Abstract
The history of the 18th century Atlantic revolutions has often been written as either one of far-reaching change, or one of continuity. But very few historians have studied how individual households experienced and negotiated this change and continuity in their everyday lives, especially for the lower classes. The present project will answer to this hiatus via an in-depth analysis of a unique collection of ca 500 letters written by men and women from the Dutch city of Delft to their municipality between1795 and 1798. The authors are mostly (the wives and widows of) artisans and shopkeepers, who had suffered losses during the revolutionary period, and ask the new revolutionary principality for a municipal job. The often very extensive letters look back on a tumultuous revolutionary period spanning from 1787 to 1795, thereby giving insight in the central research objective, which is to reconstruct the way in which lower middle class households experienced revolutionary change in their everyday lives, the ways in which they coped with these changes, and how they rebuilt their lives after the revolution. I will reconstruct this story of change for three areas of life: work, family and the social network. The resulting analysis will give us a fresh look on revolutionary change, one which highlights the agency of households from a little-studied social group in negotiating these changes in their everyday lives.
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