Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 128, Issue 4, 2015

Farming urbanites or urbanized farmers? A tentative study on urban farming in early modern Antwerp

This contribution sheds light on the importance of the production and retailing of local food by townsmen. Recent studies on food and the city have neglected this aspect of early modern food provisioning.

By looking at individual households and the corporation of the gardeners’ guild, this article glimpses the strategies of urban market gardeners. At first sight, urban farming could be considered a rather marginal phenomenon. Eighteenth-century records mention only a few farmers within the city walls, but this study suggests a more widespread phenomenon. Members of the gardeners’ guild had a retail function rather than a role in the production of food. Guild members living within the walls were particularly active in retailing. Those who lived outside the walls were mostly producers. The gardeners’ guild organized and controlled the influx of food, mostly fruit, vegetables, and to a lesser extent grain, but by no means had a monopoly on local food production.

Urban farming, however, was not limited to the gardeners’ guild. Probate inventories show a broad variety of households active in agriculture, without being members of the guild. Future research has to tackle this phenomenon in a comparative analysis.

Jubilees of the Revolt of the Netherlands. Seventeenth-century centenaries and their political context

Historians generally consider centenaries in the nineteenth century as ‘invented traditions’ and in terms of scale and political motivation emphasise discontinuity with jubilees celebrated in the early modern period. This article, however, contends that centennial jubilees were organised and celebrated widely before the nineteenth century. Focusing on seventeenth-century commemorations of the Revolt of the Netherlands – both in the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Netherlands – the authors shed new light on why people celebrated centenaries and what was at stake in doing so. People did not simply celebrate the passage of time, but jubilees also served clear secondary purposes. Foreign invasions threatening the unity of the Republic and the ongoing threat of Protestantism to South Nederlandish Catholicism motivated people to organise centenaries, much in the same way that nationalism stimulated the celebration of jubilees in the nineteenth century. A common feature of early modern centenaries was that commemoration of the past often masked disunity and political uncertainty.

Political representation and electoral malpractice, 1795-1917

Elections are generally viewed as a crucial aspect of modern political representation. Recently political theorists and historians have questioned this claim and are opening up the theoretical and historical understanding of representation. In this article we too question the self-evident relationship between representation and election. We do this by showing that the meaning and structure of Dutch elections shifted significantly during the long nineteenth century, and that these shifts are connected to changing views on political representation. The article claims that the (potential) dangers and corrupting practices that seemed to threaten elections at different times reflected opinions on the goal of elections and the understanding of what constituted proper representation. The eras of revolution, restoration, liberal parliamentarianism, and party politics had their distinct notions of representation and corresponding electoral systems. The history of parliamentary elections therefore shows the subjectivity and problematic nature of the relationship between election and representation.

The historical novel and national romanticism in the Netherlands, 1790-1899

According to Joep Leerssen ‘national romanticism’ is defined by the artist’s goal (a national political cause) and his means (inspiration is found in the past and present of the nation). This movement spread rapidly through Europe between 1820 and 1870, and Leerssen considers the ‘long tail’ and ‘the banal’ of ‘national romanticism’ mainly as phenomena of the twentieth century. As the history of national romanticism and the historical novel seem inseparable, this article compares Leerssen’s definition and periodization with data on the historical novels that appeared in the Netherlands between 1790 and 1899. The data affirms Leerssen’s periodization, but only with respect to the leading (protestant bourgeois) cultural class. An examination of all historical novels in the period 1790-1899 shows that the historical novel as consumer art was not restricted to the ‘the long tail’ and that around 1870 a Catholic form of national romanticism came into being. In a nutshell, the history of the historical novel in the nineteenth century reflects fundamental changes in Dutch political ideals in the same period: from homogeneous nation state to ‘unity in diversity’.

Contrite Loe de Jong. Media censorship and the Committee of Action against Neo-Fascism (London 1944)

On 10 June 1944 seven signatories issued a pamphlet accusing the Dutch government in exile of secretly preparing an authoritarian regime immediately to follow the German occupation. The members of this Committee of Action against Neo-Fascism belonged to the circle of Radio Orange, the Dutch broadcast organization based in London during the Second World War. The protesters were silenced by the Dutch government’s media censorship. Six of them withdrew their allegations hesitantly; but only Loe de Jong decided actively to support the government in restoring its tarnished reputation. This article traces his change of mind and corrective actions. De Jong later became the historian who dominated the historiography of the German occupation 1940-45 in his mother country. Smits explains how the scholar evaluated his previous conduct. He shows that De Jong did not present a genuine, impartial description of this incident in full detail. The historian neglected to mention that the Committee had indeed challenged the government in exile by arguing that that secret decision-making on the Dutch postwar democratic system was not a legitimate task.