Poor boys, poor chances? Training underprivileged youngsters in early modern Antwerp (1580–1780) University of Antwerp
It is generally assumed that from the eighteenth century onwards new manufacturing processes stimulated a type of child labour that was unprecedented in the pre-industrial period. The increasingly mechanised production of standardised goods would have resulted in an enormous increase in the number of children who were working as cheap, unskilled labourers in Europe’s large ateliers and earliest factories. The accompanying deskilling of ...