The embarrassment of riches? Inequality and the Dutch material culture. Amsterdam, 1581-1780.

At present, the historical study of social inequality ranks high on the research agenda, and in the past years our knowledge of changing income and wealth inequality has progressed significantly. The major ambition of this project is to contribute to a more balanced multidimensional view on social inequality by studying the material inequality in "Golden Age" Amsterdam. In so doing we will contribute to a deeper understanding of one of the critical transition periods in the history of European material culture. Recent historiography has credited the Dutch society of the seventeenth century for its pivotal role in the genesis of a new, allegedly more modern consumer culture. Thanks to the influence of the urban middling layers of society, the argument goes, the very nature of consumption changed in this era/area. When it comes to 'material culture' in the Netherlands luxury consumption is thought to have emancipated from conspicuous consumption, a luxury model which traditionally was associated with skewed societies. Rather than reproducing social inequalities, which 'old luxury' consumer pattern did, 'new luxuries' targeted the middling sort of people and served multiple goals such as comfort, pleasure, respectability. This project is the first major attempt to empirically verify this authoritative Dutch urban consumer hypothesis by explicitly linking it to debates on social and economic inequality.

Keywords:CONSUMPTION HISTORY

Disciplines:Social differentiation, stratification and social mobility, Cultural history, Early modern history, Socio-economic history

Project type:Collaboration project