By the middle of the eighteenth century, Antwerp had lost virtually all of its sixteenth-century splendour as a mercantile centre in the developing world economy. The closure of the Scheldt by the Dutch had thwarted international commercial activities, and the passage from Spanish to Austrian rule had further closed off privileged participation in the Spanish colonial trade. The urban luxury industries that had flourished in the seventeenth century under impulse of the counter-reformation had dwindled in the early eighteenth century in the face of declining domestic demand, greater protectionism in neighbouring countries and increased imports. Those merchant families who had remained in Antwerp had undergone a process of gentrification and almost completely retreated from active commercial activities. Their extensive family fortunes were invested in public loans, company shares and foreign undertakings rather than in direct commercial or industrial investments. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a few such families engaged in setting up capital-intensive industries in Antwerp, such as sugar-refining and cotton-printing, but they remained the exception. The dominant trend was an expansion of low-wage, labour-intensive textile industries on a putting-out basis, producing relatively cheap goods for a mainly domestic market. The most successful branches, such as lace manufacture and the production of mixed fabrics, were those that could most directly exploit the reservoir of cheap child and female labour which the impoverished Antwerp workers provided in ample quantity. The expansion of low-wage textile production further increased the social polarization characterized by a small but extremely wealthy upper class and a very large poor population. By 1796 only 14 per cent of the city's population could be considered wealthy, while only another 21 per cent could rely on some form of independent resources alongside income from labour. In turn, no less than two-thirds of the population consisted of poor and propertyless labourers and servants.

Existing census figures indicate that Antwerp's population remained relatively stable throughout the second half of the eighteenth century at a level of around 50,000 inhabitants.