A range of sources was used to reconstruct the location patterns of shops in Amsterdam, but two sources in particular stand out: the Capitale Impositie and the Personele Quotisatie. The oldest of the two is the register of the Capitale Impositie of 1585, published by Van Dillen. The main limitation of this source is its incompleteness: only 3,000 of the 7,000 to 8,000 households in Amsterdam contributed to the tax, and Van Dillen was only able to establish the professions of 1,400 households. On the other hand, it does give us a rough impression of where the people in the register lived in the city, and thereby an impression of the location of what were undoubtedly relatively affluent retailers in Amsterdam. As the proceeds of the tax were used for the relief of Antwerp, Catholics are likely to have minimized their contributions, but as we do not consider the amount of tax contributed here, this disadvantage does not weigh very heavily. The data of 338 people were retrieved from the source, spread over 25 professional groups:

Shops selling daily necessities:

Apple seller, bacon buyer, baker, beer seller, beer trader, brandy seller, butcher, cake baker, dairy buyer, flour buyer, grocer, grocer/pharmacist, herring buyer, pie baker, vegetable seller, waffle baker, wine buyer (147 people in total).

Shops selling durable and luxury goods:

Book seller, cloth buyer, jug seller, kramer (nonitinerant seller), pharmacist, second-hand dealer, silk-cloth buyer, wantsnijder (selling fabric by the yard) (191 people in total).

In Chapter 1, it was argued that it is justifiable to include specialized traders such as herring buyers and dairy buyers in retail trade in this period on the basis that they were seldom exclusively wholesalers but also sold en detail.

For the mid-eighteenth century, the Personele Quotisatie of 1742—published by Oldewelt and discussed in detail in Chapter 5—was available.

The Personele Quotisatie was also a tax, one that was intended to provide Holland with the funds to pay the interest and principal on a loan that had been taken out to strengthen the defences. The War of the Austrian Succession, which broke out in 1740, was the immediate reason for reinforcing the military strength of the Republic.