Well-Being in Amsterdam’s Golden Age (review)

Toward the middle of the twentieth century, the people of the Netherlands decided to use taxation and social spending to fashion one of the more equitable distributions of income among developed countries. Since that time Dutch academics have been more occupied than their counterparts anywhere else, in social democracies or other polities, in studying inequality. Derek Phillips’s part in this has been to examine some of its behavioral aspects and to make the argument that inequality extends beyond status and income into and through the territory of human well-being: power, self-esteem, autonomy, and humiliation as well as housing, working conditions, and life expectancy. Inspired by Amartya Sen, Phillips contends that inequality pervades every aspect of life. In this book he carries the case he has made about inequality in the present into the past—Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century—describing a rigidly stratified city mired in a culture of domination and subordination and laboring under a vast disparity between the elite and the poor.

Readers of this journal will be interested in Phillips’s assessment of health and survival risks. Those with a taste for social science exposition may want this kind of background to the era of Rembrandt and Vermeer but also of Adriaan van Ostade, Adriaen Brouwer, and Teniers the Younger, who depicted the lives of ordinary people. Readers may also be interested in having Phillips’s summaries of recent scholarship from Dutch academics, much of it published in Dutch.

With perhaps two hundred thousand inhabitants, Amsterdam was not the largest city in Europe in Phillips’s period, but its inhabitants suffered the penalty in earlier death that was then associated with urban life and its dense housing, crowded quarters, and inadequate means for disposing of human waste. Amsterdammers almost certainly did not live as long as their counterparts in rural England. Phillips argues that their survival must have been stratified by economic class, as it was in Geneva, but he is unable to produce much evidence on this point. People died mainly from infectious diseases, probably not cholera, as Phillips alleges, but certainly from dysentery, smallpox, typhoid, and others. They died mostly in early childhood; many perished as infants from causes that remain difficult to specify. Wealthier people lived along the three great canals, in a newly redeveloped and less crowded area, and may have separated their persons to some degree from the poorer people who lived in the Jordaan, on the outskirts, in a “great stinking garbage dump” (p. 67). But the rich mingled with the poor, who included domestic servants as well as people on the street.

Phillips’s most thorough discussions deal with the circumstances of daily life, where he finds example after example of stratification by gender, age, and status. Yet there is little to report about how people dealt with issues of self-esteem, autonomy, humiliation, and other behavioral aspects of inequality. He reproduces some paintings of middle-class life, in which one can see indications of self-satisfaction, but none portraying the public lives of the poor, which often seem to show riotous good times. Of course, that might be its own evidence of inequality.