IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ereveh/v18y2014i1p82-105..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The stability of voluntarism: financing social care in early modern Dutch towns compared with the English Poor Law, c. 1600–1800

Author

Listed:
  • Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
  • Daniëlle Teeuwen

Abstract

This article aims to compare the financing of two apparently entirely different systems of pre-industrial welfare: urban institutional welfare in the federal Dutch Republic and the national Elizabethan Poor Law in Britain. By analysing a new dataset on the income and expenditure of five Dutch towns, we conclude that, despite the absence of uniform legislation, Dutch poor relief was viable at least up until the 1790s, even in times of severe crises and declining real wages. This was obtained by the – in monetary terms – remarkably stable donations by Dutch citizens, mostly through regular collections, as well as careful financial management of the charitable funds.

Suggested Citation

  • Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk & Daniëlle Teeuwen, 2014. "The stability of voluntarism: financing social care in early modern Dutch towns compared with the English Poor Law, c. 1600–1800," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 18(1), pages 82-105.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:18:y:2014:i:1:p:82-105.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/het014
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hengstmengel, Joost & Verburg, Rudi, 2023. "The Uneventful Reception of Mandeville’s Ideas in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic, or the Mysterious Case of the Missing Outrage," SocArXiv temz2, Center for Open Science.
    2. Bas Bavel & Auke Rijpma, 2016. "How important were formalized charity and social spending before the rise of the welfare state? A long-run analysis of selected western European cases, 1400–1850," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 69(1), pages 159-187, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:18:y:2014:i:1:p:82-105.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/ereh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.