Economic History Seminar

Du 26/10/2022 de 12:00 à 13:30

Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan

RYCKBOSCH Wouter (Université de Bruxelles)

Inequality in the streets. Using witness depositions to study social and economic change in 18th and 19th-century urban Belgium

Between 1750 and 1850 cities in Belgium went through a period of profound and comprehensive transition. Industrial mechanisation, urban growth, migration, and political revolution brought an end to the ‘ancien régime’: the society of orders was abolished and replaced by one of the most unequal class-based countries in 19th-century Europe. Although the emergence of a property- and class-based society is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental changes in history, its causes and effects in many cases remain up for debate and revision. By looking at subtle changes in social interactions in everyday life in the modernising city, this contribution aims to contribute to a better understanding of the reconfiguration of the inequality regime in 18th- and 19th-century Belgium. Historians have long argued that everyday life and social relations, such as time-use and labour activities, were impacted by the ascent of industrial mechanisation (Thompson; Glennie & Thrift; Voth). However, in recent years the opposite argument has also been formulated: that the rise of capitalism stimulated property- and class-based social distinctions in daily life prior to, and ultimately leading up to, the French Revolution (Roche; Sewell). The current paper aims to test such hypotheses by examining how everyday patterns of labour, leisure, urban space, and time converged or diverged for different social groups between 1700 and 1900. In order to do so I will use a new dataset of digitised witness depositions from criminal court cases from the town of Bruges to extract and trace patterns over the course of this period.