Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 122

There is only a modest amount of material in this fine book which is of direct interest to agricultural historians, for it aims to be a standard work on the general Dutch economy in the long nineteenth century. It is a straight translation (by Ian Cressie) of a book which appeared in Dutch in 2000 (Nederland 1780–1914: staat, instituties en economische ontwikkeling (Amsterdam: Balans)), and much of the agricultural history contained in it is derived from the lead author’s trailblazing doctoral dissertation of 1985, which was published in English in 1994 as The transformation of European agriculture in the 19th century: the case of the Netherlands (Amsterdam: VU University Press). However, although the new nuggets to be found here about Dutch farming and rural affairs are few in number, what we get instead is an unprecedentedly well founded framework of economic history, both in institutional and quantitative terms, in which to place the role of the Dutch agricultural sector. For this book is intended to be the crowning glory of Van Zanden’s great project of the 1990s to reconstruct the Dutch national accounts for the period 1800–1940. The results are available at the website nationalaccounts.niwi. knaw.nl/, which also lists the principal publications which have come out of the project, including several inEnglish. The strictures of inheritance is intended to reinterpret the history of the period in the light of the new and authoritative estimates which resulted from theten-year project.

The authors choose a chronological framework of four periods of about a quarter-century, each of which is allocated two of the main chapters. The theoretical approach is one of political economy, rather than production economics (which led the national accounts project): a great deal of attention is paid to the institutional constraints on economic activity, in the form of political regimes in the four periods, citing the authority of Douglass North in giving primacy to the political sphere in determining the success of the economy. Thus the first of each pair of chapters deals with the political situation, and the second with the economic effects and experience in the same quarter-century. The basic narrative is as follows: the political arrangements of the Republic, which had assisted the Dutch economy to giddy heights in the period up to 1670, became a distinct liability in the eighteenth century, causing economic stagnation, and it took the efforts of the Revolutionary regimes of the French period (1780–1813), the political-economic autocracy of the rule of King Willem I (1813–40), and the constitutional and economic reforms history review of the classical liberals (1840–70) to shake off the inheritance of the devolved, corporatist United Provinces, and allow modern economic growth to begin around 1860. No sooner had it begun, however, than a new form of corporatism emerged, to do with the pillarization of Dutch society into ideological organizations along Protestant, Catholic, Liberal or Socialist lines, all of which wanted their share of the state and the economy; this form of ‘neo-corporatism’, however, proved quite compatible with economic growth, and the Netherlands did very well from then onwards.

The strength of the book lies in its summaries of the economic situation in every other chapter, based on the massive amounts of new data generated by the national accounts work. The chapters on the political situation are also good, but more conventional, based on older sources and not deviating much from received opinion. There is now quite a healthy amount of material in English on modern Dutch history, including economic (and agricultural) history, and this is a welcome addition. The translation is excellent, although the editing is not: difficult Dutch terms and phrases riddle the text without proper translation, sometimes italicized and sometimes not: I found it irritating and others will find it confusing. The parts of special interest for historians of agriculture are a case study on the marken or common lands in the east of the country (some of which appeared in an article in the Review in 1999), and the passages on the massive growth of agricultural exports in the period after the mid-century (principally to Britain), and on the reaction of the sector to the crisis of the 1880s.

The book is promoted in Dutch as a new standard work on the period: it is indeed that. International comparison takes place, especially with Britain and Belgium, but the relative achievements of the Dutch economy in the period of European industrialization are under-stated. The insistence on the causal link between politics and economics is useful but a little dogmatic: on the one hand it is assumed that government economic measures were effective, which of course they seldom were, or at least not in the way that were intended; on the other, the concentration on government structures reduces (though does not eliminate) a focus on other cultural determinants of the economy, such as ideas about technology and entrepreneurship, religious attitudes, and the like. This book unlocks the results of Van Zanden’s national accounts project to the non-Dutch speaking world: that is more than welcome, but no one book is ever going to be the last word.