Trends in Rural Social and Economic History of the Pre-Industrial Low Countries

Rural social and economic history of the Low Countries has long been in the shadow of more dominant urban-focused histories. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the high level of urbanisation seen in parts of the Low Countries from the high Middle Ages onwards. However, it may also be connected with problems in the discipline of rural history itself – arguably a major one being the tendency towards a) localism and b) description rather than analysis. Probably a way of rectifying this situation is by becoming more explicit and systematic with our use of comparative history – both in regions of the Low Countries, but also in creating links with wider historical processes across Western Europe as well. This paper makes a small contribution by bringing together important themes and ideas that have linked research in our various regions of interest over the past five years.

Systematic comparison is the future of the discipline it seems.
In that sense, this review paper aims to continue along this theme of comparison. Although rural history is still not as significant as urban history in the context of the Low Countries, probably a good move for the future direction of the discipline is to realise some of the general trends that link our research together. In this paper the material produced explicitly focusing on rural social and economic history of the pre-industrial Low Countries over the past five years is organised into some broad theoretical themes. By understanding what links our research in terms of ideas and concepts, we may begin to create a more analytical rural history -more interested in explanation of societal processes rather than mere description of what is happening, and therefore easier to place within wider Western European trends.

The road to commercialisation and capitalism in the Low Countries
Commercialisation is an appropriate place to begin given that the most important piece of work produced in the past five years associated with the rural society and economy of the pre-industrial Low Countries is dedicated to explaining and assessing the impact of this phenomenon -that is Manors and Markets written by Bas van Bavel of Utrecht University. 3 At present Van Bavel is probably the only social and economic historian who could have written a book like this, which will likely be the 'go-to' source for general inquiries into the social and economic history of the pre-industrial Low Countries for quite some time. The book is hardly a 'neutral' text (not necessarily a bad thing), and is influenced by older Marxist scholarship (particularly the ideas of Robert Brenner) and the Annales School (with an emphasis on long term development), but at the same time draws deeply from the well of the fashionable New Institutional Economics. That is not to say it is a perfect 63 book, or one that will escape criticism. The Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis has already devoted a whole issue to respondents from across Belgian and Dutch institutions. 4 Yet with such strong and provocative hypotheses, Van Bavel is likely aware that this goes with the territory of writing something influential for a generation of scholars -and better that, than being quietly ignored.
Probably more than those of any other scholar of the pre-industrial countryside of the Low Countries (and perhaps even of Western Europe), Van Bavel's monograph, but also his publications in their entirety have emphasised the importance of drawing comparisons and putting historical developments into relative perspective. 5 His previous publications focused mainly on the Central Dutch River Area, Flanders and Holland, but Manors and Markets broadens the comparison, taking in other parts of the Low Countries including Drenthe, the Veluwe, Zeeland, the Frisian coastal marshes, the Campine and with sporadic references to other areas. If there is to be a criticism of the book, it still did not devote enough attention to Walloon regions of the Southern Low Countries, while Groningen and Frisia also seemed to get short shrift.
Furthermore, there is still some lack of clarity over the boundaries Van Bavel uses in order to distinguish between different regions. 6 The main theoretical contributions of Van Bavel are more important, however, and two-fold. First of all, the major hypothesis put forward in the book is that the Low Countries can be divided into a number of (perhaps what Erik Thoen would term) 'social agrosystems', which during the preindustrial period each developed distinctive social, economic and ecological constellations. The point made is that divergent economic development between the regions (often very close together) was connected to different arrangements of favourable or unfavourable institutions, which importantly received their distinctive characteristics from divergent conditions of occupation and settlement. In that sense, the institutions laid down during 65 different phases of the Middle Ages were important for how the Low Countries would come to develop in the early modern period both socially and economically -path dependency in practice. 7 In effect, this kind of theoretical framework for the development of the Low Countries can almost be seen as a 'mini' framework of the sort employed in some quarters for explaining the global 'Great Divergence' (the economic development of Europe in comparison to Asia and Africa) as a counter to the prevailing framework of Kenneth Pomeranz and the 'California School'. 8 The second theoretical contribution, particularly significant for rural historians, is that Van Bavel goes against a prevailing philosophy that urbanisation is a necessary proxy for commercialisation. What he is able to show actually is that some of the earliest and most highly commercialised regions of the Low Countries were essentially rural; citing of course the Central Dutch River Area as a highly commercialised region with very low levels of urbanisation. For Van Bavel, the main drivers of pre-industrial economic and social developments were essentially rural -good news for rural historians of course, and something that has stuck in the craw of some urban historians. 9 Given the significance and provocative nature of the hypotheses and theories brought forward from Manors and Markets, it is best to begin to assess

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would extend to food 21 , or even the materials to produce linen in the winter. 22 The trend towards homing in on different stratifications within rural societies has also been performed in an article focusing on the spatial distribution of farm lands in seventeenth-century Sinaai (Flanders), where it is argued that the tendency towards scattering of parcels was not ubiquitous and different villagers arranged their parcels according to their own income strategies. 23 If there is to be a slight criticism of current research focusing on commercialisation in the pre-industrial countryside in the Low Countries, it is not over the quality (which is high) but the regional bias. trends in rural social and economic history of the pre-industrial low countries curtis review article -recensie-artikel increased commercial interaction between urban centres and the countryside.
Johan Poukens has shown that potato cultivation freed up more land formerly reserved for the household, thereby allowing peasants to benefit more fully from rising grain prices after 1750. 27 Following on from these findings, Poukens also offers a more provocative thesis by disputing the view of Erik

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economic impact. 32 The emergence of the lease on its own is not enough to explain agrarian capitalism it seems -but rather the social context through which it operates. This is supported by an article reconstructing the land and credit markets in the early-modern Campine region: factor markets took their essential importance and characteristics from very particular social conditions. 33 The same factor market institutions could have an entirely different meaning in another social context.
Perhaps one limitation of the research on commerce is the paucity of material being produced for the period before the high Middle Ages.
One exception is the excellent research now being undertaken on land and landholding for the early-medieval Ardennes. 34 For a long time it has been assumed that the early-medieval Ardennes (after widespread abandonment in the late Roman period) was based around an economy of large royal singleblock estates; yet a reassessment of the evidence of donations to monasteries has suggested a much more complex tenurial structure -and that local lordships and aristocratic kinships might have had a more important and earlier role than previously attributed to the region. It remains to be seen whether this has wider significance.

The relationship between city and countryside
In the international literature on the subject of the city and its rural hinterlands, there is now an awareness that urban-rural relationships could be entirely divergent across pre-industrial Western Europe. hinterlands as it began to grow into the sixteenth-century behemoth and international trading centre. 43 What Limberger was able to show is that while Antwerp was able to apply jurisdictions and consolidate property in its very close countryside, its geographical scope of influence was still quite smallespecially when one compares it to the great Northern Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages. 44 The only area of more distant financial investments that Antwerp was able to make in the countryside were those in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and in Zeeland -helping finance the reclamation of new lands, particularly after the terrible storm floods of the sixteenth century. 45 Dekker and Baetens show that it was mainly merchants and high office-holders who made these investments (in Zuid-Beveland) and many belonged to the international elite traders who had even provided loans to governments and cities. 46 There was, it seems, a real fear that the vital port of Antwerp would become difficult to access without these investments.
One      Elsewhere, a stimulating monograph on the fate of the Hainaut region of Wallonia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has recently appeared. 118 In this offering it is demonstrated that warfare, as well as having quite obvious direct consequences such as death and destruction, also had more long-term structural consequences too. Here the constant conflicts between Spanish and French troops in the period 1635 to 1713 completely ruined many of the smallholding peasant farmers -leading to a polarisation of society between an elite group of large farmers able to withstand the crises, and mass ranks of the impoverished landless. The system was put under further pressure with eighteenth-century population pressure, leading to transformation in agricultural techniques. This work goes against a previous view that had seen pre-industrial Hainaut as stable and unchanging over the longue durée.

Marriage practices, the household, and female labour
Marriage, the formation of households and female labour inputs in the pre-industrial Low Countries in recent years has been more restricted to scholars working on cities and towns, or at least on very macro comparisons such as the speculative 'Girlpower' paper by Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van trends in rural social and economic history of the pre-industrial low countries curtis Zanden. 119 Other work such as that of Jan Kok and George Alter has addressed the countryside more explicitly, but generally focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after the Industrial Revolution. 120 One interesting hypothesis put forward in research on rural Flanders has been that in the selection of marriage partners, people consciously thought about the level of mortality in the family of origin when making their decision to marry. 121 More often than not though, recent literature from the discipline of historical demography has been urban-focused and set after 1800. 122 However, a few more rurally-specific studies have been produced decision-making. Successful episodes of popular rural protest against elite encroachment (for example in thirteenth-century Drenthe) have been linked to longstanding traditions of freedom and equality. 127 In that sense, perhaps the key to understanding regional divergences in the Low Countries during the pre-industrial period may not be dictated by institutions per se (in the neo-institutionalist or New Institutional Economics tradition), but actually by social context providing fertile conditions for the emergence of favourable institutions in some areas but also laying the foundations for the development of unfavourable institutions in other areas. It is unfortunate then that rural history continues to be dominated by agrarian and economic concerns, rather than social, cultural or political ones, which are generally more the domain of urban historians. 128

Conclusion
In sum, what is the future of the discipline of rural social and economic history for the Low Countries? Where do we go from here? If we take the significant synthesising work of Manors and Markets as a reference point and a stimulant for further research, probably three key issues come up. According to Van Bavel's provocative thesis, many of the divergences seen across regions of the Low Countries were forged at an early date -from the earliest points of settlement and occupation. Thus, the first point is that the study of rural societies in the early Middle Ages becomes much more significant and integrated into wider debates on social and economic history, especially good news for archaeologists who will be able to test the ideas Van Bavel espouses.