Maarten Prak

Towards an economic interpretation of citizenship: The Dutch Republic between medieval communes and modern nation-states

Citizenship was a key concept in European state formation from the Middle Ages onwards. This article presents an economic interpretation of citizenship. It argues that such a contract increases the efficiency of the exchange between the state and its inhabitants. Next, the concept of citizenship is applied to the political economy of the Dutch Republic, which was an ‘intermediate’ stage in the process of state formation between the medieval commune (with a restricted form of citizenship) and the nation-state of the nineteenth century, when the concept became more inclusive, covering all inhabitants. The article briefly sketches the genesis of the Dutch Republic and identifies some of the key problems of its political economy.

Citizen radicalism and democracy in the Dutch Republic

ConclutionIn this article I have investigated one of the supposed founder-members of R. R. Palmers “Age of Democratic Revolution,” the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s. My purpose was to show that this movement, even though the Patriots made extensive use of such standard items of the democratic vocabulary as “popular sovereignty” and “representation,” did not envisage a political system that might be reasonably fitted into the revolution that Palmer had in mind.Instead, the Patriots stood within a long tradition of urban middle-class opposition politics. They held on firmly to both form and content of that tradition. What was new about them was the intensity and thoroughness with which they worked toward their goal of remedying the, as they saw it, corruption of the political system. We might even speculate that they had carried this particular tradition of urban corporatist republicanism to its logical extremes; that is to say, to a point where an even more radical step would be necessary to overcome the resistance of the established powers. They might, for example, have considered to take “popular sovereignty” at its face value, and over-come their distaste of democracy, so as to include the lower classes into their movement. That step, however, would have taken them outside the tradition that provided them with a specific brand of political liberty. Before the intervention of Prussian troops in the fall of 1787 they were not prepared to make such a momentous decision. For this would have implied a dropping of much that was essential to the corporatist ideology, which had been the prime motivation for their actions in the first place.Corporatism was deeply rooted in the Dutch society of the Old Regime. Economically, it provided major sections of the middle class with some sort of protection against the vicissitudes of conjunctural fluctuations and other uncertainties besetting the small but independent merchant or craftsman. Socially, it made these people into a community, in which they had some sort of social status. Politically, it gave the whole of the middle class a claim on the authorities, while at the same time keeping the lower classes at bay.Corporatism was not unique to the Dutch Republic. We have seen that German towns knew a similar middle-class ideology and similar political movements. French towns too had their privileges and their guilds. Nevertheless, they did not produce anything like the kind of political protest that was voiced by the Dutch and German middle classes. Against the idea of a single “democratic revolution” I have pitted the differentiated model of European state-formation, and tried to link an investigation of a particular form of collective action to that model. The pattern of a politically vital urban middle class in Germany and the Netherlands on the one hand, and its absence in France - and Britain, for that matter - on the other, in fact seems to coincide very well with the model of a commercial versus agrarian (or feudal) zone. These conclusions may lead us to some further speculations, both on the theoretical level, as well as in regard to this particular piece of Dutch history.When we look forward, toward the Batavian Republic that was founded in the wake of the French invasion of 1794–95, the ensuing struggles between moderates and radicals about political reforms - deemed necessary by all parties - do not so much present themselves as a clash between conservatives and revolutionaries, but as one between two different strands of reform. The moderates kept to the traditions of localism and corporatism, and strove for a return to the roots of the old republican constitution. The radicals on the other hand, had come to the conclusion that the problems of the Dutch state were of a magnitude that could only be overcome by wiping the slate clean and starting all over again, this time along the lines that had been suggested by the French example. The fact that many Dutch radicals had lived in exile in France in the years after 1787, where they had first-hand experience of a revolution in a completely different setting from the one at home, may perhaps in large part account for their specific brand of politics. At the same time, they can serve as prime examples of the revolutionaries-as-statemakers that Theda Skocpol has drawn attention to.This leads us to the second point. This investigation has, once more, suggested the importance of state formations in the analysis of political processes. The Dutch state had come into being in its specific form because this form served the interests of both the indigenous ruling class, that resented interference by centralizing bureaucracies, and the commercial community, that resented interference by anyone. For the local oligarchs it was of prime importance that the states power should derive from theirs, instead of the other way. The merchants wanted the state to provide them with protection against foreign aggression and nothing more. Against this coalition any centralizing institution would have to muster an equally formidable coalition of its own. The attempt was hardly ever made.The state, being the way it was, refuted some ideologies and institutions, while supporting and legitimating others. Of course, the latter were generally concomitant with the larger make-up of the state. They did, however, leave room for maneuver as both ideologies and institutions tended to be two-sided: The stress on self-government by the local patricians, for example, might be taken up by other parts of the populace as well, and turned against patrician dominance. In the same vein, the militias that should preserve public order, might turn into vehicles for rebellion. Thus, the state could not prevent opposition, but it dictated the forms it would take - the demands put forward, the means of popular mobilization. Even though the Dutch state, in terms of organization, did not seem equal to these tasks at all, it held sway over both its supporters and its discontents.

Working on Labor

Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.

Mega-structures of the Middle Ages: the construction of religious buildings in Europe and Asia, c. 1000–1500

How did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

The Republican Alternative : The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared

The Republican Alternative seeks to move beyond the mere notion of scholarly inquiry into the republic—the subject of recent rediscovery by political historians interested in Europe’s intellectual heritage—by investigating the practical similarities and differences between two early modern republics, as well as their self-images and interactions during the turbulent seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the world’s most economically successful societies, Switzerland and the Netherlands laid much of the foundation for their prosperity during the early modern period discussed here. This volume attempts to clarify the special character of these two countries as they developed, including issues of religious plurality, the republican form of government, and an increasingly commercially-driven agrarian society.

Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West

Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates, through regional studies and paired comparisons, how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

The Netherlands and the Polder Model: A Response

In response to the contributions by Davids-’t Hart, De Vries, and De Munck we emphasise that our book Nederland en het poldermodel [The Netherlands and the Polder Model] has been written for a general audience and therefore does not provide a detailed theoretical framework, nor a large number of graphs and tables. We have focused on the territory of the Netherlands, fully aware that this was not a (politically or economically) coherent territory before the sixteenth century, but any other choice would have been equally arbitrary. In the Middle Ages the region developed much like other, neighbouring parts of Western Europe, but whereas elsewhere the rise of centralised states and absolutist monarchs ended the development path based on bottom-up institutions, the successful Dutch Revolt and the formation of the decentralised Dutch Republic ensured much more continuity. We share the assessment of our critics that the transformation from this institutional structure via the mid-nineteenth century phase of ‘liberalisation’ into the new corporatism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is still incompletely understood. Nederland en het poldermodel. Een repliek In reactie op de bijdragen van Davids-’t Hart, De Vries en De Munck benadrukken we dat het boek Nederland en het poldermodel geschreven is voor een breder publiek en daardoor niet het uitgewerkte theoretische kader noch een overdaad aan tabellen en grafieken bevat. We hebben ons daarbij gericht op het grondgebied van het huidige Nederland, hoewel dat tot in de zestiende eeuw geen duidelijke eenheid bezat – in economische noch in politieke zin. Tot ver in de middeleeuwen kende dit gebied een ontwikkelingsgang die sterke parallellen vertoonde met de rest van West-Europa. Maar daar waar elders de middeleeuwse erfenis van institutievorming van onderop met de opkomst van gecentraliseerde staten en absolutistische ambities afgesloten wordt, zet deze ontwikkelingslijn zich in de Republiek met haar gecentraliseerde staatsvorm voort. We delen het oordeel van onze critici dat de complexe overgang van deze vroegmoderne institutionele structuur naar het twintigste-eeuwse poldermodel, een overgang die gekenmerkt wordt door een fase van liberalisering en institutionele hervormingen (vanaf 1798 tot ongeveer 1870) gevolgd door een hernieuwde beweging van ‘bottom-up’ collectieve actie, nog meer duiding verdient.

Bibliography of the Published Works of S.R. Epstein

Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates, through regional studies and paired comparisons, how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

The People in Politics: Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic Compared

For too long, historians have seen the French Revolution as a watershed between a political dark age of oligarchy and absolutism, and the enlightened era of democracy that presumably started in 1789. This image was the result of the combination of three research interests that all developed since the 1960s: state formation, the social composition of elites, and riots and rebellions. The first privileged the state over local authorities, even though it was at the local level that most public services were delivered. The second implied that elites were only responsive to their own interests, and disregarded the concerns of their constituents. The third suggested that ordinary people were merely relevant as political actors on an incidental basis, during riots and rebellions, and disappeared into the background again as soon as the dust had settled.1

Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800

The long-term trajectory of Hollands population in the early modern period is well-known. This chapter presents the estimates of the basic demographic data for Holland in the period 1500-1800 which can be derived from previous studies, in combination with a number of assumptions about, for example, the link between the average age of marriage of women and the birth rate. The result is a plausible scenario for the demographic development of Holland in this period. This changed after 1570, however, and between 1630 and 1700 the natural increase of the entire population of Holland became negative - a change which was due to urbanization, plague epidemics and the rising age of marriage. After 1700, the death rate in cities and the countryside started to fall again, which was partly caused by the disappearance of the plague. Keywords:age of marriage; demographic change; Holland; plague; the birth rate