Introduction
In modern cities, the retail industry enjoys great attention not only from commercial project developers, but also from municipal governments. These governments realize all too well that since the disappearance of industrial activities from downtown areas, retail trade has become eminently important in creating and preserving a vital and attractive downtown area, as well as serving as a magnet for domestic and international consumers and investors. This interest has led to an enormous number of studies and reports about the modern retail industry, the changes that have occurred in this area and the consequences of these changes for the future of the retail industry itself and the function of the city as a space for consumption. It is all the more remarkable then that we know very little about the spatial structure of the early modern retail industry. This has to do, in part, with growing attention from historians to the cultural and social aspects of shopping. Much recent research approaches the retail industry from the perspectives of material culture, survival strategies, patterns of consumption, social relationships, class and status pressures and the way in which leisure time is spent. While these studies regularly focus on the location of shops, there is seldom deep analysis.Footnote 1
The British Isles have perhaps the most research available, but even in this case there has long been doubt about whether a well-developed shopping structure existed before the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 2 In part, this doubt was a question of sources. In the period roughly before 1800, there are few sources available of the kind on which scholars have based research on the retail industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This gap made a comparison with the early modern period difficult and has convinced some that the lack of source material is an indication that the phenomenon to be studied was also unknown in that time. However, in addition to the limitations of early modern source material, there is another complication. Many of the early modern cities studied were small or very small, which prevented the emergence of a highly developed and spatially differentiated shopping structure.Footnote 3 This more developed system only became possible in the nineteenth century when the populations of the existing cities increased greatly, and new industrial cities entered the upper ranks of the urban hierarchy. Seen in this way, it is perhaps not so strange that people have seen the development of the retail industry primarily as a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For this study on the spatial dimensions of early modern shopping, then, I have chosen a city whose size would not automatically preclude the possibility of a differentiated shopping structure. The city in question is Amsterdam. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the period central to this study, the city had roughly 230,000 inhabitants and was one of the largest cities in Europe. In the next section, the spatial distribution of Amsterdam shops will be established, and the patterns that emerge will be interpreted in terms of interaction of general principles of location and the specific local context of early modern Amsterdam. In the following section location theory and local context will be dealt with in more detail.
The location of retailing: theoretical notions and local context
There is an exceptionally large and diverse amount of theoretical literature about the location of economic activities. Although discussions in this area have been dominated by researchers from the English-speaking world for decades, the roots of modern location theory can be found in Germany. In the context of this study, the work of Walter Christaller (1893–1969) and August Lösch (1906–45) is most relevant. They have defined two concepts which play an important role in virtually all studies of location: range and threshold.Footnote 4 The range of a product is the maximum distance that a consumer is prepared to travel in order to buy that specific product.Footnote 5 The threshold is the minimum consumption demand that is required in order to keep a business – in this case a shop – running. If demand falls below the threshold, then it is no longer possible for a business to offer the product in that specific location in an economically sound manner.
It is clear that range varies from product to product, but, in general, a distinction is made between convenience goods and shopping goods. Convenience goods are generally equated with foodstuffs and stimulants like tobacco, and the term will be used in this way in this study as well. More generally, convenience goods are goods that are relatively cheap and frequently purchased. For these reasons, the consumer is not prepared to travel large distances to purchase such goods, and shops selling convenience goods occur in large numbers distributed across the city.Footnote 6 Think, for instance, of the ubiquitous ‘corner shop’.Footnote 7
For more expensive goods that are bought only irregularly, however, the consumer is prepared to travel a considerable distance. The costs of travel are always a smaller fraction of the total cost of acquisition (= purchase price + travel costs) than is the case with daily necessities like bread. These items have a high threshold value for the retailer and demand a large market area that can sometimes extend far outside the city. For this reason, a location in the geographic centre of an area is most attractive. This location is always, by definition, the most easily reached by the largest number of consumers within and outside of the city. In practice, this means that concentrations of shops with similar products crop up in the centre of cities. Unlike the case with shops that deal in daily necessities, this is not a disadvantage, but, in fact, an advantage. When purchasing more expensive consumer goods – for example, clothing, shoes and jewellery – the consumer gladly compares what is on offer in different shops in terms of price, quality and appearance. For this reason, these goods are also called ‘comparison goods’. By being in close proximity to others, each shop does greater business than it would if it were in an isolated location as a quasi-monopoly.Footnote 8
Where we find the shops in a city has everything to do with the accessibility of locations. Davies makes a distinction between:
1. general accessibility: the need to be central to a surrounding consumer body;
2. arterial accessibility: the need to be aligned alongside a major access route; and
3. special accessibility: the need to occupy areas exhibiting prestige, historical affiliations or some particular environmental attribute.Footnote 9
In discussing the difference between convenience goods and shopping goods, the principle of general accessibility has already been mentioned. For the suppliers of expensive consumption goods, accessibility for the population of the whole city and possibly also the surrounding area is most important; for the suppliers of daily necessities, accessibility for consumers in the part of the city where they are based is most important.Footnote 10 The principle of arterial accessibility is based on the desire of retailers to intercept passers-by. Nelson speaks of ‘accessibility to people moving about or gathering together on errands other than shopping’.Footnote 11 In terms of space, we can imagine this linear accessibility as rows of shops along important access roads and through-streets – the so-called ‘ribbons’. ‘Special accessibility’ refers to the clustering of shops in areas with specific characteristics: for example, the presence of a public with great purchasing power or the presence of a popular daily or weekly market. More generally, accessibility is seen as a major determinant of the utility and profitability of urban land. Most land economists agree that patterns of accessibility create patterns of land use and corresponding land values.Footnote 12
The way in which these general principles of location affected the actual distribution of shops in eighteenth-century Amsterdam is, of course, dependent on the local context.Footnote 13 Local context includes, for example, laws and regulations concerning the retail industry, as well as the legacy of the past: the structure of the urban grid; the location of markets, city gates and public buildings; and the distribution of income groups across the city. Eighteenth-century Amsterdam bears the traces of medieval times as well as of the major expansion of the city in the seventeenth century. During the seventeenth century, a morphological and social-spatial structure emerged which would remain characteristic for Amsterdam until late into the nineteenth century.
There is too much on the history of urban planning and social-spatial structure to deal with it extensively here. Elsewhere, I have already demonstrated that Amsterdam neighbourhoods were mixed in terms of building façades, with the rich living along major streets and canals and the less-well-off people in sidestreets and back streets. In addition, the expansion of the city in the seventeenth century promoted compartmentalization on a neighbourhood level. From the beginning, the seventeenth-century neighbourhoods accommodated only one segment of the social pyramid.Footnote 14 For example, the area within the ring of canals was primarily the domain of higher-income residents, while lower-middle groups (tradesmen, retailers) and the working classes lived, for the most part, in peripheral neighbourhoods like the Western Islands, the Jordaan, the Noordse Bos and the Eastern Islands. The old centre of the city, the area enclosed by Singel, Kloveniersburgwal and Gelderse Kade (see Figure 1), accommodated a larger degree of social mixing than the seventeenth-century neighbourhoods. In the Jewish Quarter (Jodenbuurt), as well, very well-off and very poor people lived in relatively close proximity to one another.Footnote 15
Amsterdam in the eighteenth century: neighbourhoods and markets
Figure 1 maps the neighbourhoods mentioned. In order to simplify orientation, I have also included the wet infrastructure of canals and other waterways. The contours of Amsterdam are clearly outlined here, with the medieval centre around the old inner harbour (Damrak), the semi-circular canal ring, the Jordaan on the western periphery, the Noordse Bos on the southern periphery and the Western and Eastern Islands in the north.Footnote 16 Interruptions in the wet infrastructure indicate the location of bridges and, therefore, the routes pedestrians, carts, barrows, carriages and sledges could choose to take through the city. Amsterdam's daily and weekly markets are also indicated on the map.Footnote 17 These markets are also part of the context which shaped the location pattern of the shopping industry. Most markets offered a specific category of goods, but a much broader assortment of goods was available at the markets on Dam square, Noordermarkt, Westermarkt, Nieuwmarkt and Botermarkt.
The following paragraphs will consider whether the general principles of location discussed here have also influenced the spatial distribution of shops in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. The findings can subsequently serve as a starting point to consider the interaction between these general principles of location and the local context of an early modern city.
Sources and empirical findings: convenience goods and shopping goods
Before confronting the theory with empirical data, some attention should be paid to the available source material. Here, the Personele Quotisatie from 1742 plays a central role. This tax was charged throughout Holland and provided the provincial government with the means to settle the financial obligations of repayments and interest payments of a 3-million-guilder loan. The loan had been raised in connection with the War of the Austrian Succession, which had broken out in 1740, and the acute need to bring the Republic's defences up to standard.Footnote 18
For the purposes of this research, the source is primarily of value due to the fact that the type of shop is described precisely and it is also possible to determine the location of shops with a relatively large degree of certainty. In terms of this first point, it is sufficient to point out that of the 3,757 people listed in the Personele Quotisatie registers, only 10 were referred to by the general term ‘shopkeeper’. In all other cases, the nature of the shop is also specified. This makes it possible to distinguish between convenience goods and shopping goods. Included in the first category are suppliers of foodstuffs and stimulants: bread, confectionery, groceries, dry goods, meat, coffee, tea, spices and tobacco. Shopping goods include fabrics, clothing, fashion accessories, hats, stockings, books, luxury goods (jewellery, decorative articles), home furnishings (beds, wall coverings, carpets) and, of course, utensils like pots and pans. Not included in this research are craftsmen like tailors, shoemakers and cabinetmakers, those who provide a service (hairdressers), and the hotel and catering industry.Footnote 19
Since the so-called verponding registers, the records of a provincial tax on real estate, were used in setting up the assessment list, we also know the fiscal verponding number of the houses. Despite the fact that houses in Amsterdam did not have numbers physically attached to them until the time of Napoleon, it is possible to ‘translate’ the administrative verponding number into the exact location of a building on the street. The process is laborious and time-consuming, but no other sources known to me offer this possibility.Footnote 20
There are also some problems specific to this source. The most significant problem is, without doubt, its incompleteness. People with an annual income of 600 guilders or less were exempt from the tax and, unfortunately, were also not registered. Elsewhere, I have calculated that roughly three-quarters of Amsterdam's population went unrecorded.Footnote 21 That is not to say that three-quarters of Amsterdam's shopkeepers have eluded our observation, though. This lower-income stratum was largely made up of wage earners, not shopkeepers.
The theoretical literature argues that shops selling convenience goods are widely distributed. Was this also the case in early modern Amsterdam? Because of the incompleteness of the Personele Quotisatie, it is not easy to test this hypothesis. In the poorer neighbourhoods, in particular, only a small segment of shopkeepers were liable for this tax. Fortunately, a comparison of the number of bakers registered in the Personele Quotisatie (451) with a list of members of the bakers guild in 1688 (412 persons) and the number of bakeries in 1800 (391) suggests that almost all bakers belonged to the group of Amsterdam residents with sufficient income to be registered in the Personele Quotisatie of 1742.Footnote 22 There could not have been many more bakers in Amsterdam than the 451 registered in the Personele Quotisatie.Footnote 23 In Figure 2, the spatial distribution of bakeries can be taken as indicative of the distribution of shops dealing in daily necessities in general.
Location of bakeries, 1742
Where did Amsterdam bakers practise their profession? One indication that bakeries were spread throughout the city to a significant extent is the observation that 226 of the roughly 880 streets in Amsterdam had a bakery.Footnote 24 We cannot simply leave it at this, however. For this reason, Figure 2 maps the distribution of practically all the bakeries across the city.Footnote 25 For a correct interpretation of the map, it is useful to know that up until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the first bread factories appeared, bread production and sales were inextricably linked. The baker and his apprentices baked the bread at night and began to sell it early in the morning. Thus, the map leaves no doubt that bakeries were distributed widely across the city, thereby minimizing the distance from the consumer. Obviously, for daily necessities like bread, the early modern consumer did not want to travel a great distance.Footnote 26
In order to investigate whether stores dealing in shopping goods are less evenly distributed across the city than those dealing in convenience goods, I have compiled information about the location patterns of a series of businesses in Table 1. For each line of business, I have listed the street where the business was present in the largest numbers. In the case of convenience goods, we would not expect any particular street to contain a significantly large portion of shops. With shopping goods, however, the opposite is the case. For consumers who want to compare the price, quality and appearance of occasionally purchased and expensive goods, a concentration of shops is always attractive.
Distribution of convenience goods and shopping goods, 1742
Source: based on Oldewelt (ed.), Kohier van de Personeele Quotisatie.
The information in Table 1 leaves no doubt about the existence of different distribution patterns for convenience goods and shopping goods in early modern Amsterdam. Damrak, which had the highest number of tobacconists, held only 4.2 per cent of tobacconists registered in the Personele Quotisatie, while Prinsengracht, which encircles a large part of the city (see Figure 1), held only 3.1 per cent of all the registered bakeries. In the shopping goods sector, these percentages are much higher. More than 44 per cent of all registered silk shops and over 33 per cent of all bed shops could be found on Nieuwendijk. According to the table, this street was by far the most important shopping street for fabrics in Amsterdam. No fewer than 80 of the 207 shops on Nieuwendijk recorded in the Personele Quotisatie were engaged in the sale of fabrics.Footnote 27 Thus, Nieuwendijk is a text-book example of a shopping street. In addition to fabric shops, there were also noticeable concentrations of French shops (fashion accessories), Nuremburg shops (luxury utensils and decorative articles from Nuremburg and its surroundings) and book shops. Both the theory and empirical research are in accordance on this. The modern distinction between the location behaviour of shopkeepers dealing in convenience goods and shopping goods seems to have taken root in the past and suggests that the underlying logic also operated in large cities like Amsterdam. The next question is whether the relationship between accessibility and shopping patterns, argued for in modern studies, also had such influence in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.
The retail structure in the core area: main shopping streets
In order to give a global impression of the spatial distribution of Amsterdam shops, the most important shopping streets have been mapped in Figure 3. These streets have a shop density of 30 per cent or higher.Footnote 28 Let us limit ourselves for the moment to the heart of the city. Here we would expect locations that the literature links to a high degree of general accessibility, ‘the need to be central to a surrounding consumer body’. The same held for Amsterdam in 1742. Measured by the number of shops listed in the Personele Quotisatie, the highest densities could be found in the old city centre.
Shopping streets in Amsterdam, 1742
As in all cities that grew organically, the shopping centre of Amsterdam is made up of a series of streets whose pattern reveals something about the situation in an earlier phase of the city's development. In the case of Amsterdam, it can be assumed that the oldest commercial activities took place on or around the Dam in the Amstel, which gave Amsterdam its name. With the increase in population and economic activity, Dam square no longer offered sufficient space, and shops began to locate along the old embankments which served as access roads to the Dam. The same goes for Damrak and Rokin, filled-in streets on the western river bank. Along with Dam square, these six north–south oriented axes form Amsterdam's shopping centre. From west to east, we find Nieuwendijk, which extends into Kalverstraat, the Damrak–Rokin axis, directly situated on the water, and the Warmoesstraat-Nes axis on the east of the Amstel.
The accessibility of these main shopping streets was always excellent, both for inhabitants of the city and for people from outside Amsterdam. The latter reached Amsterdam's centre by the many country roads which connected to streets on both sides of the Amstel and especially through Amsterdam's inner harbour, Damrak. The inner harbour was heavily visited. Damrak and its immediate vicinity accommodated a large portion of the 800 weekly departures to 180 different places.Footnote 29
Due to its central location, we can also assume that relatively many shops dealing in shopping goods were established in the old inner city of Amsterdam. That this was, indeed, the case can be seen in Table 2. Here I have divided all shops whose type was specified in the Personele Quotisatie into suppliers of convenience goods and suppliers of shopping goods. In the latter category, I have separately identified fabric shops and shops dealing with clothing accessories.Footnote 30
Division of shops registered in the Personele Quotisatie* by type of product sold, 1742
* The ten shops without further identification will not be considered here. ‘Main axes’ consist of: Dam, Nieuwendijk, Kalverstraat, Rokin, Damrak, Warmoesstraat and Nes.
Source: calculated based on Oldewelt (ed.), Kohier van de Personeele Quotisatie.
Along the main axes, fewer than 30 per cent of shops registered in the Personele Quotisatie supplied food and stimulants; in the rest of the city, the figure was almost 56 per cent. In actuality, the contrast would have been even bigger since it seems likely that the marginal shops not registered in the Personele Quotisatie would have mostly been found outside of the main axes, and this group included many suppliers of daily necessities. Conversely, stores dealing in shopping goods dominated the main axes while appearing much less frequently in the rest of the city according to the registry of the Personele Quotisatie. Fabric shops, in particular, were highly concentrated on the main axes.
The contrast between the main axes and the rest of the city should not obscure the fact that the six main shopping streets on both sides of the Amstel and Dam square each had their own unique character. This is evident in Table 3, where we can see that the relationships between various categories of goods revealed considerable differences. Thus we see that the shopping area of Dam, Nieuwendijk, Warmoesstraat and Kalverstraat was made up, to a significant extent, of suppliers of fabric and clothing accessories, while Damrak and Rokin only counted a small number of them and Nes had a relatively large number of suppliers of food products and stimulants.
Division of shops on the main axes by type of goods sold
Source: calculated based on Oldewelt (ed.), Kohier van de Personeele Quotisatie. In calculating the shop density I have also used a digital version of the 1733 verponding register available at the Amsterdam city archive.
Which products are we talking about exactly? It is not useful to go street by street and shop by shop, but some findings do deserve attention. With 206 shops registered in the Personele Quotisatie and a shop density of 78 per cent, Nieuwendijk is, in a quantitative sense, by far the most important shopping street and a choice place for purchasing fabrics. In some parts of the street, fabric businesses occupy almost every building. In addition, the street also has another 22 businesses where people can buy related products: 8 hat shops, 5 ribbon shops, 4 stocking shops, 2 French shops, 2 sagathy shops and 1 lace shop. The other primary shopping streets also had specific sets of items on offer. For example, in addition to selling fabrics and accessories, the shops in Warmoesstraat primarily sold Nuremburg goods: luxury items and art objects traditionally made in Nuremburg and its surroundings out of expensive materials like precious metals, alabaster, ivory and expensive types of wood.Footnote 31 Dam square and Kalverstraat offered many shops carrying fashion accessories and also bookshops.Footnote 32 On the nearby Rokin there was a similar concentration of 22 bookshops and map shops. A short stroll from Dam square through Kalverstraat to the Munt and back along Rokin would bring the bookworm in contact with an assortment of no fewer than 44 bookshops and map shops, as well as another 4 book-carrying shops in the bordering side-streets. Not only inhabitants of Amsterdam, but people from the surrounding regions would have made use of this enormous offering. All in all, Kalverstraat had a relatively large selection of luxury articles. If we take a look at the map, that finding is not surprising. Through Heiligeweg and Vijzelstraat, Kalverstraat had a practically direct connection with the southern and most prosperous segment of the canal ring area. Nieuwendijk, in contrast, is easily reached from the somewhat less wealthy northern section of the canal ring area and from working-class districts like the Jordaan and the Haarlemmerbuurt.
If we have a look at the information above, we see that the theory and empirical data match up. In terms of general accessibility, it would be expected that the medieval centre of Amsterdam would be the most attractive location for shops, and that indeed turns out to be the case. The six most important shopping streets in eighteenth-century Amsterdam could be found along the three main axes on either side of the Amstel. More than elsewhere in the city, the main axes offered a preponderance of expensive consumption goods, which also accords with modern location theories. These are typically goods that the consumer wishes to get a good sense of before purchasing, which can only be done when there are a large number of similar shops concentrated in a relatively small area.
This finding is of importance because it indicates that although shops and shopping practices in the eighteenth century differed from today's, the underlying spatial logic was very much the same. Apparently, the fact that branding and standard qualities were unknown, that shopping goods were often not on display but had to be taken from drawers and cupboards to be shown to the customer and that it was probably common practice to buy on credit, did not affect the very basic strategy of consumers to compare what was on offer in different shops in terms of price, quality and appearance.Footnote 33 The concentration of shops supplying comparison goods is also an important finding because it suggests that ‘shopping’ did not arise as a cultural phenomenon only in the nineteenth century, but possibly emerged much earlier.Footnote 34
In addition – and this deserves some emphasis – there were also a variety of shops selling foods and stimulants along the central shopping axes. Besides passers-by, their clients included inhabitants of the inner city, of which there were a fair number. The first real census in the Netherlands, held in 1795, counted almost 40,000 inhabitants – or over 18 per cent of the total population of Amsterdam – within the area enclosed by Singel, Kloveniersburgwal and Gelderse Kade.Footnote 35
Retailing outside the core area
In order to evaluate the retail industry outside the core shopping areas, it may be useful to have another look at the distribution of shopping streets in Figure 3. Two observations, in particular, leap out: first, outside the core shopping area, streets with a high shop density mentioned in the Personele Quotisatie are almost exclusively streets that radiate from the city centre and provide access to it; secondly, city gates and (daily or weekly) markets are important structuring elements in Amsterdam's shopping landscape. Arterial accessibility and special accessibility come together here, as it were, since the radiating streets connect these structuring elements to the old city centre at the Amstel and Dam square.
The important city gates of Amsterdam are P1, P4 and P5, which connect to the busy roads to Haarlem, Leiden and Utrecht, respectively – the largest cities in the vicinity of Amsterdam. Carriage-greens were also located by P1 and P4, open places for parking carriages if one did not wish to, have to or were not allowed to access the narrow city streets.Footnote 36 Given the importance of these arterial roads, it is no surprise that shop density along radial roads was relatively high and the material prosperity of the shopkeepers sufficient for them to be listed in the Personele Quotisatie registers. The gates labelled P2 and P3 were of much less importance, due, in part, to the poor connection from the streets in the Jordaan to the canal ring and city centre – a legacy from the time of the planning of the canal ring and the Jordaan.Footnote 37 There are also indications that a shopping street ran through the Jordaan in the direction of P3 (Raampoort), but the population of the Jordaan was not very well-off and the number of listings in the Personele Quotisatie is too low for Nieuwe Leliestraat to be represented on the map. A similar situation can be seen on the route to Weesperpoort (P6, with carriage-green). Unlike the Jordaan, the area around Weesperstraat was not heavily populated and the demand for retail goods remained limited.Footnote 38 The access road to Muiderpoort (P7) ran through the Plantage. This part of the city remained undeveloped during the expansion of Amsterdam between 1656 and 1662 and was finally turned into a space for pleasure gardens. Residential houses were not allowed, only a small dwelling for the gardener and his family.Footnote 39
What did the shops along these radial streets offer? Table 4 reveals that the division of shops by type is similar to that of the shopping structure along the main axes, but more shops sell foods and stimulants on these radial streets, and consequently less shops offer shopping goods.
Division of shops registered in the Personele Quotisatie by type of goods, 1742
Note: This concerns only the radial streets with a shopping density listed in the Personele Quotisatie as greater than 30 per cent. I am defining the centre as the area enclosed by Singel, Kloveniersburgwal and Gelderse Kade, including Nieuwmarkt.
Source: calculated based on Oldewelt (ed.), Kohier van de Personeele Quotisatie.
If we divide the radial streets into those that lie within the medieval centre of the city and those outside it, we see that the share of the sector selling daily necessities is greater in the peripheral areas of the city and the percentage offering more expensive goods is correspondingly lower. These findings correspond perfectly to what location theory would predict. Since these shops are meant to attract passers-by, shops on radial streets offer a more developed selection including a relatively large number of shopping goods. In studies of modern cities, radial streets are thus seen as linear extensions of the central shopping structure. The fact that the selection of expensive goods becomes sparser the farther one moves from the centre is also easily explained. The centre of town is the most accessible location for the largest number of consumers and, as such, is the most suitable place for shops dealing in shopping goods. Close to where the radial streets branch off from the main shopping axes, retailers can profit much more from their close proximity to the shopping public than shops in peripheral areas of the radial streets, and the selection in the shops is adjusted accordingly. The same logic of arterial accessibility explains the relatively high shop density along streets which provide access to important daily and weekly markets in the city. These locations are also excellent spots for intercepting passers-by.
The global overview provided in Table 4 conceals the fact that there were great differences between radial streets, even those in the centre. Some streets primarily offered shopping goods (more than 80 per cent), and elsewhere food and stimulant suppliers dominated: bakers, confectioners, grocers, ‘komenijen’, tea shops and shops selling tobacco and snuff.Footnote 40 Finally, there were the streets with very few shops listed in the Personele Quotisatie, or none at all. These large differences in selection and shopping density within a relatively small area like the centre of Amsterdam correspond to the earlier-mentioned principle of linear accessibility. Whether or not a shopkeeper can attract consumers from the stream of pedestrians passing by depends greatly on whether the shop is established on a main axis or on a side-street with little ‘traffic’ passing through. In the middle of the eighteenth century, just like today, there was a direct connection between the location of a shop in relationship to the main pedestrian routes and the income a business could generate in that location.
The markets and especially Dam square with its town hall, Exchange, weighhouse and main church are manifestations of what Davies and others call special accessibility: ‘the need to occupy areas exhibiting prestige, historical affiliations or some particular environmental attribute’. But what about other manifestations of special accessibility? The question of whether subsidiary shopping centres tailored to the monetary status of the residents developed outside the core shopping area is relevant here. Good candidates for such development are the side-streets in the canal ring, in the immediate proximity of a sizeable elite with great purchasing power. Do streets like Herenstraat, Hartenstraat, Wolvenstraat and Huidenstraat – strategically located between the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht – offer a choice of luxury shops that can compete with what is offered in the central shopping area?
Judging from Table 5, it seems as if this was not the case. Even in the immediate proximity of the elite, the shopping selection was not simply high-quality and expensive consumption goods; in Wolvenstraat, for example, almost 60% of the shopping selection fell into the category of daily goods. Nevertheless, it is clear that the residents in that neighbourhood were well-off. Cornelis Grave, a pastry baker located in Herenstraat, enjoyed an annual income of 3,000 guilders. Along with a colleague on Nieuwendijk, he was one of the best-paid pastry bakers in the city. J. Ketelhoet, the manager of a chintz shop in Hartenstraat, made 4,000 guilders a year, making him the highest-paid person in his line of business. More generally, the influence of the environment could be seen in the relatively luxurious selections of goods on offer in Herenstraat and Hartenstraat in particular. For example, the shops selling food include a noticeably high number of confectioners. In general, however, shopkeepers did not earn great sums of money. The average income for registered shopkeepers in Herenstraat and Hartenstraat was 800 guilders a year, while it was 600 guilders a year for those in Wolvenstraat and Huidenstraat. Shopkeepers on Damrak, Nieuwendijk, Kalverstraat and Warmoesstraat made 1,500 guilders a year, and those on Rokin made 1,000. All in all, we can conclude that the shopping selection on the streets in between Herengracht and Keizersgracht corresponded with the wealth of the residents in the area, but these streets did not develop into a competing subsidiary shopping centre.
Shopping selection on side-streets between Herengracht and Keizersgracht, 1742
Source: calculated based on Oldewelt (ed.), Kohier van de Personeele Quotisatie.
The explanation for this phenomenon must be sought in the spatial structure of the city as it emerged in the seventeenth century. During this period, a significant portion of Amsterdam's elite found accommodation in the canal ring – a long strip that was wrapped like a shell around the old city centre. Unlike a city like Brussels, where a high concentration of wealthy consumers could be found around the court, there was no compact elite district in Amsterdam, and, thus, no secondary shopping area tailored to the taste and budget of the elite.Footnote 41 The centre of town was, however, easy to reach from the canal ring and thus remained the designated place for purchasing shopping goods. Here, one could find shops with direct relationships to suppliers in Paris, Lyons, Brussels and other international cities near and far.Footnote 42
The fact that the observed patterns of retail location are in line with what one would expect on the basis of modern location theory suggests that accessibility was an important factor in the location preferences of eighteenth-century Amsterdam shopkeepers. In practice, when faced with a range of options, most shopkeepers will have based their choice of location not on abstract knowledge of accessibility, but on the existing location patterns of shops in their line of business and on the rent they were willing and able to pay.Footnote 43 Thus, the large number of linen shops on Nieuwendijk would rightly be interpreted as an indication that many customers shopping for linens were to be expected there, and in Warmoesstraat one could be sure that many customers were shopping for the kind of luxury utensils and decorative articles for which Nuremburg was famous.
But, when in the seventeenth century the city was extended and new streets were developed, the buyers of lots in Wolvenstraat, one of the small streets connecting the canal ring with the city centre, proved to be very aware that access to the pedestrian flow to the city centre was of vital importance for commercial exploitation of their property. When the authorities decided to construct an additional street to the city centre (Huidenstraat) the Wolvenstraat owners protested, arguing that fewer customers would now pass through Wolvenstraat and consequently shops that were to be established there would attract less custom. The city council rejected their demands for compensation, but allowed the applicants to return their lots to the city without costs.Footnote 44
As they usually based their location decisions on the spatial distribution of existing shops and the rent costs, not many future shopkeepers will have consulted handbooks and as far as I am aware not many handbooks for shopkeepers were published. However, the handbook that was certainly available in Amsterdam stressed the prime importance of location. According to its author, Jacques Savary, shops in fabrics and other goods that we would now call shopping goods were concentrated in specific streets, while grocers, mercers and craftsmen were scattered all over town.Footnote 45 Here Savary seems to have been aware of the distinct location patterns associated with shopping goods and convenience goods. And he also seems to inform the reader that for craftsmen a location in the main shopping streets is not imperative. Savary's examples all relate to shopping streets in Paris, but they could just as easily be applied to other cities. As a matter of fact, that was exactly what Savary was arguing. Not only in Paris, but also in other cities ‘some locations will be more conveniently situated for some trades than for others’. ‘In short’, Savary concludes, ‘it is certainly very advantageous for a shopkeeper to be well located’.Footnote 46
The local context of the Amsterdam shopping system
From the previous sections, it is clear that general principles of location have greatly influenced the location patterns of Amsterdam shops. Naturally, this does not imply that the local context was of little significance. Where shops were concentrated was always strongly determined by urban planning and the social-spatial structure of the city as it developed in the preceding centuries. In particular, the relatively wide distribution of Amsterdam's elite across the canal ring prevented the emergence of a shopping area geared towards their taste and purchasing power in immediate proximity of the elite's houses, and it also reinforced the position of the main axes in the centre of town. Decisions that the municipal government made about the location of markets and the assortment of goods they might offer also affected the pattern of shops in the city. It is no coincidence that many radial streets led to important markets in town. The city gates were another set of structural elements in the urban landscape and similarly influenced decisions of shopkeepers about the location of shops and the patterns of spatial distribution that resulted from these decisions. Still, it is noticeable even within this context how closely the patterns align with modern principles of location. This creates the impression that policies of the municipal government and institutions like guilds did not radically direct location patterns. Is this impression correct?
If one struggles through the fist-thick statute books of Amsterdam, one quickly gets the impression that virtually every aspect of city life was regulated. In practice, the application and enforcement of the statutes was rather selective. When the interests of the city elite were at stake, action would generally be taken. In almost all other cases, attempts to enforce obedience to the statutes were made only when interest groups explicitly requested them. Amsterdam shopkeepers did their part in this regard. There were countless appeals to the city government to deal with salesmen who illegally went house-to-house with goods and thus negatively affected the business of guild members and shopkeepers.Footnote 47 In other areas, in contrast, there were surprisingly few regulations. For example, the Amsterdam building code of 1565, which remained in force until the nineteenth century, had no fewer than 64 articles, but none of these articles determined anything about the location and use of shop buildings. Despite the fact that the clerk of works controlled the building of ovens in the (fire-hazardous) baking industry, nowhere in the building codes or in the extensive fire codes were there any stipulations limiting bakers’ choice of location. For industrial activities that caused noise or foul odours or presented fire hazards, there were, however, limitations. Such businesses were mostly banished to the working-class neighbourhoods on the edges of town.Footnote 48
In practice, there was only one exception to the general rule that those who complied with the rules of guild membership could pick any location that they pleased: the meat industry. Butchers were required to sell their wares at a meat counter in one of the meat-halls of the city. Two of the halls were in the city centre, on the Nes, in buildings that had formerly been chapels before Amsterdam became a Protestant city (1578). The western part of the city had two meat-halls (on Westermarkt and Herenmarkt), and there was one on Botermarkt.Footnote 49 Butchers could sell directly to consumers from their own premises, where the slaughtering took place, only during slaughtering season (1 October through 25 December) and on Fridays and Sundays when the meat-halls were closed.Footnote 50 Meat-halls for Amsterdam's Jewish population were available by the Hoogduitse synagogue and Houtgracht. Jews, however, were not allowed to be members of the butchers’ guild, and for this reason, Jewish ‘cutters and testers’ ritually slaughtered the livestock on the premises of members of the butchers’ guild.Footnote 51
In general, not only was the choice of location free, the requirements for guild membership were not very strict either. For example, members of the sizeable retailers’ guild did not even have to be burghers of the city and had to pay only four guilders for membership plus an annual fee of one guilder.Footnote 52 That compliance with the rules was not strictly enforced became obvious in 1752 when there were hundreds of ‘illegal komenijen’ in the city.Footnote 53 Contrary to what one might expect based on the corporatist organization of the economy in early modern Amsterdam, the municipal government and institutions like guilds had practically no direct influence on the location choices of shopkeepers. Within the existing morphological and social-spatial structure, the rules of the ‘free market’ determined the location of commercial real estate. This explains why the general principles which have been formulated based on the situation of modern cities with liberal economic policies also exerted influence in early modern Amsterdam.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most surprising outcome of this study is that location principles formulated in the twentieth century worked so well in analysing and explaining the location patterns of shops in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. At that time too the differences in the location preferences of purveyors of convenience goods and shopping goods, as well as the three forms of accessibility, determined to a large extent the set-up of the shopping structure in the urban landscape, and in this sense that landscape can be called modern.Footnote 54 We recognize the principle of general accessibility – that is to say, accessibility to the population living in a specific area – in the high-quality selection of goods available in the centre of Amsterdam, as well as in the distribution of shops selling daily necessities across all parts of the city. The principle of linear accessibility is, in essence, about intercepting passers-by. The best locations for ‘intercepting’ shops are, naturally, the major through-streets and access roads to the centre. This logic also applied to the situation in Amsterdam. A set of radial streets connected the main shopping streets and also linked the city centre, a few important markets and the city gates. Along these radial streets, which can be considered linear extensions of the central shopping apparatus, there were relatively many high-quality shops. General principles of location also explain why the selection of goods became sparser on the radial streets the farther one travelled from the centre of town. When addressing the question of the level of offerings in neighbourhoods outside the centre, we encounter the third form of accessibility: special accessibility. From the source material available, this phenomenon was difficult to study, but the situation of the streets connecting Herengracht and Keizersgracht makes it clear that the supply of consumer goods varied based on the prosperity of the neighbourhoods, but that there were no significant secondary shopping centres.
However, the general location principles worked within a local context, and it is the interaction between the two that generated the actual distribution of shops in mid-eighteenth-century Amsterdam. It is not easy to assess the relative importance of the various components of the local context, but research into the statute books and guild regulations made it clear that the city government and the guilds did not concern themselves with the location choices of shopkeepers. The one exception was the meat industry, in which butchers were required to use municipal meat-counters. The virtual absence of regulations concerning the location of shops implies that the size of the city and its morphological and social-spatial structure – as it had emerged in the previous centuries – had greater influence on the Amsterdam shopping landscape. The location of markets, public buildings and city gates, the wealthy canal ring that formed a shell around the old city centre and the less-well-off neighbourhoods in the peripheries of the city and (south-)east of the Nieuwmarkt were important elements of this morphological and social-spatial structure.
But what seems to have been of major importance is the structure of the urban grid itself. It was after all the pattern of streets that channelled traffic through urban space, as the buyers of plots in the Wolvenstraat were well aware. And since some streets gave easier access than others to various parts of the city and to the world outside the city gates, these streets attracted more traffic and were consequently more desirable for the establishment of shops. The shops, in turn, reinforced the attraction of these streets for customers and passers-by, giving the patterns of retail location a degree of permanency that enabled them to survive major changes in the urban landscape.
The interaction of general principles of location and the local context gave shape to complex and differentiated patterns of location that do not fundamentally differ from patterns seen in the modern shopping industry. This last statement is not devoid of interest since all too often it is taken for granted that ‘modern’ location patterns are linked to changes that started with the Industrial Revolution and the modernization of economic life in the nineteenth century. This view is no longer tenable. Relatively modern patterns of location also emerged before the breakthrough of modern production and distribution technologies. In the case of Amsterdam, these patterns arose from the limited regulation of shop location and the scale of the city. Unlike most other European cities, Amsterdam was already very large before 1800, with a shopping apparatus tailored to its size and complexity. The shopping apparatus formed the infrastructure of shopping behaviour. The cultural aspect of shopping behaviour in early modern Amsterdam has not been the focus of this article, but the modern character of the location patterns discussed here suggests that ‘shopping’ as a relaxation and leisure-time activity was perhaps an older phenomenon than is often assumed.
