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?

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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 orphanage-

affiliate 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

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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).

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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 native-

born 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 Amsterdam-

born 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 native-

born 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 very few

14

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.

15

1 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).5 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.