The cost of the consumer revolution: Prices, material living standards, and real inequality in Amsterdam (1630‒1805)

This article measures the cost of the early modern consumer revolution through a quantitative analysis of product and process innovations in Amsterdam and examines their variegated social impact in two distinct datasets of probate inventories. It demonstrates that middle-class decencies became substantially cheaper during the seventeenth century, nuancing the industrious revolution hypothesis in urban settings, but we also find no sustained positive impact of rising consumption on the material living standards of the labouring masses. In the eighteenth century, in fact, first- and second-hand prices diverged due to the combined effects of a supply glut, the accelerating turnover of fashion, and the inherent fragility of many novel consumer goods. While elite and middling households compensated for their indulgence in consumerism with prudent ‘investment’ in more durable possessions, thereby ensuring a transferable inheritance for the next generation, our analysis documents the material impoverishment of Amsterdam’s working classes during the final decades of the ancien régime. The consumer revolution, we conclude, contributed to the eighteenth-century rise of material – or ‘real’ – inequality between the shrinking middle classes of this preindustrial metropolis on the one hand and its growing numbers of impoverished inhabitants on the other.