Dutch history is regularly used and claimed in the debate about national identity. That didn't sit well with many historians, so they wrote the World History of the Netherlands, a big pill full of stories about how things are.
The recently released book World History of the Netherlands has already been put on Twitter as a left-wing hobby, says Marjolein 't Hart, one of the editors of the book. She is professor by special appointment in the History of State Formation in Global Perspective at the Free University of Amsterdam and head of the History Department at the Huygens Institute for Dutch History. “Totally wrong! I won't deny that most editors are left-wing, but that certainly isn't the case for the more than a hundred scientists who contributed to this. The support was very broad and there are certainly CDA and SGP voters among the authors, to name just one example.”
The intention of the book is precisely not to choose a political side, but to tell the nuanced story of Dutch history. “In the past, politicians in particular have sometimes used history to validate their story. We want to rectify that here, without blackening Dutch history or denying its beautiful sides. Take, for example, William of Orange, who was later made Father of the Fatherland. The good man probably didn't speak Dutch at all.” That gives a different picture of this über-Dutchman.
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It sounds like a complicated job, writing a book with more than a hundred scientists, but according to 't Hart it went quite smoothly. What surprised her most was the enormous number of enthusiastic responses from scientists who wanted to contribute to the book. “In August 2017 we made a call and within no time we had 135 responses. Not only from historians, but also from archaeologists, cultural scientists, literary scholars, you name it. Most of them had good ideas for a chapter and respected the terms and conditions. We were able to persuade the publisher not to delete chapters, so that the book has become a lot more extensive and thicker than intended."
The book was made after the French example, whereby each chapter had to have a link with foreign countries, had to contain recent science and not be an enumerative, dry story. “In France there was a lot of fuss about that format. Right-wing politician Marine Le Pen was furious, because the book wrote that the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650), now a national hero, had to write his books abroad. In his own country he was persecuted for his ideas.”
Netherlands basis for English power
World history of the Netherlands ultimately contains 116 separate chapters in chronological order, written by largely different scientists. “With the book we want to show how the Netherlands related to other countries in history. What role we played in other countries and how foreign countries have influenced us. In the past, people traded, worked and traveled over much greater distances than was thought until a few decades ago.”
The book shows that what we think is truly Dutch, often has no Dutch origin. A good example is our constitution from 1848, written by the politician Thorbecke. Political historian Adriejan van Veen (Radboud University) calls it the un-Dutch constitution, because the law is based on texts from abroad. But we have not only been inspired, the Netherlands has also had a lot of influence on foreign countries over the centuries. 't Hart himself wrote a chapter on the rise of England as a world power through the contribution of Dutch systems.
“Before the arrival of the Dutch William III, who became king of England in 1689, the financial situation in that country was dire. By introducing excise duties, loan systems and a professionalized land army after Dutch examples, the state revenues rose phenomenally, England was able to pay for a standing army and then grow into a world power. I see it as a reverse Brexit. Now English politicians are shouting loudly that they have built themselves up as a country, but that is very unjustified. We should really be more proud of these inventions in the Netherlands.”
History in debate
With the book, the scientists show that the Dutch identity was not created by staying behind the polder dikes, but through interaction with other countries. “In the current heated debate about our identity, our history is dragged by the hair. By claiming that we as Dutch people have been doing certain things for centuries, behavior is justified. But this story is too limited.”
“The acceptance of gays, for example, and the emphasis on their rights, is today seen as something typically Dutch and appropriate to our tolerant national character. But that's disappointing. That tolerance is an import product that we have grown very slowly towards, following the French and German examples, since the end of the nineteenth century. And then appropriate it to us.” With gay capital Amsterdam as a result. Because when we do something, we do it right, right?
No persecution of the Jews
The book is a selection of interesting stories, but not an overall picture of Dutch history, says 't Hart. “We have received complaints about the insufficient contributions about the Second World War and the lack of the persecution of the Jews. But we also do not claim to be complete. We just wanted to nuance the picture that exists of Dutch history. History is fluid and a national identity develops in fits and starts.”
The nationalistic sound that has been heard in recent years, with an emphasis on one's own culture and identity, is a recent development, according to 't Hart. “In the Netherlands, the fear of threats from abroad has been a thing of the past few years. We have always been very open to other countries and migrants, as the book shows. There are periods in history when many more migrants came to the Netherlands than now, without us seeing that as a threat.”
Breaking myths
National myths are persistent because they have been taught in schools for years. 't Hart has already given a few good examples of myths that turned out to be not entirely true, but we will highlight a few more in conclusion. Starting with the Dutch States Bible from 1637, the first official Protestant Bible translation in print. This Bible is not the basis of Standard Dutch, as was claimed in the nineteenth century. Then linguists compared the Statenbijbel with Luther's German translation from 1522, which had been a trendsetter. The language used in the Statenbijbel, on the other hand, was already old-fashioned in its own time. That this myth has persisted is apparent from the election of the Statenvertalers as the most influential language users of all time by the readers of the magazine Onze Taal in 2004.
We think equal rights is very Dutch, but compared to the rest of Europe, we had – and have – few female professors. In 1919, Tine Tammes became the second female professor in the Netherlands, which was also late. It is remarkable that she was the daughter of a shopkeeper from Groningen. Her background makes her professorship among men all the more special, compared to her elite female colleagues abroad. That too is very Dutch.
The arrival of the pill in 1964 is also a beautiful story, written by Theo Engelen (professor of Historical Demography at Radboud University Nijmegen). We think that the birth control pill started the sexual revolution and drastically reduced the number of children. But research shows that married couples started using more contraception from the end of the nineteenth century, because child mortality fell and costs rose (children were no longer allowed to work and had to go to school). The sudden drop in the number of births in 1965 can be explained by a baby boom there just before and not by massive pill use. The decline was a logical continuation of a process of industrialisation, modernization and secularization that started already at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Engelen.