Economies, public finances, and the impact of institutional changes in interregional perspective the low countries and neighbo

Public and private finances in the late Middle Ages Studies in urban social, economic and political history of the medieval and modern Low Countries, 4 Leuven-Apeldoorn, 1995, and Marc

Economies, Public Finances,

and the Impact of Institutional Changes

in Interregional Perspective

SEUH 36

Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800)

Series Editors

Marc Boone Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Ghent University

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes

in Interregional Perspective

The Low Countries and Neighbouring German Territories

(14th-17th Centuries)

Edited byRemi van Schạk

Cover illustration: after Quinten Metsys, The moneylender and his wife, sixteenth century.

© [Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussel / foto: J Gelyns/ Ro scan]

© 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of the publisher

Contents

Personalia viiAcknowledgements xi

Introduction

Remi van Schạk

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes

in Interregional Perspective: Some Introductory Remarks 3Peter Hoppenbrouwers

Three Decades of Economic and Social History

of the Medieval Low Countries: A Summary Survey 11Marjolein ’t Hart

Coercion and Capital Revisited

Recent Trends in the Historiography of State-Formation 23

Industry and Trade

Tim Soens, Peter Stabel & Tineke Van de Walle

An Urbanised Countryside? A Regional Perspective

on Rural Textile Production in the Flemish West-Quarter (1400-1600) 35Job Weststrate

The Impact of War on Lower Rhine Trade

Finances and Politics

David Kusman & Jean-Luc Demeulemeester

Connecting Regional Capital Markets in the Late Medieval

Low Countries: The Role of Piedmontese Bankers as Financial Pathfinders

and Innovators in Brabant, Guelders, Flanders and Hainaut (c.1260-1355) 83

Bart Lambert

The Political Side of the Coin: Italian Bankers and the Fiscal Battle

between Princes and Cities in the Late Medieval Low Countries 103

Rudolf A.A Bosch

The Impact of Financial Crises on the Management of

Urban Fiscal Systems and Public Debt

Jelle Haemers

A Financial Revolution in Flanders?

Public Debt, Representative Institutions, and Political Centralisation

Evaluation

Wim Blockmans

Contents

Personalia

Wim Blockmans (1945) is emeritus professor at Leiden University He mainly

worked on state formation and representative institutions in late medieval Europe, and the Burgundian Netherlands in particular His most recent books include Metropolen aan de Noordzee (2010) and Emperor Charles V 1500‑1558 (2002), revised as Karel V, Keizer van een wereldrijk (20124)

Rudolf A.A Bosch (1984) recieved his MA degree in History at the University

of Groningen Between 2008 and 2014 he was preparing his PhD thesis on the impact

of political and economic transformations on urban societies and public finances in the Duchy of Guelders between c 1350 and 1580 at the Groningen Research Institute for

the Study of Culture He has published on several aspects concerning the urban history in the Low Countries, more specifically the socio-economic history of towns in the Eastern Netherlands and the financial relations between the Duchy of Guelders and the German Lower Rhine area

Jean-Luc Demeulemeester (1965) is professor at the Université Libre de

Bruxelles, at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, the Political Science Department and at the Arts and Humanities Faculty At Solvay Brussels School

of Economics and Management he is the co-director of the Centre for Economic and Financial History (joint with K Oosterlinck and J.J Heirwegh) of the Emile Bernheim Research centre CEB He is the co-founder and co-editor (with Dora Costa, Berkeley, and Claude Diebolt, CNRS Strasbourg and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) of Cliometrica

A Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History.

Jelle Haemers (1980) was trained as an urban historian at the University of

Ghent He is professor at the department of Medieval History of the University of Leuven since 2010 and a member of the Jonge Academie of Belgium since 2013 He wrote his first book on the Ghent revolt of 1449-1453 (2004) In recent years his research interests have widened to encompass other kinds of social and political conflicts in the late medieval town, notably in the Low Countries (1100-1600) He also published on the use of social theory and auxiliary sciences in history, the late medieval nobility and the financial history

of court and towns He has completed his second book, on the political conflict between the Flemish cities and Maximilian of Austria in the 1480s (For the Common Good State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy, 1477‑1482 (2009)), which was

awarded with the prestigious “Frans van Cauwelaert-prize” of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Belgium Most recently his De strijd om het regentschap over Filips de Schone Opstand, geweld en facties in Brugge, Gent en Ieper (1482‑1488) was published (2014) His

current major research project is a study of popular politics in the late medieval town

Marjolein ’t Hart (1955) specialised in early modern social and economic

his-tory After her graduation and PhD she held positions at various universities (Groningen, Leiden, Erasmus Rotterdam, VU University Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, New School for Social Studies New York, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia

University New York) and in various disciplines (history, sociology, political sciences) Her main publications include The Making of a Bourgeois State War, Politics and Finance during the Dutch Revolt (1993); A Financial History of the Netherlands 1550‑1990 (1997);

De wereld en Nederland Een sociale en economische geschiedenis van de laatste duizend jaar

(2011), and The Dutch Wars of Independence Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands 1570‑1680 (2014) Presently she is head of the research department of the Huygens

Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague and professor History of State Formation in Global Perspective at VU University in Amsterdam

Peter (P.C.M.) Hoppenbrouwers (1954) is professor of Medieval History at

Leiden University He is the co-author, with Wim Blockmans of Introduction to Medieval Europe 300‑1500 (2014²) His main fields of interest are peasant communities, household

and family, local lordship and military organisation, and cultures of violence in the eval Latin West

medi-David Kusman (1969), postdoctoral researcher associated with the

Interuniversity Attraction Pole Program 7/26 “City & Society in the Low Countries (1200-1850)” at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, graduated from this university in

2008 with a doctorate in medieval history, published in 2013 in the Studies in European Urban History Series, 28, under the title: Usuriers publics et banquiers du Prince Le rơle économique des financiers piémontais dans les villes du duché de Brabant (xiiie‑xiv e siècle)

His current researches focus on credit and information during the Late Middle Ages

Bart Lambert (1981) was a research assistant at the University of York, working

on the ahrc-funded project “England’s Immigrants, 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the Later Middle Ages” and is presently lecturer at Durham University He is the author of The City, the Duke and their Banker The Rapondi Family and the Formation of the Burgundian State (1384‑1430) (2006), “Pouvoir et argent La fiscalité d’État et la consommation du

crédit des ducs de Bourgogne (1384-1506)” (Revue du Nord, 2009), “Bonnore Olivier:

courtier de la fiscalité bourguignonne (1429-1466)” (Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire,

2012) and “Friendly Foreigners: International Warfare, Resident Aliens and the Early History of Denization in England, c 1250-c 1400” (English Historical Review, 2015) He

is currently editing a volume on Luxury Textiles in Italy and the Low Countries during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period, to be published with Ashgate.

Remi van Schạk (1950) studied History at the Katholieke Universiteit

Nijmegen and the University of Ghent After research fellowships and teaching activities

at the Universities of Nijmegen, Rotterdam and Groningen, he was working as a policy advisor for research in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, and is senior lec-turer in Medieval History at the same university since 1995 He is publishing on financial, economic and social history, and on socio-religious history, especially of the northern and eastern Low Countries His publications include De Tielse kroniek (1983, together with

others), Walfridus van Bedum (1985), Belasting, bevolking en bezit in Gelre en Zutphen (1350‑1550) (1987), and substantial parts of Onder vele torens Een geschiedenis van de gemeente Bedum (2002), and of the Geschiedenis van Groningen, vol I (2008).

Peter Stabel is professor of Medieval History at the University of Antwerp

and member of the Antwerp based Centre for Urban History He publishes on the social

Personalia

Personalia

and economic history of the cities of the medieval and early modern Low Countries His recent research interests cover craft guilds, textile manufacture, labour markets, gender and princely courts in the Low Countries and he is also studying the representation of urbanity and market regulation in the cities of the medieval Islamic world

Tim Soens (1977) is associate professor of Medieval and Environmental

History at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) He has studied Medieval History at the University of Ghent (Belgium), where he obtained his PhD in 2006, investigating water management and the interaction of man and nature in coastal Flanders in the medieval and early modern period Within the Antwerp Department of History, Tim Soens has developed a new research line “Environment and Power”, concentrating on the historical relationship between human societies and the natural environment, and the way this inter-action was steered by evolving power constellations and formal and informal institutions

Tineke Van de Walle completed her MA degree in History in 2012 at the

University of Antwerp She graduated on a research project concerning pilgrim accounts

to Jerusalem in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the perception on urbanity, supervised by Professor Peter Stabel From 1 October 2013 onwards, she is working as PhD fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) on a project on suburbanisation in the late fifteenth and sixteenth at the Centre for Urban History (University of Antwerp)

Job Weststrate (1975) studied history at Leiden University and

Humboldt-Universität in Berlin from 1993-1999 He obtained his PhD at Leiden University for his dissertation In het kielzog van moderne markten Handel en scheepvaart op de Rijn, Waal en IJssel (2007) Lastly he worked at the University of Groningen as a postdoctoral researcher

within the “Cuius Regio”-Project (www.cuius-regio.eu), part of the EuroCORECODE programme of the European Science Foundation His project explored the regional cohe-sion of the Guelders-Lower Rhine region in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Acknowledgements

On 8-9 June 2012, an international conference took place in the large monumental court room of the former Groningen court, now housing the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, entitled “Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Change: Towards a Comparative Approach of Regions in the Medieval and Early-Modern Low Countries and its Neighbouring Territories” The conveners were Rudolf Bosch, MA, and the editor of this volume The conference was held

in the context of an ongoing research project on state formation, economic transformation and urban society in the Duchy of Guelders in the late Middle Ages The present volume

is the result of this conference

The conference was financed by the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG), the Posthumus Institute (the Research School for Economic and Social History in the Netherlands and Flanders), the Onderzoekschool Mediëvistiek (Research School for Medieval Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders) and the EuroCORECODE programme “Cuius Regio” (funded by the European Science Foundation) The organisers are most grateful for their generous support

We would also like to thank the chair persons of the panel sessions, Professor Dick E.H de Boer and Professor Raingard M Esser, who aptly introduced the speakers and kept discussions well on track Most of the scholars who presented a paper at the conference kindly agreed to refashion the annotated text of their presentation into a contribution to this volume Unfortunately not all speakers had the opportunity to join the ranks of the authors On the other hand, we managed to “contract” one participant

of the 11th Conference on Urban History at Prague (August, 29-September 1, 2012), Dr Bart Lambert of Durham University (formerly University of York) to add his reworked presentation delivered in Prague to this volume I wish to thank all twelve authors for their patience and willingness to include my many comments on earlier drafts and for their helpful suggestions for my introduction to this volume

Finally, as the editor of this volume I am more than happy that the editors of the series “Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)”, Professor Marc Boone and Professor Anne-Laure De Bruaene, were prepared to incorporate this collection of essays

as a volume in these series after constructive feedback from external referees I would also like to thank Dr Jelle De Rock, who carefully directed the practical handling of the process from manuscript to book

Remi van SchạkGroningen, November 15, 2014

Introduction

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective, ed by Remi Van S chạk ,

Turnhout, 2015 (Studies in European Urban History, 36), p 3‑9.

F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH‑EB.5.103702

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact

of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective: Some Introductory Remarks*

Remi van Schạk

University of Groningen

Political processes and socio-economic developments are strongly interconnected

On the one hand, political friction, wars and trade blockades will certainly have had

a negative influence on rural and urban development; on the other hand, economic centres, especially towns, in their turn shaped the ways in which the process of political integration was directed Towns can be seen as particularistic elements opposed to the excessive centralisation of power, but economic and financial “containers” that were essential for the financing of political aims Not only demographic size, economic functions or fiscal potential of individual cities, but also the part they played in formal and informal political and economic networks is decisive in understanding the role of cities during the long and turbulent period prior to the formation of the Dutch Republic

In particular, analysing the development of public finances in the investigation of these relations is crucial In that respect we link up with a historiographical trend that has been prominently represented in the last two or three decades by the Ghent medievalists Walter Prevenier and Marc Boone, although the tradition itself goes back to Hans Van Werveke’s book of 1934 or even that of Georges Espinas of 1902.1 New research will remain necessary, both on urban finances and their impact and on seigniorial finances – not as an institutional study of financial systems as such, but as a study of the mechanisms

of power acquisition and preservation of power.2 Below, Marjolein ’t  Hart will show the merits and perspectives of such investigations by analysing recent trends in the historiography of state formation

1 See for instance Marc Boone en Walter Prevenier (ed.), Finances publiques et finances privées au Bas Moyen Âge Public and private finances in the late Middle Ages (Studies in urban social, economic and political history of the medieval

and modern Low Countries, 4) Leuven-Apeldoorn, 1995, and Marc Boone, Karel Davids & Paul Janssens (ed.), Urban government and the market for annuities in Western Europe (14th‑18th centuries) (Studies in European Urban History, 3),

Turnhout, 2003 Besides the “founding” books of Georges Espinas, Les finances de la commune de Douai Des origines au

xve siècle, Paris, 1902, and Hans Van Werveke, De Gentsche stadsfinanciën in de middeleeuwen, Brussels, 1934, I have to

mention the magnum opus of Raymond Van Uytven, Stadsfinanciën en stadsekonomie te Leuven van de XIIe tot het einde der XVIe eeuw (Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten

van België, Klasse der Letteren, 44), Brussels, 1961.

2 Cf Richard Bonney (ed.), Economic systems and state finance (The origins of the modern state in Europe, 13th to 18th

centuries, theme B), Oxford, 1995, and Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc XIII‑XVIII Fiscal systems in the European economy from the 13th to the 18th centuries (Fondazione Instituto Internazionale di storia

economica “F Datini”, Prato, Serie II – Atti delle “Settimane di studi” e altri convegni, 39), Florence, 2008.

* I would like to thank Mrs Ingrid Sennema for correcting my English.

Remi van Schạk

So far, research into the territory of what we usually call the Low Countries has mainly been focused on the southern and western principalities, especially the counties of Flanders and Holland, and often mainly within its political borders As highly urbanised and economically successful territories under the centralising government of the Burgundian-Habsburg dukes, they formed a perfect test-case for the relationship between successful urban economic development and one of the most intriguing processes of state formation in European medieval and early modern history For the County of Holland, much research has also been conducted into the role of the spectacular economic rise during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the specific ways of urban development

in connection with the political supremacy of this region in the Republic of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.3 Because of the existing focus on Flanders and Holland it would be highly relevant to confront the latest insights relating to the southern and western regions of the Low Countries with those relating to the eastern regions like for instance Guelders, and, moving across today’s state borders, the neighbouring German regions, especially the Lower Rhine region The Duchy of Guelders would have been connected for a longer period with some German principalities like Cleves, Jülich, Berg, Mark and Ravensberg, if the last Duke of Guelders, William from the House of Jülich-Berg (1539-1543) had not been forced to renounce that part of his territories and transfer it to Emperor Charles V as Lord of the Low Countries, as was stipulated

by the Treaty of Venlo in 1543.4 Until the formation of the Dutch Republic (and even thereafter, but to a lesser degree) the economic, political and cultural orientation of the eastern regions of the Low Countries was directed eastward to a far greater extent than

is generally assumed.5

The recent publication of Bas van Bavel’s book Manors and markets, which

provides an overview and a new interpretational framework of the social and economic history of the medieval Low Countries, has evoked considerable debate.6 One of the main issues in the debate on this synthesis, which will be discussed in more detail by Peter

3 An overview in Wim Blockmans, “The economic expansion of Holland and Zeeland in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries”, in Studia historica oeconomica Liber amicorum Herman Van der Wee, ed Erik Aerts et al., Leuven, 1993, p. 41-58

Important is the more recent monograph of Jessica Dijkman, Shaping medieval markets The organisation of commodity markets in Holland, c 1200‑c 1450 (Global Economic History Series, 8), Leiden, 2011.

4 See Wilhelm Janssen, “Kleve-Mark-Jülich-Berg-Ravensberg 1400-1600”, in Land im Mittelpunkt der Mächte Die Herzogtümer Jülich‑Kleve‑Berg, Kleve, 19852 , p. 17-40, and several contibutions in Frank Keverling Buisman et al (ed.), Verdrag en Tractaat van Venlo Herdenkingsbundel, 1543‑1993) (Werken Gelre, 43), Hilversum, 1993.

5 Some examples in this context: Volker Henn, “Die niederrheinisch-ostniederländische Raum und die Hanse”, in “zu Allen theilen inß mittel gelegen” Wesel und die Hanse an Rhein, IJssel & Lippe, ed Werner Arand & Jutta Prieur, Wesel, 1991,

p. 11-32; Rudolf A.A Bosch, “De zaak Hendrik Haeck Een case-study naar de politieke, sociale en financieel-economische aspecten van kredietrelaties tussen het hertogdom Gelre en het Duitse Nederrijngebied, 1450-1550”, in Stedelijk verleden in veelvoud Opstellen over laatmiddeleeuwse stadsgeschiedenis in de Nederlanden voor Dick de Boer, ed Hanno Brand, Jeroen

Benders & Renée Nip, Hilversum, 2011, p. 89-104, and Dick E.H de Boer, “De Moderne Devotie: reflectie, educatie

en sociale-culturele cohesie in de Duits-Nederlandse grensregio”, in Frưmmigkeit, Unterricht und Moral Einheit und Vielfalt der Devotio Moderna an den Schnittstellen von Kirche und Gesellschaft, vor allem in der deutsch‑niederländischen Grenzregion,

ed Dick E.H de Boer & Iris Kwiatkowski (Die Devotio Moderna Sozialer und kultureller Transfer (1350-1580), 1), Münster, 2013, p. 9-28 New research for the region Groningen indicates that the orientation economically and culturally was predominantly eastward well into the sixteenth century: cf Jeroen F Benders, Een economische geschiedenis van Groningen Stad en Lande, 1200‑1575 (Groninger Historische Reeks, 39), Assen, 2011, passim; Remi van Schạk, “Een samenleving

in verandering: de periode van de elfde en twaalfde eeuw” in Geschiedenis van Groningen I Prehistorie‑Middeleeuwen, ed

Maarten G.J Duijvendak et al., Zwolle, 2008, p. 151-167, and Remi van Schạk, “Consolidatie en bloei: de periode van

de dertiende en begin veertiende eeuw”, Ibidem, p. 220-227.

6 Bas van Bavel, Manors and markets Economy and society in the Low Countries, 500‑1600, Oxford, 2010 A broad

debate on this book was published in the Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 8, 2011, p. 61-138.

Introductory Remarks

Hoppenbrouwers in his contribution below, is whether differences in premodern institutional arrangements, such as markets, property structures and socio-political power relations, can be exclusively (or mainly) responsible for the divergent paths of economic development and the momentum of relative socio-economic growth and decline or stagnation which different regions within the Low Countries and Westphalia or the Lower Rhine-area witnessed during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period Some scholars argue that Van Bavel has marginalised some of the more “traditional” explanatory factors, such as geography, demography, urbanisation, technological development, capital accumulation, commercialisation and trade networks and politico-economic systems as main factors or “prime movers” for economic development in the Low Countries In order

socio-to deal with this problem new research insocio-to regional differences in both institutional and macro-economic developments should be carried out on a comparative basis, whereby both central regions and regions traditionally considered peripheral are studied equally This will result in a much wider array of case-studies which in turn can provide a more diverse and articulate overview of regional differences and similarities within the Low Countries and their neighbouring territories

Although a regional approach of the socio-economic history of the Low Countries now seems widely accepted among historians, this had not yet led to the creation of

a platform on which scholars could present their findings and integrate them into an ever growing body of knowledge on regional divergence of both institutions and socio-economic structures The conference of June 2012 in Groningen was organised for exactly this reason Its aim was to foster the development of this comparative approach and to offer an opportunity for historians to present their research into economic development, socio-political structures and institutions in different regions within (or on the fringes

of ) the Low Countries and to engage in fruitful and in-depth discussions on research outcomes and methods Thus useful comparisons between these case studies could be made, chronologically, geographically as well as thematically The overall theme of this conference was, therefore, the way and extent to which differences in economic systems and stage of development, and the impact of institutional change affected the political economy and fiscal systems of regions, or vice versa One major problem which had to

be tackled was the non-convergence of economic regions, social and political networks, political borders and even fiscal systems A similar problem was the question whether a set of variables could be regarded as supra-regional, interregional, regional, local or even a mix of all of these

These deliberations, and many others, have resulted in the present collection

of articles This volume is divided into three sections Continuing along the lines of these introductory remarks is the contribution of Peter Hoppenbrouwers on recent historiographical trends in the study of economic and social history of the medieval Low Countries.7 The contribution of Marjolein ’t Hart on trends in the historiography of state formation during the Middle Ages and early modern period in a broader European and even global setting also fits into this section Thus, the first three contributions provide

7 See most recently also Daniel R Curtis, “Trends in rural social and economic history of the pre-industrial Low Countries Recent thems and ideas in journals and books of the past five years (2007-2013)”, in BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 128-3, 2013, p. 60-95, published after the completion of the article of Hoppenbrouwers.

Remi van Schạk

a broad, historiographic introduction, serving as a basis for the collection of case-studies which is divided in two sections: “Industry and Trade”, and “Politics and Finances”

The section “Industry and Trade” is devoted to economic themes in relation to politics and institutions The first article in this section, by Tim Soens, Peter Stabel and Tineke van de Walle, deals with the contested distinction between urban and rural industry

in southwest Flanders during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries In their contribution on the remarkable development of textile industries in the Flemish West Quarter, the authors aim to transcend traditional methodological boundaries and explanatory frameworks between rural and urban history when accounting for the amazing success of this regional specialisation in textile industries Whereas a dispersed cluster of villages in the castellany

of Bailleul (in present-day France) became the centre of quality production of quality cloth, Hondschoote in the coastal region of Bergues-Saint-Winnoc specialised in much cheaper light woollens, the famous “Hondschoote says” Whereas cloth production

high-in Nieuwkerke high-involved the whole region, the Hondschoote production of says seems to have been much more concentrated, leading to an apparently more classic type of urban development The authors argue that only an integrated view on both the dynamics of international trade and the regional characteristics of the rural economy can offer more

satisfactory explanations for regional trajectories of economic development Moreover, this expansion of rural textile industry raises important questions on the interaction between politics, institutions and economics The two main centres of textile production in the Flemish West Country came into the hands of two of the most powerful noble families

at the heart of the Habsburg state apparatus in the sixteenth-century Low Countries The centres of textile industry were situated right on the border of administrative districts, and from 1477 onwards in the border region between the Habsburg Low Countries and France This border location may actually have been quite favourable for further economic development The institutional framework of the region was distinct from that of the rest

of the County of Flanders because of the conspicuous presence of small-scale fiefs, often

in the hands of farming elites In this way this contribution highlights the importance of enlarging the scope of social and economic history in the Low Countries by including regions outside the well-studied “home countries” of Flanders, Brabant and Holland

Job Weststrate has investigated the impact of war on interregional trade contacts

in the Lower Rhine area between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries His contribution links up with the central theme of this volume in several ways It explores the impact of small-scale and large-scale warfare on riverine trade in the Rhine Delta and deals with the question to what extent warfare affected the institutional framework of trade in this region: what were the effects on the functioning of political borders, how were commercial networks affected, did warfare change access to specific markets and if so, how did this influence the shape of commercial regions? Finally, it touches upon the question of how many of the changes that can be discerned in riverine trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be attributed to the impact of warfare Did prolonged warfare induce change fundamental shifts in the economic landscape, or is war to be regarded as a catalyst, speeding up processes that were already underway?

The biggest section, “Finances & Politics”, contains four contributions that are connected by the theme of public debt David Kusman and Jean-Luc Demeulemeester are discussing the role of Italian bankers on regional capital markets in four regions

to their advanced financial system, became meeting points between public and private forms of credit The dense network of town moneychangers, brokers and Piedmontese moneylenders collaborating hand in hand to perform banking functions through the town exchange implies that, contrary to what has been asserted before, Bruges was no exception

in the financial landscape of the southern Low Countries Moreover, in Mechelen information could circulate smoothly on an interregional scale on financial markets as well

as commodity markets (grains and wool)

While we are on the subject of Bruges and Italian bankers, in his contribution

“The Political Side of the Coin” Bart Lambert deals with the role of capital in the political development of late-medieval cities and regions and focuses on the Flemish city

socio-of Bruges which, because socio-of its position as a hotspot for international trade and banking, could draw on capital markets that were far more developed than elsewhere in the Low Countries The abundant availability of funds and the attractive rates at which they could

be obtained provided the Bruges aldermen with means to run the financial administration

of their city which urban authorities in the rest of Flanders and the surrounding regions did not have at their disposal Supplied by foreign, mainly Italian, investors who had no local ties and, certainly during the Burgundian period, had a preference for the princely cause, the easily accessible capital also enabled those urban groups who were keen to win ducal power to develop a policy which, in the end, sacrificed the political independence of their city Rather surprisingly, a more highly developed capital market than in other places

in Flanders and other regions of the Low Countries thus resulted in a more pronounced political subjection of the city to the central powers This view differs slightly from the conclusions of Kusman and Demeulemeester, as mentioned above

One of the mainstream arguments in the scholarly debate on public finances

is that financial crises were a prime mover in the process of financial innovation and modernisation, which in turn are thought to have been an important factor in premodern economic growth The political economy of premodern towns in the Low Countries was primarily shaped by the socio-political elites, who monopolised town government and thereby were able to shape financial institutions in their best interests The late medieval financial crises in cities of the Duchy of Guelders are treated by Rudolf Bosch At the end

of the fifteenth century urban economies in the Eastern Netherlands were struck by severe

Remi van Schạk

political and economic crises just like the Burgundian Netherlands as a whole.8 Continuous warfare ruined local economies, leading to the narrowing of the tax base, while the rising expenditure provoked by warfare forced town governments to contract loans excessively on domestic and foreign capital markets In Holland, the financial crises which were the result

of the same downward financial spiral, led to a “financial revolution” which paved the way for the economic, financial and political dominance of Holland during the seventeenth century.9 In Guelders, however, financial institutions were much more stable and political elites responded conservatively to the challenges posed by warfare and economic stagnation Here financial crises did result in the ending of the monopoly of the urban socio-political elites on financial decision-making Therefore, at macro level financial crises did not lead to innovations and scaling-up in the field of financial institutions, but at local level financial crises did indeed lead to institutional and socio-political transformations, although small and protracted

Jelle Haemers confronts us with the “ins and outs” of the financial problems of Flanders during the reign of Maximilian of Habsburg at the end of the fifteenth century, just like Bosch is doing with the crises in Guelders’ cities He prefers to speak about an

“evolution” of the fiscal system, rather than a “revolution”, as was assumed by James D Tracy on the basis of his study on Holland under Habsburg rule It must be emphasised that this question of evolution or revolution is a topic in the current scholarly debate.10

Changes in credit granting differ from region to region, but of course changes in the financing of the public debt transcend regional boundaries It is a fact that in the sixteenth-century Holland borrowed many accounting techniques and innovations from fifteenth-century practices in Flanders This could explain why the regions are similar in many ways, with the same ruling dynasty (and their entourage of top officials), and, particularly

as it relates to financial transactions, many “transregional” trading links Yet there are regional differences that perhaps support Van Bavel’s argument that political traditions and institutional achievements explain why the so-called “financial revolution” in Flanders does not manifest itself in the fifteenth century Taxes such as those imposed by Holland in the sixteenth century were uncommon in late medieval Flanders This was partly because the Flemish cities were largely independent from the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty and had defended their autonomy for centuries They refused to give up the collection of indirect (or consumer) taxes to the princely level The Holland cities, on the other hand, had a less violent tradition in that respect, although they also had some form of administrative

8 See also Remi van Schạk, “Drie vijftiende-eeuwse bestaanscrises in de Nederlanden Oorzaken, kenmerken en gevolgen”, in Leidschrift Historisch Tijdschrift, 28-2, 2013, p. 67-84.

9 Most recently about this subject: Jaco Zuijderduijn, “De laatmiddeleeuwse crisis van de overheidsfinanciën en de financiële revolutie in Holland”, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 125, 2010, p. 3-24.

10 Cf James D Tracy, A financial revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: renten and renteniers in the county of Holland

(Berkeley-London, 1985), Wantje Fritschy, “A ‘Financial revolution’ reconsidered Public finance in Holland during the Dutch Revolt, 1568-1648”, in Economic History Review, 56, 2003, p. 57-89, and C Jaco Zuijderduijn, Medieval capital markets Markets for renten, state formation and private investment in Holland (1300‑1550) (Global Economic History Series,

2), Leiden-Boston, 2009.

Introductory Remarks

autonomy.11 Therefore, tradition can explain why it did not go beyond one more step in the

“evolution” in Flanders compared to the more revolutionary events in Holland

From this case we can conclude that, as Van Bavel has maintained, not only institutions account for economic evolutions, but also historical circumstances and engrained traditions In the case of Flanders the urban revolts of the fifteenth century have

in fact caused a retardation in the centralisation of public finances

At the closing session of the Groningen conference Wim Blockmans already presented, relatively extempore, a final evaluation, but he also expressed his willingness

to deliver a more thorough evaluation after reading the written and edited texts of all contributions He emphasises that the regional variation in the levels of demographic, economic and institutional development is really striking He draws attention to the demographic factor in the economic evolution of regions – especially the level of urbanisation – in addition to the degree of accessibility in terms of the available transport system

In short, case-studies on a regional and regional-comparative level are of crucial importance for research on changes in economics, finance and politics I think that the symposium and this collection of essays prove this point convincingly At the same time

it has to be emphasised that much research still needs to be done to gain a thorough understanding of regional and interregional interactions

11 The tradition of considerable autonomy in collecting direct (ducal) taxes by at least the larger cities within their own town territory is also known from the Duchy of Guelders, as was showed in Remi van Schạk, “Taxation, public finances

ad the state-making process in the late Middle Ages: the case of the duchy of Guelders”, Journal of Medieval History, 19,

1993, p. 268 For the relatively strong financial autonomy of the Guelders cities and therefore the collection of indirect taxes

by themselves see my “Oorsprong en vroege ontwikkeling van stadsrekeningen in de Nederlanden”, in Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 133, 1996, p. 160-161.

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective, ed by Remi Van S chạk ,

Turnhout, 2015 (Studies in European Urban History, 36), p 11‑21.

F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH‑EB.5.103703

Three Decades of Economic and Social

History of the Medieval Low Countries

History of the Netherlands”, henceforth AGN) in the early 1980s and the publication,

in 2010, of two major monographs dealing specifically with the medieval period: Bas

(“Metropolises at the North Sea”) To what extent, and in which directions, have our ideas about the economy and society of the medieval Low Countries shifted over the three decades that lay in between these defining events?

The Paradigm of the 1970s

There can be little doubt that much did happen Partly, this was the logical outcome of the big popularity that social and economic history could boast throughout the 1970s and 1980s It resulted in a growing number of publications on social, economic, demographic and geographical subjects According to a calculation by Ad van der Woude, at that time the doyen of demographic and rural history in the Netherlands, and a leading member

of the editorial board of the AGN, those four aspects took up 37% of the total number

of pages of the chapters on early modern history in the AGN Not only was this twice as much as in the “old” AGN, which dated from the 1950s, but this 37% also made social and economic history into the largest single subject category in the AGN’s volumes on the early modern period, followed at an ample distance by political, institutional, and military history, which covered about 25%.1 The percentage for economic and social history was slightly lower – about 30 – for the four volumes dedicated to the Middle Ages Of special interest were the chapters on the evolution of man-made landscapes, on the expansion

of settlement, on agriculture, trade and industries, and on urbanisation in Volume 2 In Volume 4 this picture is complemented with often quantified data on the demographic, economic and social consequences of the crises of the fourteenth century

1 Ad van der Woude, “De ‘Nieuwe Geschiedenis’ in een nieuwe gedaante Inleiding op de delen 5 tot en met 9”, in

Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed Dirk Peter Blok et al., vol 5, Haarlem, 1980, p. 9-35, there 9 The final version

of this article was closed in March 2013 Literature or other information that appeared after March 2013 is not discussed, but the titles of some important recent publications have been included in the notes.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers

The contents of Volume 4, in particular, was fine-tuned to the conceptual framework, designed for the social and economic-historical sections of the AGN and set forth by Van der Woude in his thorough introduction to the volumes on the Early Modern Period This framework consisted of two components: a “methodologically static element” – coinciding with Ferdinand Braudel’s “layered-structuralist view” – and a “methodologically dynamic element” – coinciding with Wilhelm Abel’s “secular trend” The former, which referred more specifically to Braudel’s idea to distinguish three tempi in historical time according to which geophysical & geographical, social & economic, and political “things”, respectively, happen, became the basis for the thematic division of the subject matter in the AGN The latter referred to the cyclical alternation of long-term phases of growth- and contraction in pre-industrial society, that could be reconstructed by means of serial data on demographic and economic base figures (e.g birth- and mortality rates; commodity prices and wages).2

The popularity of economic and social history in the history departments of the Humanity faculties, as well as in the historical sections of the faculties of Economy, Social/Behavioral Sciences or Social Geography, at Dutch and Flemish universities would remain considerable throughout the 1980s, and much has been achieved in the first two decades following the appearance of the AGN The fruits of these efforts did find their way not only to a large number of academic dissertations, to professional journals, thematic series and edited volumes, but also to regional and local journals, and, last but not least, to the

“medieval” chapters of countless new histories of towns, villages, and provinces that have appeared during the last four decades.3

The substantial increase of output was accompanied by methodological innovations, not just in terms of comparative history, but also, for example, in the fields

of quantification, and of prosopography and [social] network analysis Historians of the 1980s and the 1990s were the first to profit from the invention of the personal computer and the internet, which within a decade revolutionised the collection and the statistical analysis of historical data An the end is not yet in sight: the latest “digital toys”, such as GIS (Geographic Information System) applications for historical mapping and ever more sophisticated software for digital text analysis, already found their way to the avant-garde

of economic and social history.4

From a theoretical point of view, the output from the last two decades of the last century reveals that the conceptual markers, driven into the historiographical landscape

by Van der Woude, certainly have been guiding, but, happily, not all-determining A

2 Van der Woude, “De ‘Nieuwe Geschiedenis’”, p. 12-17.

3 New Dutch and Belgian journals, relevant in this field, that were started since the 1970s: Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis (1974-2003), Historisch‑Geografisch Tijdschrift (1982- ), NEHA‑Bulletin (1987-2003), Tijdschrift voor Waterstaatsgeschiedenis (1992- ), Tijdschrift, later Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis (1996/1998- ), Tijdschrift voor Sociale

en Economische Geschiedenis (2004- ), and Stadsgeschiedenis (2006- ) Rare remain, certainly for the period of the Middle

Ages, monographs on (just) the economic and/or social history of a province, such as Jeroen F Benders, Een economische geschiedenis van Groningen Stad en Lande, 1200‑1575 (Groninger Historische Reeks, 39), Assen, 2011.

4 Pioneering in the field of GIS applications is the “Precadastral Atlas of Friesland” project of the History Department of the Fryske Akademy at Leeuwarden Its aim is to reconstruct the early modern or even late medieval ownership of all farms

in the present-day province of Friesland by way of back-projected mapping of the earliest cadastral data (of 1832) on earlier, precadastral, data in fiscal registers of 1700 and 1640 Johannes A Mol & Paul N Noomen, “De Prekadastrale Atlas van Friesland”, in Caert‑Thresoor Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis van de Kartografie in Nederland, 17, 1998, p. 33-37, and the

website www.fryske-akademy.nl/index.php?L=2&id=102 For digital text analysis see, for instance, the work of Dr José de Kruif of the Department of History at Utrecht University, who, as a social historian, specialises on reading culture and the media in the nineteenth century.

Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

good example with regard to the medieval history of the northern Low Countries in particular is offered by the many studies on the so-called Great Reclamation, the massive (although small-scale) reclamation of the vast peat moors, coastal marshes, and river basin lands that may have covered as much as half the surface of the present-day Netherlands

in the Carolingian Age In a sense, the further exploration of this theme may be seen as a follow-up of Henk van der Linden’s directional survey in AGN, but soon new ground was broken This was at least partly due to the fact that research in this direction was not only,

or not even primarily, undertaken by medieval historians pur sang, but also by historical

geographers and archaeologists.5 The results have been spectacular Not only has our basic knowledge of the Great Reclamation as an emancipatory process of human ingenuity and enterprise vastly increased, it also has revealed the reclamations’ profound effects on the

“institutional architecture” of the countryside: the formation of local communities with a large extent of self-government, the fitting in of church instititutions (parishes, ambulatory ecclesiastical courts) and monasteries, the arrangement of property rights to land and of modes of rent appropriation, the institutionalisation of an elementary ecological concern, the regulation of town-country relations In short, thanks to recent research our view of an extremely dynamic but also complex process which had enduring, deeply formative, if not performative, effects on the social and economic structure of the countryside, and a clear

“international”, eastward, diffusion, is far richer than it was thirty years ago

At the same time, the felicitous outpour of new studies on the Great Reclamation

in the 1980s and 1990s marked the end of an era Most of them, despite being part of a multidisciplinary approach to the theme, were the products of individual research projects Both the virtual disappearance of historical geography as an academic discipline and fundamental changes in the organisation of scientific research during the last decade or so have made this mode of operation unthinkable These changes had everything to do with the ever more urgent wish of universities and such national organisations for scientific research as NWO (The Netherlands) and FWO (Flanders) to give academic research, also in the field of history, more leverage and to accommodate individual undertakings under broad umbrella projects by means of magic words like core, spearhead, focus, interdisciplinarity and thematic embedding Two other wishes that came top-down were to better organise, manage, and control scientific research, as well as to improve the realisation and supervision of PhD research They gave occasion for the foundation of a jungle of new, and often ephemeral, research institutes and graduate schools

Succesful Projects of the Last Decades

If, once in a while, we like to run down such bureaucratic silliness, we shall have to admit that the increase in published research output has been sped up further; created a class of academic entrepreneurs, focused on attracting large amounts of “external” research money

5 English surveys in Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Agricultural production and technology in the Netherlands,

c.  1000-1500” in Medieval farming and technology The impact of agricultural change in Northwest Europe, ed Grenvill

Astill & John Langdon, Leiden, 1997, p. 89-114, and Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Dutch rural economy and society in the later medieval period (c 1000-1500): an historiographical survey”, in Rural history in the North Sea area: an overview

of recent research (Middle Ages – twentieth century), ed Erik Thoen & Leen Van Molle (CORN Publication Series, 1),

Turnhout, 2006, p. 249-282 After this date appeared Chris de Bont, Vergeten land Ontginning, bewoning en waterbeheer

in de westnederlandse veengebieden (800‑1350), (Alterra Scientific Contributions, 27), 2 vols, Wageningen, 2009.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers

and managing sizeable research projects To illustrate this trend I just mention four such enterprises that have been particularly succesful in the last decade, two from Flanders and two from the Netherlands

First, the international research network CORN (Comparative Rural History

of the North Sea Area), founded by the history departments of the universities of Ghent and Louvain in 1995 with the aim of studying the long-term economic and social development of rural society in the countries bordering the North Sea from the Middle Ages until into the twentieth century Since its foundation, the CORN group, under the inspiring direction of Erik Thoen, has succeeded in systematically dealing with a number

of key themes in social and economic history, such as social agro-systems, land and labour markets, common land management, leasehold, rural credit, marriage and fertility, food processing and technology, and subsistence crises The results are published in two series In the “CORN Publication Series”, running since 1999, fifteen volumes have been published to date, while one more is in press.6 A second series, “Rural Economy and Society

in North-Western Europe, 500-2000”, is intended as a textbook-like survey Three volumes have appeared since 2010

A second succesful Flemish initiative worth mentioning is in the field of urban history Actually it has two branches The first one is the long-term interuniversity spearhead research programme (IAP – Interuniversity Attraction Poles) “City and Society in the Low Countries, 1200-1800: space, knowledge, social capital”, the focussed continuation of a broader programme that has been running for over twenty years and

is financed from Belgian federal funds There are two publication series, one that aims

at covering all of Europe: “Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)”, now with thirty-four volumes published in English and French between 2003 and 2014, most of them dealing with the Low Countries and France, some with Italy and Spain; the other,

“Studies Stadsgeschiedenis”, intended for publications in Dutch on the urban history of the Low Countries, with eight volumes published between 2007 and 2011

The second branch has been institutionalised in a research institute of the History Department at Antwerp University, called the Center for Urban History or – in Dutch – Centrum voor Stadsgeschiedenis Under its first director, Bruno Blondé, it has indisputably grown into an internationally renowned laboratory for urban history, that has generated innovating research, for instance in the history of retailing, of material culture (furniture, house interiors), migration, vocational training & the transmission of artisan skills, as well as of urban community building in the American sociological tradition of Robert Putnam and Katherine Lynch In 2006 the Center launched a new professional journal for urban history (Stadsgeschiedenis), while at the same time it has a keen eye for what is

usually called the “valorisation” (something like social relevance) of scholarly research by

an active involvement in the production of exhibitions, illustrated books, etcetera, for large audiences It is true that the Center’s research efforts have their main point in the Early Modern, and increasingly Modern, periods, but the presence of Peter Stabel in the tenured staff guarantees substantial attention for (late) medieval urban history, with a (provisional) focus on the rural and small town textile industries of late medieval Flanders

6 Current situation in December 2014 On the CORN project, very short: Erik Thoen, “CORN: a step forward towards a ‘new rural history’”, in Rural history in the North Sea area, p. 33-34.

Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

Of the more succesful Dutch research projects on social and economic history

of the medieval period I first mention the Hanze Studie Centrum, a research institute founded in 2002 on the initiative of Dick de Boer, at that time Professor of Medieval History at Groningen University Its objective was – and still is – to carry out and facilitate new research into the intensive commercial and political relations between the German Hansa (of whom quite a few towns in the northern and eastern Low Countries were a full member) and the Low Countries The Center made a flying start thanks to its first managing director, Hanno Brand, who in a very short time (co)edited several international volumes of articles, which also gave him and his fellow workers an international platform for publishing their research on various aspects of Hansa history – with a clear accent on the later medieval period Regrettably, it has not been possible to keep this team together

or even to just keep the Center adequately staffed It means that at the moment it mainly functions as a research network, which makes its future uncertain

The other – and last – reference is to the research project “Markets, power and institutional development The rise, organisation and institutional development of markets in Holland, 11th-16th centuries”, designed by Bas van Bavel from the Department

of History at Utrecht University, and carried out between 2001 and 2006 It produced innovating PhD dissertations on commodity and credit markets (by Jessica Dijkman and Jaco Zuijderduijn, respectively), and instigated Van Bavel’s own monograph, Manors and markets – which is not limited to Holland.7

It is fair to say that in spite of such appealing results, the medieval period has received relatively little attention in the broader field of economic and social history For instance, in the two specialised Dutch journals for social and economic history – Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis and NEHA‑Bulletin, respectively – less than 5% of all articles

published until the journals merged in 2004 were about the Middle Ages.8 Since then, the new Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, did slightly better, with eleven

articles touching on the medieval period since its first year of publication in 2004 until

2013, apart from the “Manors & Markets” special of 2011 (2011-2) The only professional journal for the medieval history of the Low Countries, the Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis, regularly, but not excessively often, offers articles with a primarily social and/

or economic-historical scope – I counted twenty-five in the fourteen volumes for the years 1998-2011, rather evenly divided over the northern and southern Low Countries – say, the Netherlands and (Flemish) Belgium

Manors and Markets

At present, in the Netherlands, the section of Economic and Social History at Utrecht University has clearly taken the forefront of research in the economic and social history

of the medieval period Not only has Van Bavel, as full Professor of Economic and Social

7 Jessica Dijkman, Shaping medieval markets The organisation of commodity markets in Holland, c 1200‑c 1450

(Global Economic History Series, 8), Leiden, 2011; C Jaco Zuijderduijn, Medieval capital markets Markets for renten, state formation and private investment in Holland (1300‑1550) (Global Economic History Series, 2), Leiden, 2009; Bas van

Bavel, Manors and markets Economy and society in the Low Countries, 500‑1600, Oxford, 2010.

8 Based on a count in Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis (heenceforth TSG) by Bas van Bavel & Leo Lucassen, “Een

differentiële grens: over de integratie van de Middeleeuwen in de economische en sociale geschiedenis van de Lage Landen”, in

TSG, 28, 2002, p. 129-146; there 134 and 136 I took into account that TSG had another medieval history special in 2003,

because the score in NEHA‑Bulletin is much below that of TSG.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers

History of the Middle Ages, succeeded in building-up an incontestable position in many topics related to structural transitions in rural societies from a comparative perspective, other, renowned, colleagues, even if no mediaevalists, have contributed to important debates in the social and economic history of the crossing from the late medieval to the Early Modern Period: Jan Luiten van Zanden on proto-industrialisation and wage labour; Maarten Prak on communalism; Tine de Moor on common pool resources; and Oscar Gelderblom on merchant networks

The very issue of periodisation – does the classical divide between Middle Ages and Early Modern Period still make any sense? – was tackled by Bas van Bavel and Leo Lucassen in their introduction to the special that the Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis in 2002, dedicated

to recent developments in economic and social history of the Low Countries during the later Middle Ages.9 While concentrating on the transitional period between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, they distinguished between research that was more directed to structural change as opposed to work more focussed on continuity While the former fed on leading theories on transitional change which had all disclosed essential historical fault lines

in, first, the fourteenth century and then the eighteenth, such as those of Hohenberg and Lees for urbanisation, Tilly on state formation, and Lis and Soly on social welfare politics and the rise of a capitalist mentality, the latter had studied long-term development of quite diverse themes such as antisemitism, power brokerage, women’s labour, urban protest/rebellion movements & labour protest However, they all took up a modernist stance by arguing that essential and radical changes only occurred by the end of the eighteenth century

According to Van Bavel and Lucassen, value could be added to both of these two main currents – continuity and change – by using concepts of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) NIE defends the idea of long-term path-dependency once fundamental institutions determing “the rules of the game”, such as legally defined property rights, market privileges, laws of contract, but also normative social conventions, etcetera, have been firmly put in place and are able to constrain individual behaviour.10 Differences in the design and operation of such institutions would go a whole way to explain change in terms

of regional divergence of path-development

Shortly afterwards, Van Bavel turned Manors & Markets into his testing ground

for applying NIE as a “new interpretational framework of the social and economic history

of the medieval Low Countries” In a number of debates and reviews since its publication

it has been questioned whether NIE is indeed a useful, and manageable, theory to model long-term social and economic development on the basis of relatively poor sources For instance, measuring the impact of “shared beliefs”, ideological values, power and interest,

or “persuasive abilities” – all elements of the conceptual toolkit of NIE – on economic performance in terms of institutional efficiency is no easy task for those who have to work with medieval sources Moreover, in wait lies a circular argument, for is economic growth

9 Bas van Bavel & Leo Lucassen, “Een differentiële grens: over de integratie van de Middeleeuwen in de economische

en sociale geschiedenis van de Lage Landen”, in TSG, 28, 2002, p. 129-146.

10 Douglass North, in his latest book, co-authored by Wallis & Weingast, re-defined “institutions” as “the rules of the game”: i.e “the patterns of interaction that govern and constrain the relationships of individuals”, and which include “formal rules, written laws, formal social conventions, informal norms of behavior, and shared beliefs about the world, as well as the means of enforcement”; all such institutions “are constraints on the behavior of individuals as individuals”, with all wanted and unwanted consequences Douglass C North, John Joseph Wallis & Barry R Weingast, Violence and social orders

A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history, Cambridge etc., 2009, p. 15 A new, revised, edition of this

book appeared in 2013, after the closing of this article.

Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

rather the result or the cause of increasing institutional efficiency? Wisely, Van Bavel did not get his fingers burnt on such issues The NIE model he used in Manors and Markets

actually is a version stripped of its “informal” markers and strongly focused on market institutions and property rights – leading to a notable combination of neo-Marxist and New Instititutional ideas (Robert Brenner meets Douglass North)

Even so, he was reproached with playing down non-institutional (classical Malthusian/Ricardian/Smithian) theory that would explain regional diversity from diverging comparative advantages, caused by differences in demographic evolution, technological development, and degree of commercialisation and specialisation, and its neglect of attempts that already were made in that direction (e.g by Jan de Vries).11

neo-Most revealing on what Van Bavel himself sees as the most important long-term trends in the economic and social development of the Low Countries in the later medieval and early modern periods is the summary of Manors and Markets that he gave in the 2010

special – in English, that is to say, aimed at an international audience – of Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden/Low Countries History Review on

“the international relevance of Dutch history”.12 Van Bavel argues that in “the Netherlands” (mark the difference between Low Countries and Netherlands) the start of the transition from feudalism to capitalism must be traced back to the commercialisation process of the eleventh-twelfth centuries which increased market exchange substantially, first in (agrarian) commodities and land, next in labour and capital The growing importance of short-term land leasing and of paid labour went accompanied by proletarianisation In all such respects, according to Van Bavel, “the Netherlands” were far ahead of the rest of Europe, also of “progressive” areas such as Flanders, East England and northern Italy, and even when compared to early modern Iraq, India, China or Japan [sic] (p. 59) The Netherlands would have taken this early lead thanks to light institutional impediments and great institutional flexibility For instance, in the labour market “there were hardly any restrictions on the mobility of labour, no restrictions on wages, no fixed maximum wages, no indentured labour and no vestiges of manorial serfdom” (p. 61) How different was the in other parts of Europe

cq the world! The “deeper cause underlying” this flexible institutional framework, according

to Van Bavel, was “the exceptional balance between the social actors (…) both within the elite – that is, between the rural nobility, patriciates and territorial lords – and within society

as a whole, with peasants, village communities and urban craftsmen and entrepreneurs all holding a relatively solid position” (p.  65) The roots of this social paradise must be looked for “in the weakness of feudal elements (…), the large degree of freedom enjoyed

by the ordinary population and its high degree of self-organisation”, that had been created during the period of expansion and reclamations, the heyday of the free, enterprising, well-organised peasant-colonist (p. 65-66) If at this point many will feel as if they hear the voice

of Henk van der Linden,13 Van Bavel pushes on the same line even further: its remarkable

11 Jord Hanus, “Economic growth and living standards A comment on Bas van Bavel’s Manors and markets”, in Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis (henceforth TSEG), 8, 2011, p. 78-89, especially 81-83, and my own

review of Manors and markets in Millennium, 24, 2010, p. 171-177.

12 Bas van Bavel, “The medieval origins of capitalism in the Netherlands”, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden/Low Countries History Review (henceforth BMGN/LCHR), 125, 2010, p. 45-79 Cf also his

own summary of Manors and Markets in TSEG, 8, 2011, p. 62-65: “Manors and markets Economy and society in the Low

Countries (500-1600): a synopsis”.

13 Mentioned on p 13 above.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers

institutional-structural ancestry gave the Dutch economy, and especially the economy of the County of Holland, an enormous quality boost Markets, especially those of labour and capital, were highly integrated and relatively open, as can be evidenced from the high participation of women and the low skill premium In addition, capital was cheap thanks

to “a drastic fall in interest rates for long-term loans” (p. 67) The relative integration and openness of markets, in their turn, prevented rent-seeking behaviour, promoted the lowering

of transaction costs, and induced a high mobility of all classical factors of production

After having disclosed this complex chain of cause and effect with much confidence, Van Bavel recoils from indicating its economic effects in terms of economic growth and real wages For this part, he has to rely entirely on Van Zanden’s reconstruction

self-of GDP, c.q GDP per capita, which indicates that “GDP per capita did increase a little over the period between 1000 and 1600, but not dramatically” (p.  72) This made the performance of the Netherlands better than “elsewhere in Europe, with the exception of Italy”, but the price to be paid was “a much sharper social polarisation than in other parts

of Europe, resulting from the fierce competition in the markets”, especially in the most urbanised parts of the Netherlands (p. 73) According to Van Bavel, the limits of long-term economic success in terms of prosperity and human well-being are best measured in the average height of people as a reflection of the general dietary situation And indeed, average height of Dutch adult males went down from 1.76m in Roman times, to 1.73m in the Early Middle Ages, to 1.71m in the fourteenth century, to 1.69m in the sixteenth century, ending

at 1.67m in the first half of the nineteenth century (p. 74).14 So, Holland’s success story has its gloomy downside On the one hand, Holland around 1600, succeeded in feeding

a population that was 16 times bigger than it had been one thousand years before, on the other hand, most people were better off around 600 than in the Golden Age.15

North Sea Metropolises

Just as startling as the Hollandocentric bias that runs through Manors and Markets is the

de Noordzee, which appeared in the same year, 2010, as a volume in a series entitled “De

Geschiedenis van Nederland” (History of the Netherlands).16 To some extent it would not

be fair to compare the Blockmans book with Manors and Markets, because Metropolen

intends to be a general history of the period 1100-1560 On the other hand, its clear and deliberate focus on economic aspects is declared in the opening pages:

The guide line of this book will be the question, how the interregional dynamics

of economic growth can be explained Subsequently the question arises, how that economic development was connected with the geographic, political, social, and cultural relations within a region, and with the outside world (p. 14-15)

14 Cf Manors and Markets, p. 378.

15 The population figures are calculated from Manors and Markets, p. 36-37 and 280.

16 Wim Blockmans, Metropolen aan de Noordzee Geschiedenis van Nederland, 1100‑1560, Amsterdam, 2010 The

series’ title, “De Geschiedenis van Nederland” (“History of the Netherlands”) differs markedly from the AGN title Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (“General History of the Netherlands/Low Countries”) Whereas the singular “Nederland”

refers to the modern state The Netherlands, the plural “Nederlanden” refers either to the late medieval Low Countries (which comprised many territorial states/principalities) or the addition sum of two early modern states: the (protestant) Dutch Republic and the (catholic) Spanish (later Austrian) so-called Southern Netherlands.

Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

A count shows that about one third of the text deals with economic and social history stricto sensu, the remaining is on political and cultural (inclusive of religious) history.17

The most important agreement between Metropolen and Manors and Markets is

that both harp on pronounced regional diversity of economic development in the Low Countries as a whole, both Northern and Southern, but in the end conclude that only two regions really mattered: Flanders and Holland This is because the main boosters of economic growth – commercialisation, urbanisation and the formation of “metropolises” – were self-reinforcing processes that created centers of gravity which would not easily shift Both Van Bavel and Blockmans stress the same two main directions of this shift through time: from east (inland) to west (sea coast), and from south to north (the latter coinciding with the shift from Flanders to Holland) The reader who wants to get an idea of how, say, Zeeland or Drenthe, Namur or even Liège fared economically in the later Middle Ages, will feel himself soon deprived In that respect, both books are rather dismissive of the quite respectable tradition of the “regional monograph” intended to specify the economic and social identity of a region, and to fit the results into a broader, but balanced, interregional picture.18 Paradoxically, this inadvertent neglect of the famed regional diversity of the Low Countries has also led to a rather weak international contextualisation of important economic and sociale developments – as if, in this case, disregarding the margins (i.e economically marginal regions) led to forgetting about borders

There is another manifest area of conformity: both authors are duly cynical about the role of the state in late medieval economies They are convinced that in late medieval principalities income transfers took place in opposite direction of what modern democracies think is desirable and advisable, but nevertheless both think that political scale-enlargement, centralisation, and the reinforcement of state power, by various means, did contribute to general economic growth Blockmans mentions on the positive side of the growing state power of the Burgundian “juggernaut on loam feet” (p.  468), that it now became harder for international economic competitors, such as the Hansa and the English, to play off against each other principalities in the Low Countries that were under Burgundian rule (p. 476) Furthermore, the reign of Philip the Good (1419-1467) brought peace for about a quarter of century Real wages were high, fiscal pressure was low, and export was thriving Efforts were made towards uniformity in mintage, in administrative practices and in procedural law which may have set in motion a lowering of transaction costs All in all, the time of Philip the Good, at least for wage earning people, was “the most prosperous” era until the nineteenth century (p. 563) Only after his death the downside

of centralisation came to prevail, which was increasing bureaucracy and concomitant corruption, but most of all the costly wars waged by Philip’s successors, Charles the Bold and Maximilian of Austria Their destructive policies may have undone much of the (economic) blessings of the previous period

17 More specifically, I counted the pages 23-44, 73-90, 98-124, 195-295, 316-329, and 544-587 as dealing predominantly with economic and social history, which makes 216 pages on a total of 625 pages, i.e 35%.

18 The regional (or meso-level) approach was one of the hallmarks of the so-called Wageningen School in the 1970s and 1980s, with Ad van der Woude’s dissertation, Het Noorderkwartier Een regionaal historisch onderzoek in de demografische

en economische geschiedenis van westelijk Nederland van de late middeleeuwen tot het begin van de negentiende eeuw,

Wageningen, 1972, as most appealing specimen.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers

If Blockmans and Van Bavel agree on the equivocal effects of late medieval state intervention, they are miles apart when it comes to explaining long-term economic evolution Whereas Van Bavel points to the “social and institutional framework” as having been “crucial” for long-term economic development (p. 408), with “liberty” as the magical word ‒ liberty of peasants, artisans and merchants from feudal shackles, from guild rules, and from too much state oppression ‒ Blockmans, in his concluding remarks, still refers

to Fernand Braudel and commercial capitalism: “The driving force behind economic development”, he says, “[was] capitalist profit seeking by active agents who are continuously looking for the most favourable combinations of production factors” (p. 651)

Ironically, by taking up this traditional position, and standing firm, Wim Blockmans steers closer to the latest developments in the NIE approach of medieval economic history, as represented in particular in the work of Avner Greif, than does Bas van Bavel It is true that both reject the idea that an efficient state was needed in order

to generate economic progression which brings both of them nearer to the Greif variety

of NIE than to the North line; it is also true that, like Greif, Van Bavel makes much of the importance of (individual) liberty and (individual property) protection in economic dealings, but, unlike Blockmans, Van Bavel lacks an interest in the central theme of Greif ’s latest book, which is “corporations” and corporate action and behaviour.19 Under this term Greif lumps together both private corporations such as craft and merchant guilds, but also, and confusingly, all kinds of local government bodies as well as representative institutions

on a “national” level.20 His interest is in the regularity of social behaviour, as this is generated within such corporations by “institutionalised rules, beliefs, and norms” These had to foster and reproduce the core values related to corporatism and particularism as well

as to contribute to the reputation that was vital to the functioning of corporate bodies Greif would agree with Van Bavel that the rise of the Dutch Republic and the Golden Age following in its wake had late medieval foundations, but, then again, in Greif ’s view these foundations were more the type of institutions such as described in Metropolen than

in Manors and Markets, just as Greif keeps adhering to the traditional idea that European

economies of the (later) Middle Ages were only able to generate Smithian growth (that is, growth based on trade and specialisation) – an idea that urges itself up more in Blockmans’ book than it does in Van Bavel’s.21

To conclude, quite different “new institutional” aroma’s ascend from the two books that have marked themselves out to set the agenda for academic research on the economic and social history of the medieval Low Countries in the years to come Some will see this as

an invitation to (further) pursue the challenges set forth by Van Bavel and Blockmans – whether inspired by Braudel or Brenner, by North or by Greif – while others will tackle

19 Avner Greif, Institutions and the path to the modern economy Lessons from medieval trade, Cambridge, 2006 – not

included in the Bibliography of Manors and markets.

20 Greif, Institutions, especially p. 389-390, and 393: “The predominate social structure is the economic and political

self-governing corporation with legitimate institutionalised processes for setting rules, laws, in which those who are governed

by them have an influential voice”.

21 Greif, Institutions, p. 395.

Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

the imbalances and blank spaces in their argument and in their approach.22 Such is the fate

of historical surveys, whose authors always do too much and too little Their benevolent effect, however, is to invite further, impassioned discussion and more detailed research The papers of the Groningen symposium of which this volume is an offshoot betray what will

be major targets in the near future: thriving urban networks in regions condemned to a peripheral status by Van Bavel and Blockmans, a new stress on town-country relations and the (proto-)industrial activities they generated, and the development of more sophisticated fiscal instruments by local (urban) governments in response to increasing state pressure as well of more sophisticated financial instruments by private entrepreneurs who wanted to make money New research in all these directions will undoubtedly contribute to a sharper and a comparatively more balanced picture of institutional change in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries

22 New research in the field of the medieval history of international trade and its organisation is surveyed in Dick E.H

de Boer, “Looking at the top of the ant-hill Some observations”, in International trade in the Low Countries (14th‑16th centuries) Merchants, organisation, infrastructure, ed Peter Stabel, Bruno Blondé & Anke Greve (Studies in urban social,

economic and political history of the medieval and early modern Low Countries, 10), Leuven-Apeldoorn, 2000, p. 243-253

TSEG dedicated issue 8-2 of 2011 to a debate on Manors and markets.

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective, ed by Remi Van S chạk ,

Turnhout, 2015 (Studies in European Urban History, 36), p 23‑32.

F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH‑EB.5.103704

Coercion and Capital Revisited

Recent Trends in the Historiography

on different variants of the national state? […]1

This was the crucial question that ran through Charles Tilly’s path-breaking Coercion, capital, and European states, published in 1990 The book marked a decisive turn in the

historiography on state-formation The author summarised a number of former important historiographical trends, while at the same time postulating a new, powerful hypothesis.2

In his opinion, the enormous variation among the European states up to 1800 should be explained in terms of the different densities and combinations of “concentrated capital” and “concentrated coercion” “Concentrated capital” (i.e., cumulated financial means) was above all to be found in cities and in highly commercialised areas, such as in the Netherlands, while “concentrated coercion” (i.e., cumulated coercive instruments) was

to be found in countries with vast, landlord-dominated agricultural regions, such as in Russia.3 This yielded variations that ranged from highly “capital-intensive” to highly

1 Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990‑1990, Cambridge (MA)-Oxford, 1990, p. 5.

2 See also Marcel van der Linden, “Charles Tilly’s historical sociology”, in International Review of Social History, 54,

2009, p. 237-274, 245 ff; Volker Berghahn, “Nachruf auf Charles Tilly (1929-2008)”, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 34,

2008, p. 407-414.

3 Eric Jones, The European Miracle Environments, economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia, Cambridge,

1981, already stressed the importance of geographical variation in European state-formation.

4 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1972; Otto Hintze, Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung,

Dresden, 1906; see also Philippe Contamine (ed.), War and competition between states (The origins of the modern state in

Europe, 13th to 18th centuries, theme A), Oxford, 2000.

Marjolein ’t Hart

troops.5 Capital in the form of taxes and loans could be extracted more easily in urbanised regions Despite the enormous differences, by the end of the eighteenth century numerous European states had converged in one specific state form: the national state This was explained in relation to Europe’s endemic wars; or, in other words, “war made the state, and the state made war”.6 In the end, the only states to survive were those that managed

to combine a fair degree of capital-extractive institutionalisation with a strong coercive apparatus: the path of “capitalised coercion”, which was demonstrated above all by England and France

According to Coercion, capital these paths of state-formation need not be linear,

but could include crises, reversals and digressions, and countries could shift their dominant mode of state-formation from more capital-intensive towards more coercion-intensive (as

in the case of France, for example) Furthermore, not all state-formation was top-down Aspiring state-makers were strongly dependent upon the administrative structures of local elites; different elite groups sent representatives to the central authorities Tilly’s term “bargaining” stressed the processes of demanding, giving, and receiving between

“top” and “bottom” The author used the term “indirect rule” to highlight the strong interdependence between state rulers and local elites during the early modern period The reliance of state rulers upon entrepreneurs was also considerable, above all during Tilly’s

“Age of Brokerage”, c 1400-c 1700; due to the low degree of bureaucratisation,

state-makers counted upon intermediaries such as tax farmers to raise the necessary funds or upon military entrepreneurs to field armies.7 With the advent of national states in the early nineteenth century, the period of “indirect rule” was followed by a more “direct” one, and the capacities of state bureaucracies expanded.8

This contribution sets out to evaluate recent trends in the historiography on state-formation since the appearance of Coercion, capital To begin with, the research field

underwent a significant shift in the 1990s Until then, historians had tended to study the larger national states such as England, France, and Prussia, and looked predominantly at absolutism, bureaucratisation, state elites, and military revolutions State-formation was thus mainly studied as a top-down, linear process But now smaller and “less successful” states came into vogue, not least the Low Countries, which had provided a model for Tilly’s capital-intensive mode.9 Studies focusing on bottom-up state-formation appeared, often inspired by Charles Tilly For example, Philip Gorski analysed the role of local church elites

5 For example, John Brewer, The sinews of power War, money and the English state, 1688‑1783, New York, 1989; Wim

Blockmans, “Princes conquérants et bourgeois calculateurs Le poids des réseaux urbains dans la formation des états”, in

La ville, la bourgeoisie et la genèse de l’état moderne, ed Neithard Bulst & Jean-Philippe Genet, Paris, 1988, p. 169-181;

reappeared as Wim Blockmans, “Voracious states and obstructing cities: an aspect of state formation in pre-industrial Europe”, in Cities and the rise of states in Europe, A.D 1000 to 1800, ed Charles Tilly & Wim P Blockmans, Boulder,

1994, 218-251; Peter-Christian Witt (ed.), Wealth and taxation in Central Europe The history and sociology of public finance,

Leamington Spa-New York, 1987; Kersten Krüger, Finanzstaat Hessen, 1500‑1567 Staatsbildung im Übergang vom Domänenstaat zum Steuerstaat, Marburg, 1980 See also Richard Bonney (ed.), Economies and fiscal systems (The origins of

the modern state in Europe, 13th to 18th centuries, theme B), Oxford, 1995, and Richard Bonney (ed.), The rise of the fiscal state c. 1200‑1815, Oxford, 1999.

6 Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the history of European state-making”, in The formation of national states in Western Europe, ed Charles Tilly, Princeton (NJ), 1975, p. 42.

7 On bargaining, see Tilly, Capital, coercion, p. 99 ff.; on indirect and direct rule see Ibidem, p. 24-25, 103-106.

8 See also Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt Eine Geschichte des 19 Jahrhunderts, München 2009,

p. 820 ff.

9 See for example Brian M Downing, The military revolution and political change Origins of democracy and autocracy

in early modern Europe, Princeton (NJ), 1992.

Coercion and Capital Revisited

in disciplining the population from below; Thomas Ertman observed how the organisation

of local government at the time of sustained military competition shaped state-formation; Wayne te Brake looked at the consequences of revolts and other sorts of contention for state-formation; and Steven Gunn, David Grummit and Hans Cools studied the interactions of state, nobles and urban networks under pressure of war.10 Others were inspired by the emphasis on “indirect rule” and used the new label of “contractor state” to analyse the role of the numerous private entrepreneurs in performing administrative tasks, collecting tax funds, supplying the army and navy, and intermediating with short-term and long-term loans.11

Globalisation and Changing Perceptions of the European State

Globalisation dealt a further blow to the traditional focus on the larger national states Present-day global commodity flows, multinational corporations and bonds pervade national borders and undermine the powers of the once so powerful state Transnational links weaken former tax bases and physical boundaries, prompting historians to take a fresh look at the national state: as a temporary phase, not as the final outcome of a lengthy process That phase was long dominated by the model of the European nation-state, but this domination might have come about by accident, rather than because of a “standard” historical trajectory The rise and decline of the typical European nation-state thus gained a new place in history, and regions or urban networks became units for study and comparison

in their own right, next to nation-states.12 Furthermore, growing criticism of Eurocentrism sparked a novel kind of global comparative history, which for example compared eighteenth-century England, at that time the most advanced economic region of Europe, to the Yangzi Delta, China’s most advanced economic region in that period.13 “Provincialising Europe” came into vogue; the continent lost its sovereign, theoretical status, to which non-Europeans had previously had to compare themselves, with the inevitable outcome that they failed to attain European standards More than before, scholars acknowledged the different paths that could lead to different kinds of modernisation; among these, Europe’s

10 Philip S Gorski, The disciplinary revolution Calvinism and the rise of the state in early modern Europe, Chicago, 2003;

Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe, Cambridge, 1997;

Wayne te Brake, Shaping history, ordinary people in European politics, 1500‑1700, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1998; Steven

Gunn, David Grummit & Hans Cools, War, state, and society in England and the Netherlands 1477‑1559, Oxford, 2007.

11 Stephen Conway & Raphael Torres Sánchez (ed.), The spending of states Military expenditure during the long eighteenth century Patterns, organization and consequences, 1650‑1815, Saarbrücken, 2011; Richard Harding & Sergio

Solbes Ferri (ed.), The contractor state and its implications (1659‑1815), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2012; Roger

Knight & Martin Wilcox, Sustaining the fleet, 1793‑1815 War, the British navy and the contractor state, Woodbridge,

2010; Pepijn Brandon, Masters of war State, capital, and military enterprise in the Dutch cycle of accumulation (1600‑1795),

Leiden, 2015 See also Gordon E Bannerman, Merchants and the military in eighteenth‑century Britain, London, 2008;

David Parrott, The business of war Military enterprise and the military revolution in early modern Europe, Cambridge, 2012;

Jeff Fynn-Paul (ed.), War, entrepreneurs, and the state in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300‑1800 (History of warfare, 97),

Leiden, 2014.

12 David Held et al., Global transformations Politics, economics and culture, Stanford, 1999; Alan Milward, The European rescue of the nation‑state, London 1993; Anton Schuurman, “Globalisering en geschiedenis”, in Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 27, 2001, p. 385-401; Saskia Sassen, Territory, authority, rights From medieval to global assemblages,

Princeton, 2006.

13 Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy,

Princeton, 2000.

Marjolein ’t Hart

path was important, but just as “provincial” as the others.14 This finding was corroborated

by the growing insights regarding the widely differing paths towards modernisation and state-formation within Europe itself

The history of the European state was thus still of interest, but new kinds of comparisons yielded new information on the peculiarities of this continent Warfare, for example, was usually viewed as disastrous for a country’s economy and society, but a study comparing European and African state-formation revealed war to be a blessing in disguise.15

The political scientist Jeffrey Herbst compared the different historical positions of holders

of power in Africa and Europe While recurrent wars forced European rulers to expand their territories, because land was short relative to the large populations, and to build roads and to enlarge their extractive capacities from their respective societies, African rulers stayed put in their capital cities, which were mostly located on the coast Land was abundant in Africa, and the low density of population led to a kind of state-formation that was geared towards gaining increasing control over the people through tribal connections, and not at territory-building with clearly defined boundaries As a result, the African state did not

“learn” to engage in an intensive interaction with society; the inhabitants did not become

“citizens”, since they did not engage (or need to engage) in Tilly’s bargaining processes à

la Europe Infrastructure remained poor, with the related result that the economy lacked

instruments that might stimulate the development of a national market.16

Frequent wars drove state-formation not only in Europe, but also in much of Eurasia, as Victor Lieberman has shown States simply had to become more fiscally and administratively effective, or they would perish.17 However, the direction of the paths differed In China, the incessant military conflicts of the Warring States Period (475-221 BCE) caused the rise of a huge, precociously centralised and efficient state As was shown

by Roy Bin Wong, the Chinese Empire developed an infrastructural capacity to mobilise and disburse revenues quite beyond the imagination, let alone the capacity, of European state-makers in this period Fiscal revenues, based upon a very efficient land tax, flowed directly to the state rather than remaining in the regions and strengthening the position of local elites, as was the case in most of Europe It turned out to be much easier to transfer surplus funds from one region to another than to have to find new taxes during times of crisis There was no pressure to continually raise taxes or to find loans; additional taxes

14 Roy Bin Wong, China transformed Historical change and the limits of European experience, Ithaca, 1997; Dipesh

Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe Postcolonial thought and historical difference, Princeton, 2000; Shmuel N

Eisenstadt, “Multiple modernities”, in Daedalus, 129, 2000, p. 1-29; Jürgen Osterhammel, “Gesellschaftsgeschichtliche

Parameter chinesischer Modernität”, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28, 2002, p. 71–108; Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens

& Ann Shola Orloff (ed.), Remaking modernity Politics, history, and sociology, Durham, 2005, especially the introduction;

Sebastian Conrad, Adreas Eckert & Ulrike Freitag (ed.), Globalgeschichte Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, Frankfurt am

Main, 2007.

15 Peer Vries, “Governing growth: a comparative analysis of the role of the state in the rise of the West”, in Journal of World History, 13, 2002, p. 67-138.

16 Jeffrey Herbst, States and power in Africa Comparative lessons in authority and control, Princeton, 2000, p. 13-16, 253

That population densities mattered was confirmed by Victor Lieberman, who found remarkable parallels between Europe and South-East Asia: higher population densities after 1500 caused stronger interaction between state and population in both parts of Eurasia Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels Southeast Asia in global context, c 800‑1830, vol 1, Cambridge,

2003, p. 59-61.

17 Lieberman, Strange parallels.

Coercion and Capital Revisited

always tried to avoid a cumulative burden upon the peasantry in order to reduce the threat

of peasant revolts.18

Victoria Tin-Bor Hui added a comparison of great interest The Chinese state of the early modern period was characterised by self-strengthening, centralising tendencies, while European state-formation suffered continually from self-weakening tendencies, because of the rulers’ need to take the power-base of the nobility, clergy and urban elites into account She showed how this self-strengthening power had developed during the Age of the Warring States At that time, just as in early modern Europe, feudal warfare and urban elite opposition had weakened most Chinese states The difference was the rise of the Qin state, whose rulers combined the best existing practices in state-formation, which included introducing a strong military apparatus, a particularly efficient land tax system, and a meritocratic bureaucracy, while destroying the noble status of all families that were not directly linked to the Emperor and imposing strict control and heavy duties upon the merchants In Europe, state rulers had to bicker constantly about who had the right to levy taxes; the Chinese state never had to engage in such debates As a result, no formal bargaining process emerged.19

Merchants and urban elites in China thus lacked the independence and the instruments to further their interests; the wellbeing of the peasantry always came first.20

While this worked well for a long time, it did preclude rapid economic development supported by industrial innovations and the nascent national state, which came to the advantage of the Europeans in the eighteenth century and resulted in new institutions that buttressed modern economic growth As Timur Kuran has shown, lack of flexibility was a problem in the Ottoman Empire Banks had to function in an environment in which usury laws could not be circumvented as easily as in European towns Western European urban governments had introduced the annuity, a form of loan that did not require the payment

of interest but instead used a system of annual “compensations” Ottoman companies also experienced difficulties in the continuation of their enterprises, because of inheritance rules that favoured the dispersal of assets.21 The rigidity of the Ottoman tax-farming system, with its lifetime contracts, prevented the necessary adjustments from being made during the recurrent crises of the eighteenth century.22 Central and direct rule brought obvious advantages, permitting substantial development and growth, but in the end, both in China and the Ottoman Empire, the state did not support the merchants, but aimed principally

at controlling them

18 Wong, China transformed, p. 132-134 Occasional levies consisted of duties imposed on examinees trying to obtain a

post within the government, on merchants, or through an additional land tax, although extra levies upon the peasantry were postponed for as long as possible While the efficiency of the Chinese government did not preclude periods of weakened central control, the self-strengthening tendency supported the realignment under a new regime See also Osterhammel,

“Gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Parameter”, p.  91-92 Jean-Laurent Rosenthal & Roy Bin Wong, Before and beyond divergence The politics of economic change in China and Europe, Cambridge (MA), 2011, p. 230, argue that the average tax

yield per head of the population was higher in China than in Europe.

19 Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and state formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2005, p. 213

ff.; Wong, China Transformed, p. 95, 135.

20 Wim Blockmans & Marjolein ’t Hart, “Power”, in Oxford handbook of cities in world history, ed Peter Clark,

Oxford, 2013, p. 421-437.

21 Timur Kuran, The long divergence How Islamic law held back the Middle East, Princeton, 2010, p. 79, 98, 154.

22 Karen Barkey, Empire of difference The Ottomans in comparative perspective, Cambridge, 2008, p. 234-236; K Kivanç

Karamana and Şevket Pamuk, “Ottoman state finances in European perspective, 1500-1914”, in The Journal of Economic History, 70, 2010, p. 593-629.

Marjolein ’t Hart

Institutions and Economic Development

A strong state, though, was not necessary harmful for merchants State rulers supported trade with protection, infrastructure, and coin regulations Economic historians noted that the most powerful nation-states also protected the property rights of the financial elites and permitted the rise of representative institutions, which furthered the support from taxpayers and moneylenders.23 Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, all three of whom hail from the well-established scholarly tradition of institutional economics, argued that access to state institutions mattered Autocratic regimes hindered economic development, at least in the long run; the institutions of open-access societies, on the other hand, furthered economic growth A crucial factor in their analysis was control over violence, or the development of the state monopoly of violence Supervision of this monopoly should not be dominated by a closed elite who could also use the police and military for extractive economic purposes While truly open-access societies only emerged

in the nineteenth century, with the coming of democracies mainly in the western world, the authors also discussed precursors to open-access societies, such as eighteenth-century Great Britain.24 In another recent book, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson analysed global differences in economic performance They concluded that states with “inclusive” political and economic institutions, i.e institutions permitting the participation of large groups of the population, did better than those with “extractive” ones, in which benefits accrued to

a small elite.25 Such notions invited scholars to consider Robert Putnam’s theory of civil society and encouraged studies on governmental structures in capital-intensive regions, such as the Netherlands Having a high number of non-state organisations and associations was found to stimulate trust and processes of bargaining between state and population, and could favour the development of a free market economy.26 Apparently, under certain conditions, unremitting warfare could coincide with the strengthening and enlarging of the economic base, which could then boost the capital-extractive capacities of the bureaucracy Failing to meet such multifarious challenges contributed to the destruction of states, while

it permitted other states to grow in the direction of capitalised coercive nation-states

23 Richard Sylla, “Financial systems and economic modernization”, in The Journal of Economic History, 62, 2002,

p. 277-292.

24 Douglass C North, John Joseph Wallis & Barry R Weingast, Violence and social orders A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history, Cambridge, 2009 (a new, revised, edition of this book appeared in 2013) For an

introduction on institutional economy, see Douglass C North, Structure and change in economic history, New York, 1981

For critical voices, see Sheila Ogilvie, “Whatever is, is right? Economic institutions in pre-industrial Europe”, in Economic History Review, 60, 2007, p. 649-684; the review symposium “The state and violence A discussion of Violence and Social Orders”, in Perspectives on Politics, 8, 2010, p. 287-296; and the review by Catherine Goetze on http://catherinegoetze.org/

blog (accessed June 16, 2013) Another problem is the development of modern efficient institutions; Douglas W Allen,

The institutional revolution Measurement and the economic emergence of the modern world, Chicago, 2012, emphasised the

resilience of pre-modern institutions, since they were highly efficient for societies before the Industrial Revolution.

25 Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, Why nations fail The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty, New York,

2012; see also the critical review by Francis Fukuyama, on http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/fukuyama/2012/03/26/ acemoglu-and-robinson-on-why-nations-fail/ (accessed June 16, 2013).

26 Robert Putnam, Making democracy work Civic traditions in modern Italy, Princeton, 1992; Jürgen Kocka, “Civil

society from a historical perspective”, in European Review, 12, 2004, p. 65-79; Jan Luiten van Zanden & Maarten Prak,

“Towards an economic interpretation of citizenship: the Dutch Republic between medieval communes and modern nation states”, in European Review of Economic History, 10, 2006, p. 111-145 Jürgen Habermas’ insights stressing the power of

the public space are related to these works; see for example Blockmans & ’t Hart, “Power”; Simon Gunn, The public culture of the Victorian middle class, Manchester, 2000; Colin Jones, The great nation France from Louis XV to Napoleon,

London 2002.