Macht in De Metropool (original) (raw)

Current historiography endorses a narrative that the political elite of pre-industrial gateway cities became more ‘open’ in the wake of efflorescence and that their city councils became populated with merchants. Yet, according to the existing literature, Antwerp challenges this narrative, as the influx of merchants was very limited during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Antwerp transformed from a medium-sized Brabantine city into the leading economic centre in western Europe. Moreover, scholars disagree on whether the economic expansion had any impact at all on the composition and profile of Antwerp's political elite. By analysing the social composition of the city council and how this evolved from the beginning of Antwerp's commercial expansion around 1400 until its apogee around 1550, I revisit the question whether Antwerp constitutes an exception to the established pattern of elite formation in gateway cities and, if so, why.

The government of pre-modern European cities had a broad range of functions, which it fulfilled in a relatively autonomous way. They had to provide jurisdiction, regulations of economic life, administration maintain the public order and to organize the public space, that is the streets, squares bridges and public buildings. By and by it increasingly provided services to the urban community, including the provision of economic infrastructure, poor relief, teaching, and health services. The city was, however not the exclusive provider of such services. Many remained in private hands or were managed by ecclesiastic organisations, craft guilds or fraternities. Hence, poor relief was generally in the hand of ecclesiastic organisations, while craft guilds provided social security for their members and their families. The city government regularly sustained these associations by means of subsidies, and provided regulations, without however mingeling with the actual work of the providers. T...

This article uses space syntax analysis to explore the relationship between the spatial configuration of the city of Antwerp and the organisation of its trades and occupations in the early 19th century. A cadastral map from 1835 and a commercial almanac for 1838 were used to map the occupations held by the inhabitants of some 10,667 plots. Antwerp maintained a medieval spatial configuration at this time, with a strong ‘background network’ of distributed streets and continuous public spaces that privileged movement and encounter. However a ‘foreground network’ of streets was still found to be more accessible to global through movement. The spatial analysis of economic activity found a low level of clustering of different trades and occupations in particular parts of the city. Economic activities were rather broadly distributed throughout the background network of the street system. However, some trades and occupations took advantage of the foreground network of accessible streets more than others, and this was found to be statistically significant. Those occupations with high accessibility at all scales included retailers, wholesalers and artisans. While retailers would have prioritised access to passing trade, the latter two groups may have valued the circulation of goods, products and knowledge as much as the circulation of people.

In the 14th and 15th centuries Antwerp was a port of considerable dimensions and commercial importance. The Brabant fairs of Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp were a major meeting point for merchants from the Low Countries, the Rhineland and England from the fourteenth century onwards. This article gives a short synthesis of the existing literature on the earliest period of the commercial history of Antwerp, little of which has been published in English so far, and map the commercial activity in Antwerp in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It focuses on the trade with the staple goods grain, fish and salt. The testimonies related to the litigation concerning the staple between Antwerp and the towns of Brussels and Mechlin in the early fifteenth century provide detailed information concerning the destinations, traded products as well as trading practices and strategies, so that a picture of the commercial networks and practices of Antwerp during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century can be established which is complementary to the older historiography concerning the international trade at the Antwerp fairs.

This book encompasses work from Hugo Soly’s entire career. Even more than that. The major gain is his inductive method and actor’s perspective on capitalism that automatically follows from using the definition of capital as a process. By doing so, he has successfully introduced the “new history of capitalism” on the European mainland of the early modern period. And in doing so he gives the so-missed human face to macro stories such as the “invisible hand.”