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Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries: an assessment of the importance and nature of wage labour in the countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flanders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2006

BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL
BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht, and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
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Abstract

The rise of wage labour in the countryside forms a fundamental element in the transition to a modern, capitalist economy and society. Hard data on this development, however, are scarce. Here, the importance of wage labour around the middle of the sixteenth century is reconstructed for three regions in the Low Countries. This reconstruction shows not only a high importance of wage labour, between a quarter to almost 60 per cent of rural labour input, but also strong regional differences. These differences appear not to be connected to urbanization or to the rise of one or another sector in the rural economy, but to the regional social and institutional framework in which the economy developed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , May 2006 , pp. 37 - 72
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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