Poor boys, poor chances? Training underprivileged youngsters in early modern Antwerp (1580–1780)

​It is generally assumed that from the eighteenth century onwards new manufacturing processes stimulated a type of child labour that was unprecedented in the pre-industrial period. The increasingly mechanised production of standardised goods would have resulted in an enormous increase in the number of children who were working as cheap, unskilled labourers in Europe’s large ateliers and earliest factories. The accompanying deskilling of youngsters would moreover have deprived them of genuine career prospects. Youngsters devolved from apprentices into employees who were in a business-like relationship with their employer. As such, this history is often sketched in stark contrast to the pre-industrial period in which the apprenticeship takes centre stage. During an apprenticeship a master artisan passed on his technical skills to a child or teenager, who thus obtained opportunities for a future as a journeyman or a master and, hence, as an independent breadwinner/head of household/wage earner. Culturally too, apprenticeship institutionalised an important transitional stage of the youngster’s life during which he served his master and cultivated a subservient relationship with him. An important facet of the master-apprentice relationship was for the master to educate his apprentice in lessons on morality and religion. Because scholars have tended to assume that both types of child labour are two completely separate phenomena, the transition between them has hardly received any attention in the literature and, thus, remains ambiguous. How should we understand this period of transition? Was the unskilled, exploitative type of child labour on a massive scale completely new in the eighteenth century, or was it the result of a long-term transformation of the apprenticeship system? Whereas scholars predominantly argue in favour of the first explanation, this research examines the latter. This study shows that welfare apprenticeship in Antwerp was not necessarily a fast track towards cheap, unskilled labour. The integrated approach applied in this study underlines the fact that the underprivileged apprentices’ training practices were not increasingly based on economic strategies nor did they degenerate into exploitative child labour. In contrast, the Antwerp Chamber of the Poor never chose economic considerations over the importance that they attributed to each boy’s personal circumstances. As a result, from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century the Chamber of the Poor prioritised the acquisition of a training over the boys working to earn an income. Contrary to the expectations set out by historians who describe the motivation of charitable institutions as increasingly financial, the Chamber’s welfare apprenticeships were continuously shaped with the apprentice in mind.

Jaar van publicatie:2021

Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis

Toegankelijkheid:Embargoed