Maïka De Keyzer obtained her PhD in 2014 at the University of Antwerp with a dissertation on late medieval commons, sustainability, and inclusiveness. Her research deals with both economic, social and ecological history of the premodern period. Via an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, Maïka De Keyzer analyses the causes and consequences of welfare, inequality, social resilience and collective action. Currently, her main focus is the study of the impact of different societal models on general welfare levels in the premodern period.
A peasant makeshift economy: avoiding precariousness or building economic resilience? Different income strategies of peasant households in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Campine area, Southern Low Countries)
A makeshift lifestyle is mostly associated with poverty. In the words of Alannah Tomkins and Steven King, the concept is often used to denote patchy, desperate, and sometimes failing strategies employed by the poor for material survival. This is where I started as well. Working on a premodern peasant economy to the North-East of Antwerp in the Southern Low Countries, I expected to find the poorest cottagers and landless labourers as the main actors in the makeshift economy. To my surprise, however, other groups, higher on the social ladder, did not rely on some well-defined and stable sources of income. Even independent farmers or peasants switched between arable farming, animal husbandry, cottage industry, rent-seeking, and earning a wage. They may not have been desperate or failing, but they certainly combined a wide range of agricultural, financial, and labour opportunities to generate a complex and shifting family income. Following a life cycle path, while also adapting to economic cycles, they sought the most effective way to create a family income. In this lecture, I will therefore try to disentangle the income profile of different social groups in the Campine peasant economy and discuss whether the concept of a makeshift economy can or should be reserved for the poor. Additionally, I would like to reflect on our overreliance on wage series and land registers to calculate the household income of premodern societies, given the highly dynamic nature of income in this period.
Mikko Jakonen is a Professor of Social and Public Policy at the University of Eastern Finland. His main research areas include transformations in work and the economy, contemporary social and political theory, and the history of political thought. He has written monographs, edited several books and special journal issues, and published extensively in various academic journals and edited volumes.
In recent years, Jakonen has focused on research related to precarity and in-work poverty in Finland, the precarious working conditions of artists, and the intertwined developments of British political, economic, and international relations during the 17th to 19th centuries. In future his interests lie particularly in the ruptures of the welfare state, evolving conceptualizations of work, and the development of a theory of motion within the social sciences.