Civic Charity in a Golden Age

Using the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage as a window through which readerscan see the start of profound social and economic changes in early modernAmsterdam, Civic Charity in a Golden Age explores the connectionsbetween the developing capitalist economy, the functioning of the government,and the provision of charitable services to orphans in Amsterdam duringthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the city's greatestprosperity and subsequent decline.Anne McCants skillfully interprets details of the orphanage's expenditures,especially for food; its population; the work records of those who werereared there; and the careers of the regents who oversaw it. The establishmentof the orphanage itself was called for by the changing economic needsof rapidly expanding commercial centers and the potential instabilityof a government that depended on taxes from a large, politically powerlesssegment of the population.