Back to the Future: Career Transitions at the Dawn of Capitalism: The immigration of merchants from the Southern Netherlands to Amsterdam, 1578–1602

This paper investigates the conditions facilitating career transitions across dissimilar cultural contexts. Particular attention is devoted to two critical obstacles faced by transitioners during cross-cultural role reorientations. First, transitioners must make sense of the unspoken demands and requirements ascribed to their work role in the new cultural context. Second, they must find ways to access and mobilize context-specific resources and information in a context alien to them. Empirically, the histories of 452 merchants emigrated from the southern provinces to Amsterdam during the period 1578-1602 are analyzed. The difference between Amsterdam's merchant culture (based on open competition, speculative and "depersonalized" financial investments) and that of the southern provinces (a well-protected economic environment based on the guild system) required a reorientation from the role of pre-modern merchants to that of capitalist entrepreneurs. A set of hypotheses predicting why some immigrant merchants successfully completed this career transition while others did not is presented and brought to test.