Ask a Dutch person to describe typical cultural traits of his own people and you will often hear words such as 'tolerance' and 'commercial spirit'. According to historian Wijnand Mijnhardt of the University of Utrecht, this self-image from the Golden Age is based on a historical misconception. Our current society is much closer to the late eighteenth century, when Dutch society also lost its unique tolerance due to economic downturn.
For the research project ‘The Balance between City and Countryside:Disurbanization and the Rise of an Agrarian Society:Zeeland 1700-1860’, Wijnand Mijnhardt, Peter Brusse, Jeanine Dekker and Arno Neele examined how the Netherlands changed as a result of the economic downturn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, our country changed from an urbanized society to a culture in which agriculture played a much more important role.
The researchers took Zeeland, an area that was highly urbanized in the Golden Age, as an example study to investigate the effects of the de-urbanization of the seventeenth century on the Netherlands as a whole. In the course of this century the cities emptied and the demand for agricultural products increased. The Dutch seized the opportunities that were at hand. At that time, they were no longer in the cities but in the countryside.
With the shift from the city to the countryside, the unique level of tolerance and openness that prevailed in the Dutch trading cities as 'centers of world trade' also disappeared. Instead, the more agrarian economy created a much narrower climate that drove many thinkers abroad. For example, the great Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker – better known as Multatuli – preferred to stay in Germany rather than on his native soil.
Stacked away
We see three clear shifts in the period studied," says Wijnand Mijnhardt. "From the city to the countryside, from power in the bourgeoisie to the nobility and from west to east." According to Mijnhardt, the landed gentry – who owned a lot of land – in the east of the Netherlands were able to profit from the emergence of a much more agrarian society and thereby expand their power.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie from the maritime provinces no longer had but the nobility from the lands in power.
“This development is hidden away in the historiography. It is often thought that there is a direct development between the tolerant urban society of the Golden Age and the modern age,” says Mijnhardt. “During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Netherlands took shape. Agriculture occupied a much more important place at that time.”
According to the researchers, the de-urbanization offered many new opportunities. The Netherlands is currently the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world after the United States. According to the Utrecht researchers, we owe this unique position to the developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are often incorrectly referred to as a gloomy period.