
Haarlem ging op wollen zolen: opkomst, bloei en ondergang van de textielnijverheid aan het Spaarne (Schoorl,
1995) 55-109, and for Twente (the main production area of linen after 1650): C. Trompetter, Agriculture, protoindustry and Mennonite entrepreneurship: a history of the textile industries in Twente, 1600-1815 (Amsterdam,
1997).
10
See J. Boot, ‘Handspinnen van katoen en handkatoenspinnerijen (deel 1)’, Textielhistorische bijdragen 24 (1984)
58 and J. Boot, ‘Handspinnen van katoen en handkatoenspinnerijen (deel 2)’, Textielhistorische bijdragen 26
(1986)43 and further.
11
Compare G. van Gurp, ‘De Tilburgse lakenhandel met Holland en Brabant in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw’,
Textielhistorische bijdragen 38 (1998) 54-55 and M. Jansen, De industriële ontwikkeling in Nederland 1800-1850
(Amsterdam, 1999) 312.
12
I have subtracted the people working in the linen, knitting and other textile industries from Posthumus’ figures.
The number of 36.000 people amounted to approximately 60% of Leiden’s total population N.W. Posthumus, De
geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie. II. De nieuwe tijd (zestiende tot achttiende eeuw). De lakenindustrie en
verwante industrieën. Tweede en derde deel (’s-Gravenhage, 1939) 882, 937.
13
Jansen, Industriële ontwikkeling in Nederland, 133.
14
See P. Lourens and J. Lucassen, ‘De oprichting en ontwikkeling van ambachtsgilden in Nederland (13de-19de
eeuw)’, in: C. Lis and H. Soly (ed.), Werelden van verschil. Ambachtsgilden in de Lage Landen (Brussel, 1997) 4377.
15
Lourens and Lucassen, ‘Oprichting en ontwikkeling van ambachtsgilden’, 53-54; B. Panhuysen, Maatwerk:
kleermakers, naaisters, oudkleerkopers en de gilden (1500-1800) (Amsterdam, 2000) 23.
16
M.E. Wiesner, 'Spinsters and seamstresses: women in cloth and clothing production', in: M.W. Ferguson, M.
Quilligan and N.J. Vickers (ed.), Rewriting the Renaissance. The discourses of sexual difference on early modern
Europe (Chicago, 1986) 1919-193.
17
Posthumus, Geschiedenis (deel II), 338-339; 438 and further.
2
10
Van Nederveen Meerkerk
National overview Netherlands, Textile conference IISH, 11-13 Nov. 2004
18
Posthumus, Geschiedenis (deel II), 502-504; B.M.A. de Vries, 'De Leidse textielnijverheid in de zeventiende en
achttiende eeuw', in: J.K.S. Moes and B.M.A. de Vries (red.), Stof uit het Leidse verleden. Zeven eeuwen
textielnijverheid (Utrecht, 1991) 86-87.
19
G. van Gurp, ‘Proto-industrialisatie in Tilburg en Geldrop’, Textielhistorische bijdragen 39 (1999) 17-18.
20
I have found examples in the municipal archives of Den Bosch, Leiden, Utrecht, and Zwolle.
21
GAL, Archive Halls, inv. nos. 216-221.
22
H. Kaptein, De Hollandse textielnijverheid 1350-1600: conjunctuur en continuïteit (Hilversum, 1998) 83-84;
Trompetter, Agriculture, proto-industry and Mennonite entrepreneurship, 48.
23
National Archives, Archives Department of Internal Affaires, 1796-1813, inv. no. 783.
24
See: Jansen, Industriële ontwikkeling in Nederland,.
25
E. Kloek, Wie hij zij, man of wijf. Vrouwengeschiedenis en de vroegmoderne tijd: Drie Leidse studies (Hilversum,
1990) 63-65.
26
HUA, Guild archives, inv. no. 114.
27
J. Lucassen and R. Penninx, Nieuwkomers, nakomelingen, Nederlanders. Immigranten in Nederland 1550-1993
(Amsterdam, 1999) 34-35, 52
28
J.L. van Zanden, Arbeid tijdens het handelskapitalisme. Opkomst en neergang van moderne economische groei
(Bergen, 1991) 60, 73.
29
GAL, Guild Archives, inv. no. 1374/3 and 1374/4.
30
GAL, Archive Halls, inv. nos. 3844, 3845, 3847.
31
Based on: HCO, IA025, inv. nos. 309-312.
32
Posthumus, Geschiedenis (deel II), 187, 572-573, 971-973; M. Prak, ‘Arme und reiche Handwerker in ’sHertogenbosch am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in: K.H. Kaufhold and W. Reininghaus (ed.), Stadt und Handwerk in
Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Keulen/Weimar/Wenen, 2000) 249-251.
33
HCO, IA025, inv. nos. 309-312.
34
GA Den Bosch, Old City Archive, inv. nos. 1433-1443 compared with inv. no. 1452.
35
G. Rooijakkers, Rituele repertoires. Volkscultuur in oostelijk Noord-Brabant 1559-1853 (Nijmegen, 1994) 307308.
11