Jaco Zuijderduijn

Spending, Saving, or Investing? Risk Management in Sixteenth‐Century Dutch Households

(This paper has been accepted (May 2011) for publication in the Economic History Review) In the past one of the main challenges to households was how to cope with adversity. War, plague, famine, and flood were a constant threat, and could reduce what little improvements families had made in productivity. Economic growth therefore required a means to absorb external adversities. To see how well late medieval households coped with adversity,this investigation focuses on the households of a small town and its surroundings in early modern Holland. Our findings reveal that several severe external events around 1500 had little effect on the general level or distribution of wealth, which suggests certain forms of insurance may have protected the population. The results show that households increasingly invested in capital markets rather than employ such techniques as scattered holdings and hoarding.. This fact indicates that such investment played a vital role in a household’s risk aversion strategy. The change from unproductive to more productive risk-aversion strategies also provides some clues about progress with respect to insurance during Holland’s financial revolution.

The organisation of markets as a key factor in the rise of Holland from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century: a test case for an institutional approach

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and some effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a tentative comparison with the functioning of markets in Flanders and eastern England.

The emergence of provincial debt in the county of Holland (thirteenth-sixteenth centuries)

Historians often use the concept of financial revolutions to explain the rise of the Dutch Republic, claiming that innovations in government funding allowed for marked progress in the field of public finance. The article focuses on the medieval precursors of the financial revolution, which the States of Holland brought about when they introduced province-wide public debt in the sixteenth century. The relevant techniques were already known, but predominantly used for political rather than financial purposes. Therefore techniques such as collective responsibility for debt were scarcely implemented. The article hypothesizes that sovereigns made use of the corporate personality of public bodies to increase ties with the main towns of Holland, and thus they used collective responsibility for debt to create stability. This only became a major financial instrument at the turn of the sixteenth century, when a financial crisis forced both sovereign and main towns to reorganize the medieval system of debt servicing. This centralization was crucial for the large public debt the county of Holland created under the Dutch Republic and may even be regarded as a step in the direction of national debt.

The Art of Counting: Reconstructing Numeracy of the Middle and Upper Classes on the Basis of Portraits in the Early Modern Low Countries

Abstract In the past decades, numeracy has taken an increasingly important place in the study of human capital formation, as well as in literacy studies and studies on formal education and book production. In order to understand levels of education, scholars have recently tried to develop new ways to measure the level of education, particularly because it has since become apparent that the measures of literacy historically have not always been very accurate. To measure numeracy, population surveys have been used to show that in the past respondents who were innumerate had a tendency to state their ages as round numbers, ending in 0 or 5. Finding suitable data in the pre-modern age to analyze numeracy via age heaping is a cumbersome task, however. In this article, the authors explore the possibilities of using art, especially individual portraits in which the age of the sitter is indicated on the portrait by means of the Aetatis suae formula, as a source to study human capital formation and numeracy. This article has two main objectives that contribute to different areas of economic history as well as art history. The authors first demonstrate which criteria should be taken into account when building a database, especially for artistic artifacts. Secondly, they use the dataset to contribute to the understanding of numeracy levels among the well-to-do in the Low Countries in the early modern period. The analysis will show that womens numeracy was often even higher than that of men. Notwithstanding the high overall level of womens numeracy compared to other countries in Europe, the authors will also test the recent hypothesis put forward by Peter Földvári, Bas Van Leeuwen, and Van Jieli Leeuwen-Li that when womens ages were mentioned, they were usually reported as part of a married couple and possibly adapted to the ages husbands reported.

‘Good, fresh air and an expert medical service’ : Old age pensioners in Leiden’s St. Hiëronymusdal retirement home, sixteenth century

Abstract The cost of retirement has a strong impact on social processes, both today and in the past. This study concerns the cost of retirement to St. Hiëronymusdal, a retirement home that was established outside the town of Leiden in the first half of the sixteenth century. Here individuals could purchase lifelong accommodation and care. If they had enough money to spend, they could opt for relatively luxurious contracts providing them with a private room; if they were short of means, they could opt for a basic contract providing them with a bed in a hall. We demonstrate that this allowed people from lower and middling groups to prepare for old age. Inexpensive retirement also gave individuals the option to spend their old age living independently from relatives, in a retirement home. These elderly people could do this on their own account by paying for care rather than depending on charity – which usually involved a loss of social prestige. We suggest that inexpensive retirement allowed family ties to become looser and thus facilitated such developments as migration and urbanization, and the rise of the European marriage pattern. Rising prices and declining interest rates caused retirement to become more expensive in later centuries though, posing challenges for the early modern elderly.

Grave concerns: Entailment and intergenerational agency in Amsterdam (1600–1800)

The entail was one of the few instruments that allowed pre-industrial testators to organize long-term strategies with respect to asset management: it allowed them to decide which goods descendants could alienate, and also after how many generations restrictions would be lifted. This article looks into the somewhat neglected topic of entailment in merchant towns, and thus contributes to our understanding of the goals urban testators set with respect to asset management, both for themselves and their descendants. Evidence from Amsterdam suggests that many testators were inclied to create long-term strategies once improvements had been made to the institutional framework surrounding the entail. Our analysis indicates that they were particularly looking for ways to prevent descendants from squandering patrimonial goods, but without reducing liquidity. This ‘intergenerational agency problem’ was solved by allowing groups of descendants to file requests to have entails cancelled.

Money, Currency and Crisis : In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000

Money is a core feature in all discussions of economic crisis, as is clear from the debates about the responses of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States to the 2008 economic crisis. This volume explores the role of money in economic performance, and focuses on how monetary systems have affected economic crises for the last 4,000 years. Recent events have confirmed that money is only a useful tool in economic exchange if it is trusted, and this is a concept that this text explores in depth. The international panel of experts assembled here offers a long-range perspective, from ancient Assyria to modern societies in Europe, China and the US. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, and to anyone who seeks to understand the economic crises of recent decades, and place them in a wider historical context.

The Other Fundamental Problem of Exchange: Mortgages, Defaults and Debtor Protection in Sixteenth-Century Holland

Mortgages, defaults and foreclosures of real estate have often been linked to the decline of peasant smallholding, and the rise of commercial farms run by townsmen and operated by landless labourers. However, little is known of how mortgage law was applied in practice. This chapter presents a case study, focusing on villagers who lost real estate during the process of expropriation for debt. It finds that there were large differences between the legal rights creditors held to pursue their debtors and their ability to enforce these rights. This was due to two characteristics of mortgage contracts: first, judges in local law courts had to authorize foreclosure, and as a result the execution of mortgage law was at their discretion. Second, judges looking to apply leniency were helped by the fact that mortgage contracts usually contained both a special and general mortgage. This allowed judges to allow only seizure of movables, thus preventing large-scale expropriation of real estate. As a result, the number of foreclosures of real estate was rather modest and expropriation was mainly applied in exceptional circumstances, such as debtors fleeing their creditors.

Introduction: Mortgages and Annuities in Historical Perspective

This Introduction outlines the key themes and concerns of Land and credit. It emphasizes the historical importance of the use of land and other real property as security for loans in the shape of mortgages and annuities. Such secured lending has often been ascribed a significant role in the development of the pre-industrial European economy, yet the exact character of that role has hitherto remained unclear, with some commentators placing an emphasis on peasant borrowing for investment while others stress peasant expropriation via mortgage foreclosure. The Introduction explores these possibilities and, drawing on the substantive chapters which follow, places particular emphasis on the part played by mortgage law and the evolution of mortgage instruments in shaping the extent to which borrowing on landed security was taken up in the European countryside in this period.

Coins, Currencies and Credit Instruments. Media of Exchange in Economic and Social History.

How, in historical societies, did people finalise transactions? Over the past few decades many economic and social historians have concerned themselves with this question, following the examples set by Douglass North and Craig Muldrew. Surprisingly, they have almost completely disregarded the most straightforward solution that historical societies had to offer, namely by using coins and currencies. Those scholars assumed, in part, that credit instruments were much more important in day-to-day trade. In this introduction we argue that studies into the unequal socioeconomic distribution of media of exchange - coins, currencies, and credit instruments - reveal mechanisms that are crucial to understanding broader social and economic processes. To this end, we discuss how the five articles in this special issue contribute to the growing literature on this topic. (Less)