Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 324

Despite the annoyingly high pretensions expressed in the title and parts of the text, this actually is in many respects a nice book on Dutch de-urbanization processes in the period 1750–1850. These processes are illustrated through a convenient English summary of three interesting and very recent Dutch monographs on developments in the economic, political and cultural realm in the Dutch province of Zeeland in the period 1750–1850, written by, respectively, the first author, Paul Brusse, Jeanine Dekker and Arno Neele. Although urbanization seems to be a development which is not easily reversed, there are numerous examples of pre-industrial and industrial societies showing falling shares of urban population during long periods.

In what is now the Netherlands, and especially in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, a massive and rapid urbanization took place from the late middle ages until about 1680, making the Dutch Republic one of the most urbanized regions of the world. There then followed nearly two centuries of de-urbanization, initially due to an absolute decline of cities, but from about 1815 until 1850 also because the increase of the urban population lagged behind that of the rural population. As there were large temporal and quantitative differences between cities, the authors use a typology dividing cities into five categories: 1) government seats; 2) military cities and naval ports; 3) centres of international trade; 4) industrial centres; 5) centres of regional trade (agricultural centres). Later on, in addition to this categorization, the authors also point to some cities where the inhabitants owned extensive rural properties, which resulted in large income streams going from the countryside to the cities.

Although the authors acknowledge that cities can have a hybrid nature, the urban categorization proves useful, as they are able to show that Dutch urban decline took place mainly in centres of industrial trade or industry. The shift from urban to rural or agricultural was largely due to a loss of previous strong positions in international and industrial activities. As local and regional conditions played a large role in this loss, differences in the development between cities could be large. Dutch cities that functioned mainly as centres of an agricultural hinterland were hardly affected, because of the advantageous developments in agriculture from 1750 onwards. Though plausible, this analysis could have benefited from a more quantitative and systematic investigation of the urban and rural developments under consideration. This would, for instance, have shown that the continuous, slow de-urbanization process in the Dutch inland provinces had already started in the sixteenth century.

The authors propose to make urbanization and de-urbanization the central criterion for a new periodization of Dutch history, which would be less political than the ‘old-fashioned’ one which extends from the start of the Dutch Revolt in 1568 to the period around 1800 when the Napoleonic political turmoil ended in the constitution of the Dutch monarchy. This new periodization would better integrate economic, social and cultural factors, but is also designed to produce Dutch history which is less focused on the urbanized main province of Holland, and which pays more attention to diverging developments in other provinces and in the countryside. The authors’ attention to the rural farming elite as increasingly independent economic and administrative community leaders is also interesting.

The book closes with a concise new narrative of 30 pages summarizing Dutch history from the late middle ages to 1700, from 1700 to 1850, and, very briefly, the recent period. This review is not the place to discuss the many aspects touched upon in this often appealing new picture of Dutch history, which tries to integrate economic, cultural and political dimensions of developments from an urban–rural perspective. One major argument is that the economic and cultural roots of Dutch society today lie not in the impressively wealthy commercial Dutch Golden Age, but rather in the period 1750–1850, when a revival of the countryside resulted in a growing importance of agriculture.

A weak point, however, is the confusing use in the overview of ill-defined territorial demarcations, like the apparent inclusion of coastal Groningen and Friesland in the inland provinces, frequently also denoted as ‘the East’ as opposed to ‘the West’ (comprising only Zeeland and Holland). Unfortunately this results in a simplified picture, only substituting ‘the West’ for Holland as the standard against which developments elsewhere are measured. The authors even suggest a clear distinction line between a Republic of Burghers in ‘the West’ and a Republic of Nobles in ‘the East’. This seems a very limited improvement on the previous ‘Hollandocentric’ historiography. Such a simplification does not take into account, for instance, that the rural parts of Northern provinces Groningen and Friesland were in many ways much more similar to Holland and Zeeland than to the inland provinces. Unfortunately, these simplifications and some exaggerations (like, for instance, depicting the newly developed nuclear household system within the Western Netherlands in the seventeenth century as extraordinary in a Europe still characterized by extended households) diminish the general value of this study.