Leiden University Student Repository

Oudsten, Jessica den (2021)

The Descendants of Norwegian and Danish Immigrants: Integration, Assimilation and Social Mobility in Amsterdam, 1660-1811

Research master thesis | History (research) (MA)

This thesis explores one of the major lacunae in migration history: what happened to the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who migrated to the Dutch Republic in the early modern period? Immigrants constituted a large segment of the urban population: in Amsterdam around 1650 circa forty percent of the resident population was born abroad. Thousands of these immigrants got married in Amsterdam and had children. The lives of these children, but also of the (great)grandchildren, had not been studied until now. Profiting from recent advancements in the digitisation and indexation of the parish registers and the notarial archives of Amsterdam, this thesis analyses the processes of integration, assimilation and social mobility of nine families with a Norwegian or Danish migration background between 1660 and 1811. What was their process of integration like, and to what extent did they experience social mobility?

Amsterdam

Migration

Integration

Assimilation

Social Mobility

Dutch Republic

Early Modern Period

Migration History

Author

Oudsten, Jessica den

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence

Supervisors

Schmidt, A.

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en