Inside my
about
Bas Spliet (∞1995) is doctor in History and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Economic and Social History group of Utrecht University. He was trained at Ghent University, where he obtained two bachelor’s (History and Middle Eastern Studies) and one master’s (History) degree, before obtaining his PhD from Antwerp University and VUB Brussels in 2025. His research interests converge around the birth of our modern economy and society, particularly between 1600 and 1900, and touch upon topics like urbanization and industrialization, economic inequality and social mobility, and living standards and consumerism. Beyond the social impact of economic history, he is also interested in the global effects of one of its foundational subjects of enquiry – the Great Divergence – on other historical developments, including in intellectual history and international relations. Across these diverse interests, he is motivated to understand current transitions by studying past transitions.
Next to Utrecht University, Dr Spliet is affiliated with the Centre for Urban History at Antwerp University and VUB Brussels’ Social History of Capitalism research centre. In 2021, the History Alumni of Ghent University awarded him the André Schaepdrijver Prize for best master’s thesis; in 2023, he obtained a ‘grant for promising researchers’ from the Research Council of Antwerp University; and in 2026, he was shortlisted for the Economic History Society’s Thirsk-Feinstein Prize for best doctoral dissertation. He can be contacted at B.R.Spliet@uu.nl.
Research
Working papers
The Economics of Craft Guilds: Evidence from the Post-Abolition Low Countries
2026
Over the past decades some economic historians have challenged the Enlightenment view of craft guilds as rent-seeking institutions that impeded technological and industrial innovation. Although these revisionists have convincingly shown that guild flourishment and economic growth were often compatible in the leading economies of preindustrial Europe, it remains difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Did industrial monopolies foster economic growth, for instance by facilitating human capital formation? Or did economic growth enable the foundation and maintenance of inefficient institutions? This paper moves beyond the case studies and macro-economic comparisons employed by both sides in this longstanding debate and instead compares industries with and without corporate traditions systematically. The micro-level evidence presented here comes from a detailed industrial survey of the Low Countries from 1819, which was linked to existing databases of craft guilds in the Northern and Southern Netherlands.
The results show that guilds were more common in higher- than in low-skilled sectors compared to unincorporated industries, in line with the revisionist hypothesis that human capital investment was a core reason for their emergence and persistence. On closer inspection, however, the paper finds no evidence that guild concentration in higher-skilled occupations benefitted trained adult workers or the wider economy. Skill level, urban economic development and economies of scale were all positively correlated with wage growth, but guilds extracted rents from this surplus through their labour market monopsony. They seem to have captured human capital rather than have created it, in other words. Their employees were also paid less due to the limitations guilds placed on firm size, indicating that incorporated industries were less productive than their unincorporated counterparts. The fact that their export markets were more likely to be local and less likely to extend beyond the borders of the Low Countries after abolition also supports the traditional interpretation of these producer monopolies as institutional obstacles to inclusive economic development.
From ‘Migrant City’ to ‘City of the Established’? The Social Mobility of Immigrants: Amsterdam , 1600-1800 (2024)
2024
This working paper, presented at the Datini-ESTER seminar in May 2024, examines the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants in early modern Amsterdam and challenges the view that the city became a ‘city of the established’ after the end of the Golden Age. Combining probate inventories with marriage banns, it shows that Amsterdam remained comparatively open to newcomers well into the eighteenth century. Despite rising inequality and attempts by guilds and welfare institutions to restrict access, immigrants from economically less developed regions to the (north)east of Holland continued to be found in significatn numbers among the city’s middling and wealthier households at the end of their lives. Many entered skilled occupations or married into established families, while the wealth distribution of immigrant and native households differed surprisingly little. The evidence therefore suggests that immigration continued to offer meaningful opportunities for upward mobility. Rather than simply adding to an expanding urban underclass, immigrants continued to supply skills and labour that contributed to Amsterdam’s economic development. This was reflected in the magistrate’s persistent open door policy at a time that other Dutch cities turned to restricting immigration. Amsterdam thus remained a ‘migrant city’ in which geographic and social mobility were mutually reinforcing until the end of the eighteenth century.
In academic year 2026-2027, I will expand on this preparatory research with a project focusing on intergenerational mobility. Using a large database of marriage banns, occupational mobility among children of immigrants and of city-born parents will be compared across the demographic transition of seventeenth-century Amsterdam from a migrant-majority city to one where an increasing number of residents were born in town. The key objective is to examine whether the prospects for social mobility mattered for migrants’ decision to settle down for the long run, which was crucial for a preindustrial town to break through the ‘graveyard effect’ and realize urban growth. If the degree of immigrant social mobility remained constant throughout the demographic transition, as the counterhypothesis postulates, then its causes need to sought not in any ‘Amsterdam Dream’ effect but rather in the institutional openness of Amsterdam, which persisted into the eighteenth century when the population stabilized. The larger motivation of this project is to establish whether the dynamics of urban growth and stagnation were endogenous or exogenous and to contribute to historiographical debates on urbanization and economic growth.
Main publications
Canal Palaces and Damp Basements: Capitalism, Housing Inequality, and Living Standards in Early Modern Amsterdam – Urban History (2026) – first view available in August
This article examines the impact of urban growth on housing inequality in early modern Amsterdam, a prime example of a ‘capitalist city’ shaped by private housing markets. A comprehensive dataset of Amsterdam’s housing distribution is used to track social differences in housing value, affordability, location and density. It is the first study of a pre-nineteenth-century city that systematically uncovers the compartmentalization of the housing stock into apartment-style dwellings. Urban growth and income inequality are revealed as its causes, while its consequences were ambivalent from a wellbeing perspective. Housing compartmentalization inhibited meaningful residential segregation but also worsened the disparity in living standards.
This article measures the cost of the early modern consumer revolution through a quantitative analysis of product and process innovations in Amsterdam and examines their variegated social impact in two distinct datasets of probate inventories. It demonstrates that middle-class decencies became substantially cheaper during the seventeenth century, nuancing the industrious revolution hypothesis in urban settings, but we also find no sustained positive impact of rising consumption on the material living standards of the labouring masses. In the eighteenth century, in fact, first- and second-hand prices diverged due to the combined effects of a supply glut, the accelerating turnover of fashion, and the inherent fragility of many novel consumer goods. While elite and middling households compensated for their indulgence in consumerism with prudent ‘investment’ in more durable possessions, thereby ensuring a transferable inheritance for the next generation, our analysis documents the material impoverishment of Amsterdam’s working classes during the final decades of the ancien régime. The consumer revolution, we conclude, contributed to the eighteenth-century rise of material – or ‘real’ – inequality between the shrinking middle classes of this preindustrial metropolis on the one hand and its growing numbers of impoverished inhabitants on the other.
Urban spaces are often considered nurseries of consumer developments. Focusing on eighteenth-century London, the cradle of the famed nascent consumer society, we employ newspaper advertisements of forthcoming auction sales to map changes in the domestic material culture of the city’s ‘polite society’. Over the course of the century, British-made products replaced Asian luxuries among the most distinct positional goods promoted in these advertisements, and new social distinctions emerged around objects related to leisure, gardening, music, and domestic sociability and conviviality. Overall, however, narrowing consumer inequalities outweighed these renewed differentiations in the social distribution of positional goods, suggesting a convergence of domestic material culture between London’s elite and upper middling sorts.
This chapter examines how the political economy of the medieval and early modern Low Countries contributes to debates on the ‘European miracle’ by reassessing the relationship between polycentric governance, urbanization, and state formation. It argues that the exceptional commercial success of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland stemmed not from either political decentralization or state capacity alone, but from a dynamic balance between cities, sovereigns, and local elites. Urbanization created autonomous cities that constrained monarchical power while competition among cities discouraged rent-seeking and fostered institutional innovation in commerce. This polycentric urban order enabled sustained economic dynamism and laid the foundations for later developments associated with capitalism, liberalism, and modern economic growth. The Low Countries therefore provide a crucial intermediate case that reconciles competing interpretations of Europe’s long-term economic rise.
This article answers a simple question: Who or what pulled the rug from underneath the demand for Dutch paintings in the second half of the seventeenth century? Previous explanations – diminished purchasing power, overproduction, depleted social distinction potential, budget and space constraints – are tested with a unique database of Amsterdam probate inventories but found insufficient. I maintain that the downfall of the painting in Dutch interiors is best explained within the framework of the consumer revolution, on which this case study offers a fresh perspective by arguing that the ascent of fashion gave rise to a consumer version of creative destruction. The modernity of Holland’s burgeoning consumer society was borne out of the fact that Dutch burghers simply lost interest.
This article investigates the consumption of knowledge in early modern Amsterdam. A dataset of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century probate inventories is employed to examine the synergies and inequalities between the skilled and educated middle classes and the intellectual elites. A series of democratisation waves in the ownership of books, writing equipment, and measuring tools confirms the unprecedented levels of basic literacy and numeracy skills in the urban centres of the early modern Low Countries revealed by research on signature proficiency and age heaping. The concentration of secular books and advanced knowledge objects in the hands of a small but growing group of affluent households, on the other hand, corresponds to other research that has fixated instead on the role of upper-tail human capital in scientific, technological, and economic progress. Yet, the relatively low value estimates of libraries and scientific instruments, together with a more qualitative examination of two amateur scientists of middling background, dovetails with the hypothesis that the Dutch Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment were marked by a close interaction and mobility between craftsmen and scientists. An above-average income and enough leisure time to develop intellectual interests could be sufficient for inhabitants of Amsterdam to cross the Rubicon from consuming to (re)producing knowledge.
This article studies the Belgian and Dutch roles in NATO’s 1979 Double-Track Decision, in which the member states of the Alliance unanimously agreed to deploy a new generation of thermonuclear missiles in five West-European countries, among them Belgium and the Netherlands. It argues that the dynamics between the three traditional heavyweights in the Alliance’s nuclear weapons policy – the United States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany – produced a unique situation in which Brussels and The Hague landed in key positions in the international decision-making process. In this context, the two small countries challenged the fragile NATO consensus surrounding the Double-Track Decision and substantially jeopardized the unanimous endorsement of the final agreement. Internally, clear majorities of Dutch and Belgian public opinion and close to if not half of MPs were tilted against the missiles. In each country, moreover, a major ruling coalition party insisted that NATO should make a positive deployment decision only after all avenues of arms control were exhausted. Yet, revealing the limits of democracy in Cold War defense policy, both countries eventually fell in line and signed on to the agreement.
This chapter traces the development of one tradition of liberal international relations, ‘non-interventionism’, over the course of the past four centuries, beginning with the publication of one of the first treatises on international law in 1625 and ending with the present. While stressing that the doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of other nations rarely achieved the status of a rock-solid dogma, it argues that many leading classical liberals across the ages extended their aversion to domestic interventions into the realm of international relations by developing theories of anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism. Conversely, arguments for colonialism and for an activist foreign policy often went hand in glove in the thought of progressive liberals, such as in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Although liberal imperialism was eventually discredited, I maintain that the interventionist mindset that has dominated liberal foreign policy thought in the last couple of decades is ultimately rooted in colonial ideas of Western cultural supremacy.
While detailed accounts of ownership patterns of material culture buttress major narratives on the critical consumer transitions of the late early modern era, still surprisingly little is known about the specific consumer mentalities that went along with the rapidly expanding empire of goods. On the basis of newspaper advertisements for auctions of household estates in Amsterdam and Antwerp, this contribution maps the language of consumption on the high-end secondary markets. Unsurprisingly the language of consumption in both (former) commercial metropoles evolved as the eighteenth century progressed, with product qualities such as ‘modern’ gaining in prominence. Yet, strange as it may seem, the boundaries between the mentalities of new affordable luxuries and traditional old luxuries were by no means clear-cut. Moreover, in Antwerp as well as in Amsterdam, it was first and foremost the aesthetics of the rich material culture that were invoked to lure potential customers to an auction. Even though both societies were marked by a rather frugal and commercially oriented mentality, the elitist vocabulary of consumption relied heavily on ‘taste’ formation, hence contributing to the rising material inequalities that marked the eighteenth century.
Other publications
Book projects
The Amsterdam Dream? Opportunity, Mobility and Inequality in a Preindustrial Metropolis
Entitled: A History of Western Foreign Policy