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? 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 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 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 ever-married 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.
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 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 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]