Chapter Thirteen
Becoming Consumers: Asiatic Goods in Migrant and Native-born Middling Households in 18th
Century Amsterdam
Anne McCants
Eighteenth Century Amsterdam was a city of immigrants. It had experienced an exponential
growth in both population and economic activity during the golden age of Dutch maritime
supremacy in the preceding century, and continued to exert a powerful attractive force on
migrants from both its nearby rural hinterlands as well as all parts of Europe throughout the
Eighteenth Century. Many of these immigrants were desperately poor, with the women
clustered in low wage domestic service while their male counterparts gravitated towards what
were frequently fatal occupations in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) or as mariners of
other sorts. At the other end of the spectrum, a relative few of these immigrants were
fabulously wealthy—most notably the Sephardic Jewish and Huguenot merchants fleeing
persecution in either the Iberian Peninsula or Louis XIV’s France, or from the economic collapse
of Antwerp following decades of war with Spain. The material culture of these prosperous and
entrepreneurial migrants has been well documented; indeed, evidence of its key artifacts
remains well preserved in museum collections and depicted in gallery-worthy representational
art. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the material culture of poor immigrants is mostly lost
to us on account of both its sparseness and its meanness; what there was—and there was not
much—was not worth saving. The material experience of middling immigrants, however, which
was neither totally constrained by abject poverty nor the product of an elite culture that easily
transcended particular localities, has received less attention. But it should be of great interest
for our understanding of how people assimilated into their new environments when they
moved in the early modern period. Did they take on the material trappings of their new
location, or did they carry with them and preserve the artifacts of their life prior to moving?
1
Furthermore, how did their economic standing interact with the opportunities (or perhaps
pressures) to engage in new kinds of consumption afforded by residence in a new location,
particularly if that location happened also to be the much-lauded entrepot (stapelmarkt) for the
world: Amsterdam?
Despite the many achievements of a now voluminous literature on the consumer
culture of the Eighteenth Century, including an increasing number of studies that specifically
engage in comparative work across regions and across the rural-urban divide, we still know
almost nothing about the differential experience of people who lived side by side, but who had
come from very different places of origin. This is a lamentable lacuna, of course, if we want to
more fully understand the forces that drive decision-making in consumer practices, particularly
during a period that witnessed as much rapid change as did the Eighteenth Century. People
who live in close proximity to each other are likely to be exposed to the same location-specific
information and market opportunities, just as people with the same wealth or income profiles
can be expected to share common economic access to a range of goods and services as
delimited by price. However, neither co-location, nor economic capacity can account for what
might remain as very different processes of taste formation and levels of social or cultural
capital relevant to material practices in a specific location across a range of individual
households. It is the exploration of the contribution of these, as it were more interior,
processes to the acquisition of new types of goods that is the next frontier in historical research
on the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ of the Eighteenth Century.
Goods must be available for purchase in order to be consumed, and their use must be
understood before individuals can acquire a taste for them. Obviously, they must also be
‘affordable’ in some literal sense of the word. But given the flexibility with which many goods
can be substituted for many others, information is increasingly recognized as at least as
important as economic means for the development of markets for novel goods in particular.
When we think about the new fabrics, foodstuffs, household products and tablewares that
circulated under the aegis of the various East India companies, and the private traders they
facilitated, questions of information and cultural capital become especially important. (By new
2
here I have in mind both significant variations in the material of an old product, so silk cloth
instead of wool, or porcelain vessels instead of earthenware, and more dramatically those
products that were entirely new, most obviously tea, coffee and chocolate.) Historians have by
now documented quite extensively both the depth and breadth of the diffusion of novel or
even exotic Asiatic goods across northwestern Europe over the course of the Eighteenth
Century, so the facts of the case no longer cause surprise or provoke doubt. Work remains,
however, to be done to fully explore the process behind this outcome. Broadly speaking,
historians have looked to two very different types of mechanisms to explain the introduction
and adoption of new goods—one economic and the other cultural. Studies that rely on probate
inventory evidence to document the expansion of new consumer goods in this period all show
quite clearly that wealthier households were earlier and more extensive adopters of the ‘goods
from the east’ than were their poorer neighbors. As wealth increases, the range and quantity
of a household’s possessions expands. Yet another well documented phenomenon is the
diffusion of new consumer practices from port cities and other centers of trade out into
increasingly rural hinterlands. Wealth alone is not enough to explain the full range of the
consumer changes that took place over the Eighteenth Century. The adoption of new
consumption patterns also required the acquisition of new kinds of cultural capital.
But how exactly did early modern Europeans come to acquire the right kind of cultural
capital to become consumers of previously unknown goods from a distant place? What
allowed for the (what appears to have been easy) adoption of these goods in so many places?
What cultural preconditions were necessary, or helpful? How did new practices associated with
these goods get internalized? How did they change the rhythm of the day, the look and flavor
of cuisine, the norms of social engagement? And most importantly for my purposes here, what
was the background that facilitated participation in new routines of consumption for some
people more readily than for others? All of these questions lend themselves well to a study
whose comparative lens is focused not on two different places (with their attendant differences
in economic opportunity or market access), but on two different kinds of people residing in the
3
same place but having come from different cultural origins. That is to say, they lend themselves
well to a study of migrant consumer practices.
My study here draws on a unique data set to directly explore the tension between the
financial and cultural stimulants to the new consumer practices. After-death inventories
collected by the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage (Burgerweeshuis), mostly of deceased
parents leaving children to the institution, capture a broader range—one that is importantly
and unusually skewed towards the lower citizenry—of household wealth profiles than do the
more typical inventory sources found in most notarial records. Furthermore, the households
captured in my data set of 914 inventories drawn up between 1740-1782 have also been
nominally linked to the Amsterdam marriage registers allowing for the identification of evermarried household heads and their spouses by their place of birth. Individuals native to
Amsterdam and born to citizen parents received their citizenship automatically. But
immigrants to the city from anywhere else, either in the Dutch Republic or from further afield,
had to purchase their citizenship for a considerable fee. As a result of this steep financial
barrier to entry, the native-born households in my sample were significantly poorer—with
median assets less than half as much as that of their immigrant counterparts who had to have
prospered sufficiently to be able to purchase their citizenship in the first place. On the basis of
wealth alone we would expect the immigrant households in the Orphanage’s purview to
possess more and better quality new goods and to do so earlier in time than their poorer native
peers. However, this does not prove to be unambiguously the case. Although the wealthier
immigrant citizen households were slightly more likely to possess at least one item of porcelain,
tea or coffee wares, or Asiatic textiles, than the native born, the latter nonetheless often owned
larger quantities of these items once they had crossed the wealth threshold for ownership at
all. Given the tremendous gap in the wealth profiles between the two groups, the
comparatively modest adoption of the new goods by the immigrant group suggests that a
lifetime of residence in Amsterdam conferred a kind of cultural capital that only a substantial
financial advantage could overcome in the making of new consumer habits.
4
The Data
The after-death household inventories collected by the Amsterdam Burgerweeshuis offer an
unusual opportunity to investigate the consumer culture and wealth profiles of middling
Amsterdam natives versus those who had obtained citizen status despite being immigrants to
the city, as households from both populations are captured in the records of the orphanage.
The regents of the Burgerweeshuis required that inventories be drawn up for the estates of all
citizen decedents leaving minor children to be cared for at municipal expense. They did this
with a view to assessing the ability of those estates to contribute to the costs of maintaining the
orphaned children in the institution. Thus, even the deceased parents of very poor children
were evaluated, so long as they were citizens of the city and their children were eligible for
care. As a result, this collection represents an unusually broad spectrum of the citizen working
poor, as well as petty shopkeepers and craftsmen of the city. While the archive contains close
to 1,500 inventories, the sample reported on here is composed of only those dated between
May 1740 and the end of April 1782.
Admittance into the Burgerweeshuis was open to all fully orphaned children whose
parents (both of them individually) had held citizenship in the city of Amsterdam for at least
seven years. There is, however, plenty of evidence to suggest that, as in many early modern
communities, the well-to-do did not avail themselves of such public services, but rather found
ways to care for their orphans within their own kin networks, thereby preserving familial
control over the assets associated with the households from which wealthier children had
come. The immigrant underclass was also excluded from the orphanage by the combined cost
of citizenship and the rules for longevity as a citizen. So it was that the Burgerweeshuis could
understand itself to be primarily an institution catering to those of the middling sort. The
inventories themselves do in fact confirm just this situation as I have shown in work published
elsewhere from this data.1
Somewhat surprisingly, given the Burgerweeshuis Regent’s own conception of their
charitable mission to the burgerij, (that is, the respectable middle class of the city) the
population that actually found its way into their orphanage (and thereby into their
5
bookkeeping) was by any absolute measure a poor one. During a period in which the
Burgerweeshuis itself spent f150 (Dutch guilders) per annum to care for each child, the median
household associated with the institution had total assets at death amounting to only f69—
dropping to f52 if the 133 inventories recording no possessions at all are factored in with an
asset value set at zero. Once the outstanding debts of the deceased are accounted for, the
median household actually had a negative net worth. Yet some types of households were
consistently poorer even than others. Male decedents enjoyed greater assets than did female
decedents (with median assets of f62 and f47 respectively), although they also tended to incur
more and higher debts (See Table 16.1). This itself was a sign of men’s greater economic
activity in a society where bills were typically only settled at long intervals. But even greater
disparities are evident across household types than can be captured by gender alone. Married
couples (that is, male or female decedents who had remarried after the death of the spouse
with whom they had begat the orphans in question), regardless of whether they entered the
books at the death of the husband or the wife, enjoyed substantially greater assets than any
other group. The contrast with widows is especially great, with the experience of widowers
falling in between. Even those who had never married (all of whom were former orphan
inmates by necessity of the data collection process captured here) had higher median assets
than did the widows. The median household assets of married couples were f83 compared to
f52, f31, and f63 for widowers, widows, and the never-married respectively. Moreover, this
result is not simply an artifact of age at death. The median age at death of the inventoried
subjects does not vary systematically across the wealth categories, nor do the median asset
figures for the various demographic groups change perceptibly when controlling for age at
death. The real relative strength of households headed by two adults should not be terribly
surprising, however, given that for almost all of these families, the main source of total
household assets resided in the movable goods themselves, and intact households tended to be
larger and blessed with more possessions than broken households, regardless of the age of the
household head. Yet it is worth remembering that both widows and widowers had at one point
been in similarly complete households, so there must have been some process by which they
disacquired material possessions following the death of their spouse. Indeed, despite these
6
local differences between the various types of families associated with the Burgerweeshuis, the
overall sample actually occupied a fairly narrow approximate range between the second and
fourth deciles of the larger distribution of social standing (estimated by a combination of
housing rents, assets at death, the city income tax records, and citizenship status) in
eighteenth-century Amsterdam.2
While Amsterdam natives who sent orphaned children to the Burgerweeshuis upon their
deaths were more likely to live in the heart of the old city in the so-called Centrum (as opposed
to comparable citizen immigrants who found themselves disproportionately in the newer
neighborhoods such as the Jordaan and the western Islands), they were nonetheless not as
materially successful as these immigrants. The latter typically occupied housing with a greater
number of rooms, filled with more, and more highly valued, possessions, were more likely to
run their own shops, and possessed both greater total assets and higher debt burdens than
their native peers (See Table 16.2.) This may seem a surprising finding given what historians
already know about the grinding poverty that characterized many of the unskilled immigrants
that made their way to Amsterdam over the course of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries. However, the segment of the immigrant population captured by the Burgerweeshuis
bookkeeping had already demonstrated an important measure of their economic success in
their very capacity to purchase citizenship, particularly if they had to do so twice—that is,
separately for each of the partners, both husband and wife. It is the resulting self-selection
effect that yields the unusual situation of wealthier immigrant than native-born decedents
within a group that was on the whole still of modest means despite its status as members of
the citizenry (burgerschaap). That is to say, the Burgerweeshuis was inaccessible to very poor
immigrants, and similarly unattractive to the truly wealthy ones just as it was to wealthy
natives.
Determinants of consumer behavior
Before turning to the specific question of the material cultural practices of the orphanageaffiliate immigrant households in comparison to their native peers, we need first to understand
7
the broader context of the consumer goods found in the after-death inventories of the entire
population associated with the Burgerweeshuis. In work I have done elsewhere, I have noted
that a remarkable 28.5 per cent of all the inventories drawn up by the orphanage did not even
report the presence of a bed in the household, despite it being the most rudimentary and
widely owned item found in the records.3 Only 68 per cent of the households owned at least
one blanket. The same proportion owned at least one chair, 60 per cent a cupboard or
wardrobe, and 58 per cent a mirror, that most quintessential item of Dutch material culture.
Many fewer, 25 per cent, owned paintings (all of which were untitled and not described). 25
per cent also owned at least one item made of silver, usually a button(s) but also occasionally a
piece of jewelry or a dish. Only 21 per cent of the households could claim either a Bible or
Psalmbook, while gold wares were even less in evidence, found in only 12 per cent of the
households. Perhaps most surprising to modern readers is the incredibly low incidence of forks
found in these inventories, with only 5 per cent of all households able to claim even one.
Despite the fact that the fork famously made its debut in the Italian Renaissance, it remained
still an extremely exotic object for these eighteenth-century Amsterdamers. Overall then, the
picture is one of a considerable poverty of possessions with many of the households associated
with the orphanage lacking those basic goods that would seem essential even for a poor
household to maintain the simplest rituals of everyday life. This context of material deprivation
then is the one in which all the other results reported below need to be understood.
So far I have made no mention of any of the exotic goods that were invoked in the
framing of my research question. While it might seem unlikely that they would be found at all
(or certainly not widely) among this population given the pitiful evidence recounted above, this
is not in fact the case. As the first row of Table 16.3 attests, households associated with the
Burgerweeshuis did manage to participate, at least tangentially, in the new consumer culture of
the Eighteenth Century made possible by the Dutch East India Company and her competitors.
Just over half of all the households could claim to own at least one item specially named for use
in the consumption of tea or coffee, and a similar number possessed at least one piece of
Delftware, itself not an Asiatic import but a substitute for the same of relatively recent (mid- to
8
late-Seventeenth Century) European mimicry. Fewer households owned an object made of
porcelain (only 37.6 per cent), and even fewer an item fashioned out of silk, chintz, or even
cotton (22.6 per cent, 14.6 per cent and 23.3 per cent respectively). Nonetheless, even the
truly extravagant fabric chintz, only available as an import and not yet as an imitation of local
production, was almost three times as prevalent in the inventories as the, what seems to us
anyway, entirely prosaic fork.
So how do we make sense of this situation in which a great many households seem not
to have managed even a rudimentary material culture, while others similarly situated—at least
in terms of their reliance on the Burgerweeshuis to care for their orphaned children—were able
to participate in the burgeoning world of chinoiserie, albeit in perhaps a rather limited way.
One obvious place to begin is to recognise that, even within the context of the relatively narrow
wealth profile of the group of households associated with the orphanage, there was
nonetheless a range of economic, demographic and occupational situations in which these
households found themselves, a diversity that allowed for what were ultimately significant
differences in their material experiences.4 As we know from Engel’s Law and extensions to it,
an additional few guilders of wealth has a much greater impact on consumption behavior at the
bottom of the wealth spectrum than it does for those who are higher up along the spectrum.
The consumer impact of any given absolute value of additional wealth diminishes towards zero
as wealth increases.
If we sort the orphanage inventory population into three broad wealth categories
(based on their total assets as reported in the inventories themselves) it is very easy to see that
wealthier households participated more fully in the consumption of the new ‘Asiatic’ goods,
whether actual imports or European-produced imitations. We can measure both the incidence
of participation across households (see Table 16.3) and the quantity of items possessed by any
given household (see Table 16.4). Among those households whose total assets amounted to
less than f15, both metrics reveal a very modest propensity to own any of the six reference
goods selected for this study (porcelain, tea and coffee wares, delftware, silk, chintz, and cotton
fabrics). For most of the items in question fewer than 5 per cent of the poorest households
9
participated at all, and even when they did it was with only one or two discrete objects.
Substantially greater ownership of these goods is found among households whose total assets
ranged from f15 to less than f200. Finally, consistent with other studies of a similar nature, the
highest rates of ownership are found among those whose assets were f200 or more. Indeed, 91
per cent of this last group owned at least one item for the making or serving of tea or coffee,
three-quarters of them owned delftware, and 66 per cent of them owned porcelain. This result
is, of course, hardly a surprise, especially given that wealth is here being measured in large part
by the value of the surviving household possessions themselves.
A much more unexpected finding comes when we ask the same ownership questions of
the data sorted not by wealth, but by the location of origin of the household heads.5 My
reading of the growing literature that compares the material culture of Amsterdam (and other
North Sea or English Channel entrepot cities more generally) with rural and/or other
Continental locations suggests that the Amsterdam natives should be the group most heavily
invested in the possession of the six reference goods under consideration here. Yet, as the
results in Table 16.3 show without ambiguity, it was the double native-to-Amsterdam couples
that were the least likely to participate in new kinds of consumption as compared to all other
possible groups (with the exception of the unknown category where it is certainly the case that
there is too much white noise in the data to accord any meaning to the results). A cursory
reading of this evidence seems to invalidate much of what we thought we knew about the
cultural transmission of new consumer practices: that is, that information and consumer habits
radiated outward from large port cities in Holland and England to smaller towns and eventually
the countryside, or from north-western Europe more generally to those parts of Europe to the
east, south and far north. Remarkably, even the small number of orphanage affiliates (only 32)
who can be identified as having a direct link with the Dutch East India Company (or ocean-going
seafaring more generally), do not seem to have fared any better in their access to Asiatic goods
or their imitations (with the notable exception of cotton fabrics which are found in relative
abundance in the VOC affiliate households).
10
The equally small number of households (34) that are linked through either the husband
or the wife, or both, to one of the German or Baltic cities of the old Hanseatic League seem by
contrast to have been much more progressive in their consumption habits, showing a clear
superiority of access to new tablewares over either the Amsterdam natives or those who
actually worked on the high seas. The only notable exception to this finding is in the case of
cotton textiles or clothing. The households associated with the VOC were slightly more likely to
have an item made of cotton than were the households that originated in Hansa port cities,
despite the fact that the latter were much more likely to be headed by married couples with
many more possessions overall than the former. Almost half of the Hansa affiliate households
were headed by an intact marriage, whereas less than one-quarter of the VOC affiliates were so
situated. Indeed, almost half of the latter were men living alone at the time of death. That
they had little porcelain or tea wares is perhaps not so surprising then, but one cannot help but
wonder if they had acquired their taste for cotton clothing while working abroad?
This does not explain the larger fact, however, that households headed by Amsterdam
natives were so much less likely to participate in the new consumption than their immigrant
peers. We need to make sense of this rather dramatic anomaly from what we would expect
based on the preponderance of the research on consumer culture in the Eighteenth Century?
Fortunately, this puzzle is also not so difficult to explain with some deeper investigation. As a
review of the peculiar features of the composition of the Burgerweeshuis population reminds
us, in this case the immigrant households were substantially more prosperous than their native
peers. They lived in more spacious housing, ran their own shops at three times the rate of the
Amsterdam-born couples, and were almost twice as likely to be in the highest wealth category
(and similarly only about half as likely to be in the lowest). Moreover, the 32 households of
East India sailors and soldiers were all headed by men born in Amsterdam, (and in the cases
where they were currently, or had been previously married, it was to spouses from
Amsterdam). While the lower ranks of the VOC labor force was of course increasingly filled by a
great flood of immigrants to Amsterdam as the Eighteenth Century wore on, such men were
not among those who could afford to purchase the rights of citizenship. So it is not particularly
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surprisingly that the VOC affiliates in the Burgerweeshuis data match fairly closely the wealth
profile of the larger group of Amsterdam natives from which they were drawn, with their
relative poverty offering yet another reason why their access to new commodities was more
limited than might have been expected.
It seems then that the relatively greater wealth of the immigrant households was
enough, in the case of the Burgerweeshuis population anyway, to mask any advantage that
might otherwise have been held by those who had spent their entire lives exposed to the social
and cultural practices associated with the new commodities that passed regularly through the
port of Amsterdam. But this does not mean that the native born were limited in their social
capacity to engage in new consumption practices. Rather, the opposite may still have been the
case, if it had not been for the severe economic limitations faced by this group. It is tempting
to propose to test this hypothesis using regression analysis to tease out the relative importance
of the two factors—wealth and location of origin—for stimulating new consumer habits, as
measured by either the ownership share, the absolute quantity of goods possessed, or the
value of the objects inventoried. However, it is a temptation worth resisting given the absence
of an independently generated measure of wealth or economic status, and the relatively small
sample sizes of the cross-tabulated cells (particularly for the various fabrics which were found
in less than a quarter of all households in the inventory study as a whole).
Fortunately, a much less ambiguous measure of the relative strength of cultural and
financial factors can be devised from the information that is available for this population. Table
16.5 reports two measures I have calculated that reveal what are essentially the threshold
levels of household wealth (as captured solely by the inventories) necessary for participation in
the consumption of various goods, including the six Asiatic or imitation goods already discussed
above, and with the addition of the Dutch-manufactured heavy woolen fabric (lakens) as a
useful comparison good representing a more traditional consumer culture. The first measure,
labeled ‘lowest asset value,’ indicates the minimum household asset value for an inventory
containing that good as calculated separately for each demographic sub-group. The second
metric, labeled the ‘density asset value,’ captures the point in the spectrum of ranked asset
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values for each demographic sub-group at which ownership of the good in question becomes
dense. The actual ownership proportion that is required to constitute density is different for
each good and varies according to the proportion of households in possession of that item in
the total sample. For example, delftware is considered to have reached a density of ownership
when at least half or more of the households in the given sub-group possess at least one piece
because slightly more than half of the total population captured here owned at least one piece
of delftware. By contrast, on account of its lower overall prevalence, silk is considered to have
achieved density when only one-third of the households possess at least one item. No density
value has been determined in the case of the asset value rankings for silk and chintz ownership
for some of the demographic sub-groups because the total number of owners was too small to
provide a reliable and unambiguous tipping point in each of the data series.
So what do the calculated threshold asset values indicate? In every case, the nativeborn Amsterdam households reveal the consumption of new goods at lower levels of total asset
valuations than do their peers born outside of the city, often by a sizable margin—at half, a
third or dramatically in the case of porcelain at one-fiftieth of the value. Likewise, density of
ownership is also reached at much lower levels of asset valuations for the native born than for
the immigrants, with the one exception of tea and coffee goods where the two populations are
statistically indistinguishable from each other.6 This certainly suggests that if the Amsterdamborn households in the Burgerweeshis population had enjoyed the relative wealth profiles of
their immigrant peers, but still maintained their cultural propensity for participation in the new
consumer culture, they would have indeed shown much higher rates of participation overall
than did the newcomers to the city, just as we would have expected from the historiographical
literature on this phenomenon. That the Amsterdam-born orphanage affiliates had even as
much access to the world of porcelain, tea and exotic fabrics as their inventories reveal them to
have had is truly remarkable given their overwhelmingly dismal financial profiles. The surviving
contents of their homes at the time of their deaths reveal simultaneously the depth of their
poverty and the seeming adventurousness of their otherwise limited consumption capacity.
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Conclusions
The factors that allow (or encourage) some individuals to purchase new goods, acquire new
tastes, and take on new habits, have been a source of great interest to historians of the early
modern period. While every age experiences the opportunity for novelty in some form or
another, there can be little doubt that for Europeans living in the age of the great sailing ships,
and the merchant companies which perfected their use, opportunities for novelty arrived more
frequently and more pervasively than was the case at any historical moment prior to theirs.
What is more, these Europeans seem to have risen to the challenge presented by novel
commodities and their associated practices with a kind of enthusiasm not apparent in every
society similarly situated. For some time it seemed enough for historians to argue (somewhat
circularly) that it was rapidly increasing wealth which allowed these early modern Europeans to
take on new consumer behaviors with such enthusiasm, while at the same time documenting
their improving wealth profile by that very consumer behavior. More recently, social and
cultural historians have suggested that it is not enough just to be able to afford new consumer
practices regardless of how that economic capacity might be identified. It is also necessary that
both flows of information and community norms of behavior—what we might think of as social
capital—prime the pump for the diffusion of new commodities across the landscape, whether it
is understood in physical, sociological or economic terms.
In what is a very rare opportunity for using historical data, this paper has tested the
relative strengths of these two positions for a very specific population: poor to middling
eighteenth-century citizens of Amsterdam, some of whom were native to the city and others of
whom had migrated in from either near or far, only acquiring citizenship by virtue of a sizable
cash payment. While many of the immigrants enjoyed a disproportionate economic capacity
for the adoption of new consumer goods, their enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century craze for
chinoiserie nonetheless paled in comparison to that of their relatively less prosperous nativeborn neighbors. For the latter consistently reveal themselves to have been eager participants
in the new consumption practices, adopting the new products just as soon as they could
possibly afford them, even if it meant the acquisition of only one item and that in a context of
14
very few other material possessions. Not surprisingly, their first point of connection was almost
always through a lower quality variant, for example an object that the bookkeeper might
describe as old, well-worn or even broken. Immigrants, on the other hand, seem to have added
exotic tablewares and fabrics only once they were first relatively well supplied with more
traditional goods.
It would of course be foolish to disregard the power that financial capacity has to limit
consumer choices. But if the evidence presented here is at all indicative of the experience of
other populations that exhibit similarly diverse geographic origins, we should not overlook the
importance of information and location-specific social capital to informing consumer choices.
Indeed, if the second-hand market, or even trash scrounging, had in fact been an important
venue for the transfer of exotic goods in a dilapidated state (which seems an entirely
reasonable proposition for the population of orphanage affiliates) the advantages conferred by
local knowledge would be even more apparent. Thus, even people of very limited financial
means might exercise the choice to acquire one or two high-status goods (with status being
conferred via social learning) over against a potentially larger array of more ordinary goods.
Living in a port city of the global caliber of Amsterdam towards the end of her ‘golden age’ must
have complicated those choices considerably. But growing up in that environment also seems
to have equipped people, even those who were desperately poor by our reckoning, to make
such choices with a surer hand than their economic fortunes alone might have suggested
possible.
See Anne McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Anne McCants, ‘Inequality among the poor of
eighteenth century Amsterdam’, Explorations in Economic History, 44 (2007), pp. 1-21.
2 See McCants, ‘Inequality’.
3 Anne McCants, ‘Poor consumers as global consumers: the diffusion of tea and coffee drinking in
the eighteenth century,’ Economic History Review, 61, S1 (2008), p. 185.
4 I estimate the Burgerweeshuis population to have hailed from roughly the second and third wealth
deciles in the city, while de Vries and van de Woude estimate that immigrants without citizenship
made up a sizeable number of those in the first and second deciles. McCants, ‘Inequality’; Jan de
Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the
Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
1
15
Because the location of origin is known only from the household linkage process between the
inventory series and the Amsterdam marriage registers, data on location is limited to those
decedents who had been married at least once (although all former orphans were by definition
from Amsterdam), and for whom the marriage had taken place in Amsterdam. For any couple that
came to buy dual citizenship sometime after migrating to Amsterdam as an already married couple,
no identification of their city of origin can be made.
6 It should be noted that the difference in the case of tea and coffee goods is not statistically
significant given the relatively small number of cases in the sample that include relevant data. So
although the immigrant couples reach a density of tea and coffee goods ownership at an absolutely
lower asset value than do the native couples, the difference cannot be said to be reliably different
from zero.
5
16