Abstract

The availability of a detailed tax record for 1742 made it possible to establish, with more certainty than before, the location patterns of Amsterdam's early modern retail industry. This chapter also shows that we can usefully draw on location principles formulated in twentiethcentury liberal economies when analyzing and explaining early modern location patterns. The reason is that in early modern Amsterdam too, the use of property was subject to the rules of the ‘free market’. This does not rule out the influence of the local context. After all, the actual distribution of shops and the range of goods they sold were strongly determined by the urban and socio-spatial structure of the city as it had developed over the preceding centuries.

Keywords: location patterns, modern location theory, accessibility, daily necessities, consumer durables

During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the period on which we shall focus in the coming chapters, the population of Amsterdam initially grew to between 230,000 and 240,000 inhabitants in 1730. After this, however, population growth stagnated, and in the decades around 1800, there was even a sharp decline in the population. The recovery was slow, and around the middle of the nineteenth century Amsterdam still had no more than 220,000 inhabitants. Throughout this period, the population could thus easily be accommodated in the city as it had developed during the major seventeenth-century expansions. The urban grid—and with it the accessibility of the streets, canals and squares—also remained unchanged. This stable spatial framework forms the background to our study of shops in the period between 1700 and 1850.