Parish and Belonging: Community Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700–1950 (review)

Between Wage Labor and Vocation:

Child Labor in Dutch Urban Industry, 1600-1800

Abstract

Although child labor was a widespread phenomenon in the pre-industrial Dutch economy, we do not know very much about it. This article aims to expand our knowledge by looking at children's work in several urban industries in the Dutch Republic. By investigating the kind of economic activities children performed, their starting age, working and living conditions and the amount of training they received, we want to typify pre-industrial child labour more specifically. Did children's work serve as a necessary source of wage income, or rather as a vocational training for their later participation in the labour market? It will appear that this characterization as 'work' or 'training' depended largely on the child's age, sex and social background. These distinctions may help further research on the performance of preindustrial economies, in which a demand for flexible labor played a crucial role.

Introduction

Francoise Loeram was only twelve years old when the Leiden draper Piere Blisijn employed her to spin for him for two years in 1640. In exchange, the girl received food, lodgings and a set of clothes, and at the end of her contract the sum of 15 guilders.¹ Fran\cid{c}oise was not an exceptional case; in the seventeenth century many thousands of children worked in the Leiden textile industry. Nevertheless child labor is usually associated with the rise of industrial factory labor in the nineteenth century. This interpretation has dominated, because only from that time contemporaries started to perceive large-scale child labor as a social problem. Degrading conditions in the factories, such as long working hours, physically heavy labor and miserable working circumstances caused opposition among parts of the bourgeoisie and representatives of various political tendencies. In the course of the nineteenth century, moral indignation ultimately led to protective legislation in the area of child labor.²

Historical research on child labor has until now focused mainly on the industrial era. Because the effects of industrial factory labor were most visible, historians through most of the twentieth century considered child labor a 'social problem of industrialization'. Moral condemnation played an important role in this interpretation.³ Influenced by new ideas about the course of the Industrial Revolution, and by attention given to the 'family economy', historians in recent decades have modified the dominant interpretation. They now recognize that child labor occurred not just in factories, but existed on a large scale in—for example—agriculture and pre-industrial crafts; also prior to industrialization, child labor was very common.⁴

In their well-known overview study, Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude define the early modern Dutch Republic as 'the first modern economy'. Already in the pre-industrial period, the Dutch economy was in their view characterized by high productivity and a great demand for labor. De Vries and Van der Woude assume that large numbers of children helped to meet this demand. To a considerable degree, they worked in export industries that were organized in an early capitalist fashion, such as textiles, pipe-making and pin-making.⁵ Leo Noordegraaf and Jan Luiten van Zanden likewise suggest that child labor may have been of great importance for the economic growth of the Dutch Republic.⁶ Nevertheless little research has been done about child labor in the pre-industrial period in the Netherlands. Only a few historians, and quite some decades ago, analyzed the subject. Quite similar to the traditional international literature they emphasized the exploitation of children by capitalist employers.⁷

However, by judging the immoral exploitation of children as an effect of the (early) capitalist production system, the whole story of child labor is by no means told. Recently historians have pointed to the...