Bruno Blondé (Antwerp) (Web), Henning Bovenkerk (Münster), and Marcus Falk (Lund)

Time: 15.-16.12.2023
Venue: Antwerp University, Belgium
Proposals by: 1509.2023

In this workshop, participants will discuss one of the most striking paradoxes of the late early modern period: how did rural households of almost all social strata improve their material living standards and increase their consumption, while real wages and agricultural productivity during the same period declined, and the real cost of primary agricultural goods increased?
One of the probably most influential attempts to bridge this paradox is the industrious revolution theory, presented by Jan de Vries (2008). Inspired by probate inventory evidence from the Frisian countryside, the theory appears to hold for the relatively highly urban northwest-European economic core regions of southern England and the Low Countries (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2008; Malanima & Pinchera 2012); regions with early developed urban economies and easy access to new, imported consumer goods (McCants 2008). It has however not been accepted without critique, especially when applied on the more rural European peripheries (Ogilvie 2010, Hutchison 2014, Allen & Weisdorf 2011; Horrel, Humphries, & Weisdorf 2021; Malanima & Pinchera 2012; Gary & Olsson 2020). Nor does a consensus exist about the significance of the triangle industriousness-living standards-consumer patterns, as regional evolutions could be profoundly different. Whereas several studies have provided evidence for an increase of number of days worked per year using a variety of methods (e. g., Dribe and van der Putte 2012, Humphries and Weisdorf 2019, Jensen et al. 2019), some authors suggest that an increase in industriousness mere compensated for a decline in wages and did not enable households to benefit from an increased variety in the supply of consumer goods. Moreover regional variations in material living standards do not simply mirror differences in the degree of commercialization of the rural economy, as suggested by De Vries (Blondé, Lambrecht, Ryckbosch & Vermoesen 2019; Poukens 2012). Finally, social variations in the acceptance of ‘new’ consumer patterns have been discovered: in some cases changes were clearly introduced at the top (or in the city) before trickling down to the less privileged, but … read more and source (Web).