Between Wage Labor and Vocation: Child Labor in Dutch Urban Industry, 1600-1800‪.‬

Introduction Francoise Loeram was only twelve years old when the Leiden draper Piere Blisijn employed her to spin for him for two years in 1640. In exchange, the girl received food, lodgings and a set of clothes, and at the end of her contract the sum of 15 guilders. (1) Francoise was not an exceptional case; in the seventeenth century many thousands of children worked in the Leiden textile industry. Nevertheless child labor is usually associated with the rise of industrial factory labor in the nineteenth century. This interpretation has dominated, because only from that time contemporaries started to perceive large-scale child labor as a social problem. Degrading conditions in the factories, such as long working hours, physically heavy labor and miserable working circumstances caused opposition among parts of the bourgeoisie and representatives of various political tendencies. In the course of the nineteenth century, moral indignation ultimately led to protective legislation in the area of child labor. (2)