Retail Ratios in the Netherlands, c. 1670 – c. 1815 Danielle van den Heuvel and Sheilagh Ogilvie University of Cambridge
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[email protected] CWPESH no. 2 Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Daniëlle Teeuwen for the collection of a substantial part of the data; Piet Lourens and Jan Lucassen for access to their Guilds Database; Jelle van Lottum for training and guidance on ArcGIS; Jeremy Edwards for his advice on the econometric analysis; and Jeremy Edwards, Oscar Gelderblom, Lex Heerma van Voss, Alexander Klein, Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and participants at the All-UC Conference 2011 on ‘Space and Place in Economic History’, for their comments on the paper. Abstract: The Netherlands are thought to have pioneered an early modern ‘Retail Revolution’ which reduced the transaction costs of bringing market wares to wider social strata, facilitating the Consumer Revolution. This paper addresses open questions about this development using a commonly used quantitative benchmark – the ‘retail ratio’, defined as the number of retailers per 1,000 inhabitants. We present a large dataset of Dutch retail ratios and use them to show how the density of retailing in the Netherlands varied across space, over time, and with other local characteristics. We conclude by drawing broader implications of our findings for understanding the early modern Retail Revolution. 1 1. Introduction Expanding market consumption is widely held to have fuelled European economic growth before industrialization. Between 1650 and 1800, a ‘Consumer Revolution’ is thought to have seen the middling sort spending lavishly on luxuries and the poorer strata buying cheap fashions and comestibles, while in a parallel ‘Industrious Revolution’ the growing demand for market goods motivated households to re- allocate time from leisure and household production to income-earning work.1 The Consumer and Industrious Revolutions not only needed people to shift into market work and earn more spending money.