Sport and the New Culture: Amsterdam’s Sporting Entrepreneurs in its ‘Second Golden Age’

Piercey, Nicholas (2019) Sport and the New Culture: Amsterdam’s Sporting Entrepreneurs in its ‘Second Golden Age’. In: The International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport (ISHPES 2018), 18 July 2018 - 21 July 2018, Münster, Germany. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam underwent important changes to its economic, social and cultural life, which saw it called the ‘Second Golden Age’ of the city. As old elites gave way to new entrepreneurial influences, a new culture emerged which focused on mass, visible and consumable activities, in which the body played an important role. The late 1870s and 1880s in Amsterdam saw spatial changes and an expansion of entrepreneurial activities in various fields; sport too became the location for the development of new forms of activity, new products and for the accumulation of profit. Entrepreneurs in the sporting field, like Perry & Co., De Gruyter and the Amsterdamsche Sport-Club, could fuse together new cultures of the body and the consumer to produce a range of new products, while new technologies of selling and media provided new markets. In the Amsterdam of the 1880s entrepreneurs were not only finding new markets, opportunities and profits, but they were also reproducing the concept of the trainable, measurable and consumable body within the streets of the expanding capital. Using archival sources and digital newspapers, in addition to existing research, this paper will demonstrate how sport and the new consumer culture were inextricably linked in the discourses of late-19th century Amsterdam.