One benefit of a great history book like Jonathan Israel's Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, & Fall: 1477 - 1806 is its deep organization. One can open to the Table of Contents, run a finger down the page and see just how the tale will proceed. Even more, the same reader can pick a topic, go to its start, and within a few lines, at the beginning of just a few paragraphs, begin to chart the course, the scope of the topic, if not its destination. Sometimes, as here, there are the copious tables, fantastic bibliographic info or other footnotes and apparati, all of which give testament to the prior scolarship that went into the work. The growth of these strategies in what is commonly called 'scholarship' today grew a lot through the 20th century. Centering on provenance of sources, referents themselves, and related materials, they reveal the many chains of communication with previous generations of scholars, as well as among contemporaries. But you often need to be able to read several foreign languages.
This clear, direct form of exposition comes at first, Israel makes plain, from a solid, well-established outline (worked out well in advance) which, for its sake, limits confusing distractions. For it can be seen, once that initial pattern of organization is set, recognized, and a few iterations borne out, the pattern itself makes for easier use, as a result, in teaching the material as well. But while the method is established, useful and predictable, the style, as prose, loses much of its more engaging possibilities. This dryness of exposition is seen also, as an admirable trait, especially in controversies.
What could be controversial about Holland 500 years ago? Plenty. Israel makes a case, borne out by evidence we have, that The Low Countries, as we now call that part of northwest Europe including Holland and Belgium and bits of Northern France, was on its own, a highly urbanized society. This simply means that there was a higher production of goods there, and all of which were generated in literally smaller spaces. Around 1500 there was no clear overarching ruler here. No hegemonic king or any leader or faction, no Duke or Count or Prince, nor any singular or real group of families, or sets of interests, leading any other group in the area, for long. There were some families that were richer and held larger plots of land, but they were usually farther south or east. There were no obvious gigantic merchandise or production facilities run by anybody except for the obvious harbours and ports for shipping concerns, and those for the river estuaries, in their places.
Instead what Israel describes is a great variety of people, close-packed, all busy at playing a part in a job or skill. Many of those skills when all put together in their right places, multiplying the opportunities for production and consumption, for all. This is where a thousand controversies popped up. People of every station began to see their personal share grow and naturally wanted more. The peasants slowly lost feudal or seigneurial ties and slowly gained more rights, if not all privileges in the marketplace. More people became expert at numerous skills and could pass this information on. Including things like printing books. There was just one Catholic Church, of course, but with so many different clerical orders, festivals and the like, a wide range of observance and belief could and did develop.
Still the cities in this time did not increase so much in size due to the physical constraints of land. The limited scope in land, and in particular, its limited uses necessitated restraints on population growth. So villages and towns could fill up but then would soon find limits on habitation. Near 1500 there were probably less than a million inhabitants in what we would call the Low Countries today. Yet they weren't concentrated in any one or handful of cities. There were sixteen towns with 10,000 inhabitants or more, but only a couple with 40,000 or more. Along the way, somehow, they found enough parcels of dredged up land, cut by rivers, held in place by dikes, and lining canals which, turned out to be room enough to do everything.
More got done here than in most places across Europe, rivalled only by north Italy at the time. In addition to foreign shipping concerns, from the ocean and the British Isles and beyond, theer were numerous rivers that emptied here. All year there was produce from all over Europe, deposited here and processed and sent somewhere else. There were as a result also more languages spoken here.
There were shipbuilders here as well as merchants and market sellers, there was a market for peat which required those many that dug and hauled and processed peat. This peat was then used as a fuel that, for centuries, powered the popular beer breweries, which then could be sold and transported. Varieties of Cheese proliferated even though that comes from milk, which comes from sheep and goats and cattle. But all of these could be found at hand in the area because of local innovations like individual stalls for milking animals.
There were guilds, there were associations of trade and maritime competitions. There were churches and monasteries and layclerics, nunneries and neighborhood associations. There were land reclamation teams, as well as dairy farmers and cheese makers. But there was little if any state involvement. A tithe went to the Church. Neighbors and property owners sluiced canals. All the little towns next to the larger populated cities had different roles to play and continually tried to work things out. Changes were afoot here as well.
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pp. 106-16. in Jonathan I Israel; Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, & Fall: 1477 - 1806 : Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998
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