By Jeannette Kamp

The nineteenth century truly was an age of transformation. Throughout Europe processes of industrialization and urbanization, nationalization and centralization, changed the structures of society. It was an age in which the number of people living in urban communities grew substantially.

The majority of this urban growth was achieved by in-migration of people from the countryside who moved to the big city (often indirectly) in search of work. At the time, the rapid urbanization was a cause of concern for the (governing) elites. In their view, the influx of primarily poor newcomers led to an increase of crime and all sort of immoral behaviour like drunkenness and prostitution. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociologists reinforced the idea that there was a link between urbanization, migration and crime.

Since then, the presumed link between urbanization, migration and crime remained a matter of scholarly (and public) debate. This project therefore investigates the experiences of migrants within the criminal justice system in Amsterdam 1850-1905.

By Samantha Sint Nicolaas

During the sixteenth and seventeenth century some 600,000 foreigners settled in the cities of the province of Holland in the Dutch Republic. That early modern Amsterdam, in particular, attracted a consistently large migrant population is well known. The religious tolerance, the economic opportunity structures, and the poor relief provisions made Amsterdam a particularly attractive destination for both foreign and inland migrants alike. Even as other cities in the Dutch Republic increasingly regulated who was welcome to settle within the city, Amsterdam maintained a tolerant migration policy, with no system of letters of indemnity.

At the same time there was evidence of increasing tension between migrants and locals in Amsterdam. This was visible in the emerging segregation on the labour market, the marriage market and in residential patterns. In this same period, elsewhere in Europe, poorer migrants became increasingly seen against the backdrop of their demands for access to poverty relief and communal resources, as well as increasingly associated with criminal behaviour and the disruption of public order.

This project looks anew at the reception of different migrant groups in Amsterdam through the increasingly entangled lens of migration and crime. It analyses the interrogations and sentencing of migrants to further elucidate the treatment of migrants by Amsterdam's judicial authorities, as well as the reception of migrants by the settled population.

By Karlijn Luk

Due to its economic prosperity, its policy of (relative) religious tolerance, and its large numbers of migrants, the Dutch Republic has long had a reputation of being the prime example of ‘tolerance’, especially during the seventeenth century. Although the great variety of newcomers in the Dutch Republic did launch an era of economic prosperity, they were also the cause of social unrest. Cultural differences, combined with the increased residential density, were instigators for numerous difficulties in everyday urban life. However, little is known about the daily practices of local and migrant co-existence: to what extent were newcomers treated as outsiders and did daily interactions between migrants and the local population of these cities lead to more conflicts? Did certain prejudices against newcomers make them more vulnerable, as targets of conflict and violence or to suspicion by the authorities?

In order to answer the question to what extent immigration in Rotterdam and Leiden between 1680 and 1800 gave rise to discriminatory patterns in criminal prosecution and conflict regulation among natives and immigrants, I will be looking a variety of judicial sources. With the purpose of analyzing both the daily practices of local an migrant co-existence as well as migrant vulnerability before the courts through the use of these sources of social control, this project focusses on how the cities of Leiden and Rotterdam dealt with public order disturbances, violence and cases of sodomy.

The aim of this project is not only to reconstruct the ways in which certain characteristics and migration-status played into the treatment of different types of people before the early modern courts, but also to consider the conflicts behind certain cases that reached the city courts, such as violent offences. Conflicts and how they were dealt with both by the people involved and by authorities in particular provide a privileged insight for studying everyday interactions and relations between established city dwellers and newcomers in a city or neighbourhood.