Inequality among the poor of eighteenth century Amsterdam

Abstract

This paper examines nearly 1000 poor to middling citizen households from the city of Amsterdam with a view to assessing their place in the larger wealth distribution of the city as preliminarily sketched in the work of Soltow, van Zanden, and others. It utilizes the probate inventories drawn up by the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage, which when coupled with the marriage, baptism, and burial records of the city archives, allow for the reconstruction of the household circumstances, material, financial, and demographic, of the families associated with the institution. These data yield detailed information about precisely the kind of people who were systematically excluded from the tax registers and financial records which form the basis for our current knowledge about inequality among historical populations. The lower portion of the wealth distribution is described and then linked via housing rental rates to a more complete distribution of the various social classes in the city. Finally, the determinants of inequality within the ranks of the poor are examined and financial assets of even very small amounts are found to be critical in shaping the socio-economic experience of the lower citizenry.