New Institutional Economics has sparked a renewed interest in urban regulations and the elites who issued them. Yet, scholars have not yet examined the complex social configurations in which power elites had to function and how these configurations shaped the incentives and constraints for urban politics. Golden Age Antwerp serves as a case study, since much of its economic efflorescence is attributed to the commercial policies that were implemented by the city council. Merchants were, according to existing literature, largely absent from this council. This provides a striking contrast with other pre-industrial gateway cities where the urban government was largely populated by merchants. This raises the question how Antwerp pursued merchant-friendly policies and where the political elite got its economic knowhow. This article will show that Antwerp was less divergent than generally assumed. Merchants entered Antwerp’s city council slower than in other gateway cities, because of some formal barriers, the timing of Antwerp’s economic bloom and the absence of a strong local merchant community. Nevertheless, the low number of merchants in the city council before 1550 shows that politics were not so much shaped by social overlaps between different types of elites, but rather on interactions between them.
Janna Everaert (Thu,) studied this question.