The Logic of Charity: Amsterdam, 1800-1850 (review)

Almost one-quarter of Amsterdam's population received relief during the first half of the nineteenth century. Coping with the potential social problem that such a large group presented could have been a sizable challenge. However, as van Leeuwen demonstrates in this book, not only did the Amsterdam commercial and financial elites manage to provide for the city's paupers through their poor-relief system, but they also used it to perform additional functions as well.

The Logic of Charity combines archival research and secondary literature in history with sociology and welfare economics to create "a simple model of poor relief in preindustrial Europe" (1). This model emphasizes the interdependence of elites and paupers, by arguing that elites used poor relief as a method to control the masses whereas paupers used it as a survival strategy. Although a power imbalance clearly existed in this system, both groups ultimately engaged in such an exchange mechanism because they found it profitable.

Amsterdam elites, whose prosperity depended, at least in part, on the operation of the harbor, needed to maintain a low-wage labor reserve in the city. Shipping was a business with sharp seasonal fluctuations-busy in the summer but quiet in the winter. The seasonal pattern was additionally complicated by larger fluctuations in the business cycle. The poor relief system kept workers from removing themselves from the labor pool by migrating and permitted elites to spread the costs of avoiding labor shortages to other groups in the city.

The poor relief system was also structured in such a way that it helped to perpetuate the static class structure of nineteenth-century Amsterdam, and not just by demanding deferential behavior from paupers who received aid. Special assistance was also quietly rendered to the "genteel poor," those from wealthier groups who had fallen on hard times, so that they could keep up appearances. In addition, since minor privileges and increased status were obtained by middle-class people who assumed much of the practical work of relief, they, too, were encouraged to identify with the existing social order.

Van Leeuwen also examines the effectiveness of the relief system as a survival strategy for the poor in Amsterdam. Outdoor relief included not only cash and food and occasionally fuel or other goods, but also some medical care, education, and a few other services. This aid never reached a level that would alone support a family; paupers had to combine poor relief with other strategies, both legal and illegal, in order to survive.

If this book has any weakness, it is that van Leeuwen makes a stronger case for the relative value of poor relief versus other strategies, particularly illegal strategies, than the evidence would seem to allow. Indeed, illegal strategies were successful only when they were invisible, that is to say, when paupers who used them were able to stay out of the clutches of the law. This point makes any conclusions about paupers' perceptions of the relative value of one survival strategy over another somewhat problematic.

That said, The Logic of Charity provides an elegant model for explaining how poor relief worked well beyond the boundaries of Amsterdam. Since the Netherlands industrialized relatively late in Western Europe, its archives provide historians with opportunities to use nineteenth- century records to draw conclusions about preindustrial social structures that existed elsewhere in an earlier, more poorly documented Europe. That opportunity was used to advantage in this book.