[eng] Abstract During its Golden Age (16th C.) Antwerp became the commercial metropolis of the Western European Economy. The social and cultural identity of the Antwerp bourgeoisie was profoundly marked by this commercial background. This pattern also emerges from research of 17th and 18th С...

Economic historians are increasingly aware of the divergence between the development of real wages and GDP per capita in pre-industrial Europe, even in affluent urbanized societies with high wage levels such as the sixteenth-century Low Countries. This article offers an empirical answer to this...