To Kill Two Birds with One Stone: Keeping Immigrants in by Granting Free Burghership in Early Modern Antwerp

• Published in: Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities pp. 95 - 114
• Main Author: De Meester, Jan
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Routledge 2014; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700; Economic history; Burgher Books; Free Burghership; Serge Weavers; Raw Cloth; Young Man; Historic Demographical Analyses; Craft Guilds; Diamond Cutters; Sixteenth Century Antwerp; Corine Maitte; Tapestry Weavers; Bergen Op Zoom; Early Modern Cities; Matriculation Lists; Bert De Munck; Herman Van Der Wee; Early Modern European Cities; Jan Lucassen; Early Modern Low Countries; Inscription Lists; Antwerp Authorities; Quaderni Storici; De Munck; Esaias Van De Velde
• ISBN: 9781472439871; 0367879417; 9780367879419; 1472439872; 9781472439895; 1472439899
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315588605-5

This chapter concentrates on craftsmen skilled as well as unskilled in order to find out more about the labour migration policy outlined by the Antwerp city authorities. It describes that the Antwerp government granted burghership to the many moderately and poorly skilled craftsmen in order to build up some kind of surplus labour, a surplus that was skilled enough to step in when needed. Many Antwerp-based cloth-shearers followed the English cloth to German cities such as Hamburg, Cologne or Wesel, which gradually took over the cloth-shearing business. It seems that at this point, we have to agree with Marc Boone and Peter Stabel, who believe that free burghership was sometimes used to breathe new life into fading industries. During the second half of the sixteenth century the Antwerp magistrate successfully upgraded the silk-processing industry and the diamond-cutting industry. Many of the immigrants who purchased burghership were the founding fathers of famous generations of gold- or silversmiths.