Cambrinus uitgedaagd. Verschuivingen in de consumptie en distributie van dranken in het achttiende-eeuwse Hasselt
Johan Poukens
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Cambrinus challenged. Shifts in the consumption and distribution of beverages in eighteenthcentury Hasselt
This article focuses on the challenges the traditional beer-selling innkeepers faced when in the course of the eighteenth century consumer preferences gradually shifted from beer to distilled liquors and hot, colonial beverages. Due to the emergence of gin- and coffeehouses, public houses were flourishing in the county of Flanders and the duchy of Brabant, but not in the town of Hasselt. Although the consumption of gin also increased sharply after 1770, corporate regulation and the emergence of an important distilling industry prevented innkeepers from incorporating the new drinks in their businesses. The decreasing demand for beer among the lower classes combined with the town governments policy of beer price regulation caused the overall number of inns to decline.

Klein gewin brengt rijkdom in. De Zuid-Nederlandse handelaars in de export naar Italië in de jaren 1540
Jeroen Puttevils
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Merchants from the Southern Netherlands in the export trade to Italy in 1540s
This article examines the growing participation of merchants from the Southern Netherlands in the international trade with Italy during the sixteenth century. Confronting these merchants with their presumed more developed Italian counterparts shows how traders from the Netherlands were able to carve out a commercial niche in the Italian trade by focusing on the export of both transit products and the produce of the textile industries of the Netherlands to the Venetian market. Venice hosted an important community of Flemish merchants who co-operated with Venetians to ship their goods to the East, where demand for textiles from Western Europe was high. Moreover it is demonstrated that small players were active in this branch of trade as well, which points to the democratization of international trade at the time.

Marktwerking of discriminatie? Spinlonen van mannen en vrouwen in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlandse textielnijverheid
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
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Market wage or discrimination? Male and female spinning wages in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic
Historians usually attribute wage differentials between men and women either to productivity differences or to gender discrimination. This article aims to investigate the causes of the gender wage gap by analyzing a new series of spinning wages of both men and women in the seventeenth-century Dutch textile industry. At first sight, equal piece rates for spinning men and women seem to rule out wage discrimination. Nevertheless, more deeply rooted gender discrimination, resulting from the segmented seventeenth-century labour market, restricted women’s access to many professions. This labour market segmentation largely contributed to differences in earning capacity of both sexes. Therefore, it is important to look beyond wage differences in a particular sector and also take into account more generally embedded gender inequalities in the labour market.

De ‘laatste’ voedselrellen. Voedseloproer in de jaren 1850 in Vlaanderen: een casestudie van Sint-Niklaas
Wouter Ronsijn
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The ‘last’ food riots. Food riots in the 1850’s in Flanders: a case-study of Sint-Niklaas
The food crises of the mid-nineteenth century entailed a last wave of food riots across Western Europe. In this article two aspects of food riots during the dearth crisis of the 1850’s in the Belgian provinces of East- and West-Flanders are explored. Firstly, it examines the occurrence of food riots as a response to an absence of governmental intervention. Secondly, it looks at the extent to which the riots resembled the classic food riot. Based on evidence from the case study of the town of Sint-Niklaas, the article concludes that riots indeed responded to an absent government, and that they resembled typical food riots. However, the food riots of the 1850’s bear new elements as well.