"How It Came that the Bakers Bake No Bread": A Struggle for Trade Privileges in Seventeenth-Century New Amsterdam

Abstract

F OR two weeks in October i66i, New Amsterdam experienced a bread shortage. The bakers refused to comply with a local ordinance charging them to twice a week and to keep the town supplied with bread of sufficient weight and quality. The burgomasters who administered the municipal government sent for Hendrick Willemsen, a baker and bread inspector, and demanded to know how it came that the bakers no bread? Willemsen explained that the regulated price of bread was so low compared to the price of grain that the bakers were afraid to buy grain for beavers as they may suffer loss and that they ought not be obliged to twice a week. The burgomasters declared their intention to deliberate, so that neither the bakers on the one side nor the community on the other be taken short. At first, the authorities ordered the bakers to bake good bread and to keep continually large bread in the shops or risk exclusion from the trade for a period of a year and six weeks. Ten days later, they revised the ordinances relating to bread, increasing prices by IO percent. The bakers returned to regular baking, and New Amsterdam was assured of a bread supply.1 The dispute between New Amsterdam's bakers and its burgomasters seems familiar from accounts of the regulation of the grain trade and baking in early modern Europe. In the Old World, paternalistic urban authorities regulated commercial activities considered too important to the general good to be left to the whims of the market or the discretion of profit-minded individuals.2 In the New World, the scarcity of labor, abundance of land, and