According to the Civil and Alien Laws of both countries, foreign-born residents of Antwerp and Rotterdam could have a number of different overlapping statuses of belonging: foreign nationals without any formal link to their actual place of residency; foreign nationals with an official residency permit; foreign nationals possessing civil equality with nationals (denizen status); naturalised Belgian or Dutch allowed to hold public offices; naturalised citizens who thanks to their gender and property received active and passive voting rights together with naturalisation⁹; and colonial subjects who were denied the status of nationals, let alone citizens.¹⁰ What these different statuses entailed in terms of individual rights and obligations became subject to change with suffrage reforms and the establishment of public social security systems in particular.

In the late nineteenth century, however, nationality and citizenship were not equivalent concepts or forms of social status. This is for example underlined by the fact that women possessing nationality were not citizens of their country. In the Netherlands and Belgium, citizenship remained inaccessible to all female nationals up until 1919 and 1948 respectively. As long as suffrage remained linked to property, citizenship did not automatically come with being male either. Yet, nationality as the legal bounds of the national community was, and still is, a pre-condition for citizenship. Nationality denotes the ‘relationship between an individual and a nation involving the duty of obedience or allegiance on the part of the subject and protection on the part of the state’.¹¹ Citizenship is the basis for the individual’s right to political participation.¹²

In Belgium, the process of defining national belonging was accompanied by legal reforms designed to broaden the national community, by making Belgian nationality and citizenship more accessible to foreign-born residents. In the Netherlands, the increasing importance of nationality and citizenship was accompanied by a closer legal demarcation between the national community and foreign residents who aspired to Dutch nationality and citizenship. While building their empires, both the Netherlands and Belgium excluded colonial populations from the legal nation by denying them all formal means of belonging as well as the right to vote.

Since 1831, when Belgium gained its independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, both countries’ nationality and citizenship were regulated by the Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek or Code Civil) which stemmed from the Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804. The Dutch Burgerlijk Wetboek from 1838 established a jus soli regulation: every child born in the Netherlands or in its colonies by parents who resided in the country, regardless of whether or not they were Dutch, would automatically receive Dutch nationality. A Dutchman’s wife automatically received Dutch nationality, including cases in which the husband had become Dutch via naturalisation. Throughout the nineteenth century, in both the Netherlands and Belgium, a woman’s nationality was linked to her husband’s national belonging. The Dutch nationality law from 1892, the Wet op het Nederlanderschap, explicitly excluded married women from individual naturalisation, and it was only in 1896 that an independent woman, a widow, for the first time received naturalisation.¹³ In Article Eight, the Burgerlijk Wetboek also stipulated that foreign-born residents could achieve legal equality with Dutch nationals on the level of civil rights, without possessing Dutch nationality. Such a request could be made after six years of residency on Dutch territory.¹⁴ Until the denizen status was abolished in 1892, foreign-born city dwellers in Rotterdam chose to apply for denizen status rather than naturalisation, which was a much more complicated procedure.¹⁵

To apply for Dutch nationality via naturalisation, a person had to be twenty years old, be a resident of the Netherlands or its colonies for at least ten years, and had to declare that he or she intended to remain living there. The price for naturalisation, as declared in the 1850 law, was raised to 75 guilders in 1882.¹⁶ With the 1892 law on Dutch nationality, the costs for registration and the required seal were raised as well.¹⁷ The 1892 nationality law represented an important shift. It redefined Dutch nationality and citizenship by dropping the jus soli principle in favour of a jus sanguinis regulation: from now on, only children with parents who held Dutch nationality before 1893 would be considered Dutch from birth. The population of the Dutch Indies was legally excluded from the Dutch nation because colonised people were defined as Dutch subjects, not as nationals, let alone citizens.¹⁸ The 1892 nationality law had implications in particular for Rotterdam, as this was a location where many newcomers arrived. With the 1892 law, legislators came to consider double nationality as a social problem, in as much that foreign nationals who aspired to become a Dutch national were now forced to give up their original nationality.¹⁹ The possibility of long-term residents becoming legally equal to Dutch nationals was abolished.²⁰

In Belgium, naturalisation developed into a more open and popular legal institution from the 1880s onwards; Belgian authorities began to encourage foreign-born residents to integrate with the Belgian legal nation.²¹ Before 1881, naturalisation was regulated by the Civil Code, which stipulated that Belgian nationality followed the jus sanguinis principles. But, in administrative practice, people born to foreign parents on Belgian soil were seldom expelled and were instead considered to be lawful residents of the country.²² Like in the Netherlands, foreign-born residents could also hold equal civil rights as Belgian nationals, the so-called domicilié status. This status entitled aliens to municipal welfare and protected them from expulsion. In the early years of the Belgian state, becoming a domicilié was an exceptional favour granted to very few foreign-born residents, most of them members of the bourgeoisie.²³ Unlike in Rotterdam, where numerous foreign-born residents applied for the denizen status up until 1892, applications for civil equality seem to have been a rare phenomenon in late-nineteenth-century Antwerp that left hardly any trace in the city archives. Supposedly, the applications for denizen status were taken over by the naturalisation procedure that became more popular after 1881.

The Belgian Civil Code provided for an ordinary and a grand naturalisation. The latter not only conferred on its male holder Belgian nationality, but citizenship rights as well. The applicant for ordinary naturalisation had to be twenty-one years old and was required to have resided in Belgium for at least five years. The Naturalisation Law of 1881, followed up by the Nationality Law of 1909, introduced a shift in attitude and practice, reflecting the political elite’s intention to integrate foreign-born residents into the Belgian legal nation.²⁴ The law eased the requirements for those foreign nationals interested in applying for grand naturalisation and halved the price for ordinary naturalisations. The law particularly encouraged foreign nationals born in Belgium to opt for Belgian nationality, and contrary to the Netherlands, dual nationality was widely accepted.²⁵

The liberalisation of nationality legislation and the will to assimilate settled immigrants went along with a strict division between Belgian nationals and foreigners, who in the late nineteenth century had begun to face increasing discrimination.²⁶ The same was true for colonised people whose status resembled that of subjects under the Ancien Régime. Among the Congolese subjects, a differentiation was made between those who, on a ‘meritocratic’ basis, were registered in the population records, the so-called évolués, and those who were not officially registered.²⁷ Only certain privileged members of the Congolese elite were theoretically allowed to ask for legal equality with Belgian nationals in some areas of civil and penal law, though the granting of these rights was rare.²⁸

In late-nineteenth-century Belgium and the Netherlands, where the importance of the category ‘nationality’ had begun to increase, very few foreign nationals were applying for naturalisation and even fewer would finally receive the nationality of their new country of residence.²⁹ With 171,000 foreign nationals living in Belgium in 1890³⁰, only slightly more than 1,500 people became Belgian nationals via naturalisation between 1881 and 1900.³¹ According to the 1889 Dutch census, 49,000 foreign nationals were living in the Netherlands³²; between 1880 and 1899 only 844 of them received the Dutch nationality via naturalisation, excluding the colonies where another 136 people received naturalisation.³³

Naturalisation in both countries was a costly and time-consuming procedure involving both parliamentary chambers. It was considered a favour granted by the state, rather than a right. The granting of Belgian or Dutch nationality was a discretionary act of parliament, and even candidates who fulfilled all formal criteria could have their applications rejected. Vice versa, parliament could accept applications that did not comply with the formal criteria as parliamentarians did not have to account for whether an application was accepted or rejected.³⁴ Consequently, only members of the higher social ranks, in particular those foreign-born residents who were planning a career in the public sector, including the military, and those who were well off enough to receive voting rights together with nationality, had an incentive to go through the long naturalisation procedure.³⁵ In Belgium, about one third of those naturalised between 1880 and 1900 belonged to two professional groups: they were members of the armed forces and civil servants.³⁶ In the Netherlands during the same period, senior members of the armed forces and tradesmen were the ones most likely to become naturalised.³⁷ In both countries between 1880 and 1900, almost all people who became naturalised were foreign nationals from neighbouring countries, with Germans representing the biggest share.³⁸ Many German residents belonged to the social elite and could expect advantages from naturalisation, especially in the trading cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam.³⁹ In the case of Antwerp, the Catholic Party even feared that if the German residents received voting rights alongside grand naturalisation, the protestant German trading community would represent a firm ‘voting block’ for the Liberal Party in the port city.⁴⁰ Residents of German origin in some cases also opted for Belgian or Dutch nationality to avoid the heavier requirement of military service in their home country.⁴¹ Until the end of the nineteenth century, it was possible for young men to avoid military service in both Belgium and the Netherlands, particularly if they were well off.⁴²

Among the naturalised in Belgium were also numerous people originating from the parts of Limburg and Luxembourg that the 1839 Treaty of London had integrated into the Netherlands, but which Belgium had reclaimed at its independence. Several legal measures enacted between 1879 and 1909 facilitated the naturalisation of the residents of these territories.⁴³ In the Netherlands, after the legal reform in 1892, the so-called former-Dutch (oud-Nederlanders) who had resided abroad for ten years lost their nationality if they did not declare in writing to the authorities that they wanted to remain Dutch. Those among the oud-Nederlanders who neglected to make this declaration before 1903 contributed to the sharp increase in naturalisation numbers after the Dutch government had introduced special conditions for them to become re-naturalised.⁴⁴

At the end of the nineteenth century, Antwerp developed from a peripheral textile centre in the Austrian Netherlands into a major distribution port for rapidly industrialising Belgium.⁴⁵ By 1900, the city’s population totalled about 300,000 residents, making it the country’s biggest city.⁴⁶ As with many port cities, both Antwerp and Rotterdam owed their demographic expansion to in-migration. In 1900, about thirteen percent of Antwerp’s inhabitants were non-Belgian, most often of German or Dutch origin.⁴⁷ An important share of the foreign, especially German-born, residents was active in the port economy and worked within the (German) export business.⁴⁸ Eastern Europeans, many of them migrants who were unable to continue their planned migration to the Americas, also contributed to the rising migrant population in the port cities from the 1880s onwards. By 1900, the third-largest migrant community in Antwerp was composed of people from the Russian Empire.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of applicants for naturalisation in Antwerp originated from neighbouring countries, in particular from Germany and the Netherlands, just as it was at the national level.⁵⁰

The Belgian application procedure for naturalisation started and ended at the local level. Yet, the national parliament made the final decision in a discretionary manner as to whether or not an application for naturalisation was accepted.⁵¹ The process began with a foreign national turning in a request to the local administration. After receiving the application, the local representative of the royal prosecutor, the parquet de la ville d’Anvers, would inform national institutions about the procedure and send a note to the national prosecutor so that the responsible department at the Ministry of Justice, the Sûreté publique⁵², could review the application. Naturalisation essentially involved these two national institutions, the national prosecutor and the Sûreté publique, alongside the Antwerp mayor and police. As will be shown, after the national authorities had given green light it was up to the mayor and the police to evaluate the applicant and support or oppose his or her request. The large majority of naturalisation candidates were male. In the name register of foreign nationals living in the province of Antwerp who applied for naturalisation in 1895, for example, we find only six women among the 370 candidates, while in 1896 only six out of 656 applicants were female.⁵³ Due to this gender imbalance⁵⁴, I will generally use masculine pronouns when referring to the naturalisation candidates.

Before the beginning of the legislative process that would ultimately grant naturalisation by involving both parliamentary chambers, the Sûreté publique would turn the affair over to the local authorities if the application was deemed worthy of consideration. The Sûreté would ask the mayor of the city to set up a report about the applicant’s ‘behaviour, morality, criminal record, and solvency’.⁵⁵ The mayor would then pass the case further down the administrative scale to the police force for the city section where the foreign national was registered. A police agent would have to inform the mayor as to whether the candidate had a record of outstanding morality and behaviour, and whether there were any recorded judicial incidents. He would also need to confirm the candidate’s financial solvency by investigating his profession and income. If the Antwerp mayor transferred a positive report of the candidate to the royal prosecutor, he had officially confirmed his support for the foreign resident’s application for naturalisation by acting as his guarantor. After the legislative procedure had been carried out on the national level, the foreign national would present himself to the mayor and declare that he accepted the naturalisation and would pay the necessary fees. If the applicant failed to do so within three months, his Belgian nationality would be withdrawn.

In the case of the German national Carolus-Frederik-Eduardus Karcher, who applied for grand naturalisation in 1887, the police commissar confirmed that the candidate resided in Antwerp, and had lived there for sixteen years with only one year of interruption.⁵⁶ Continuous residency was crucial when applying for naturalisation in Antwerp, as well as in Rotterdam. A formal proof of residency would not have sufficed; rather it was the candidate’s actual local presence and reputation that mattered. Paradoxically, foreign nationals had to prove their local rootedness and belonging when applying for naturalisation. Yet, in the case of the port cities, where an increasing number of foreign tradespeople set up their business in the late nineteenth century, long-time local presence in the ports was supposedly attributable to economic activities and not proof of meaningful allegiance to their country of residence. Hence, the city’s interests – and especially the economic advantages a city could expect from the continued presence of the foreign national – played a key role in the naturalisation procedures at the local level. References to national allegiance and belonging are hardly discernible in the local administrative procedures.

Besides irreproachable moral behaviour, the police commissar had to testify to the applicant’s marital status, which was generally recorded in the local register books kept at the police station.⁵⁷ The 1881 Belgian naturalisation law required people applying for grand naturalisation to be married or, if their spouse was deceased, to have children from that marriage. Unmarried individuals or those without children from a previous marriage could only become naturalised at the age of fifty. Along with permanent residency, marriage was considered a stabilising factor binding the foreign national to the local community. Although being married to a Belgian woman was advantageous for the candidate⁵⁸, it was still better to be married to a non-Belgian woman than to not be married at all.⁵⁹ The local authorities took marriage as an indication that the foreign national was settled in Antwerp. Thus, a marriage certificate was generally enclosed with the application for ordinary or grand naturalisation. At the same time, the naturalisation law from 1881 also stipulated that marriage was not required if the candidate’s father had already received grand naturalisation in Belgium. Accordingly, the German applicant Carolus-Frederik-Eduardus Karcher, a single man working as a commission agent at his father’s harbour business in Antwerp, could apply for grand naturalisation because his father was a naturalised Belgian. Hence, local belonging could likewise be proven with family ties that linked the foreign national to a particular place, rather than to the nation as an ‘imagined community’.⁶⁰

Throughout the local naturalisation procedure, the candidate was in constant contact with the local administrations, sending letters back and forth and turning in various documents, such as a marriage certificate or proof of fulfilled military service. When transferring the completed dossier to the royal prosecutor, the mayor acted as an advocate for the foreign national living in Antwerp.⁶¹ He presented his case in a favourable light and closed his letter with the standard formulation: ‘J’estime que cette demande peut être favorablement accueillie’ (‘I think that this application deserves favourable consideration’)⁶²; or ‘[s]a demande mérite tout appui’ (‘this request deserves all-out support’).⁶³ The different local authorities who contributed to the naturalisation process – the mayor, the police, and the parquet – spoke and acted on the candidate’s behalf so that his request for naturalisation would be successful at the national level. Rather than establishing a closer bond between the foreign national and the nation state, the naturalisation procedure was a local endeavour to further integrate an often economically successful city dweller into the local community.

The local naturalisation practice was also framed by the national legal context. Indeed, local practice in Antwerp shifted after the introduction of the 1881 naturalisation law. The sheer volume of archival records demonstrates that the liberalisation of grand naturalisation provoked an increase in applications.⁶⁴ As will be shown, with the 1881 legal reform, local authorities became more inclined to support applications for naturalisation by wealthy individuals even if applicants did not fulfil all formal criteria. This development differed from previous practices as exemplified by the case of Charles Langsdorf. In 1870, the German businessman Charles Langsdorf, who had settled in Antwerp as early as 1845 and ran a successful business in the port, had to testify to his irreproachable behaviour prior to his arrival in Belgium when applying for naturalisation. The Belgian Senate asked Langsdorf to prove that he had ‘honourably left’ the different countries where he had lived before arriving in Belgium.⁶⁵ In a personal letter addressed to the Antwerp police commissar, Langsdorf did not hide his indignation about these exorbitant administrative demands – about ‘l’inconvenance d’une telle demande’ (‘the impropriety of this request’) – renouncing his former wish to become Belgian.⁶⁶ Such incidents of successful but highly mobile businessmen of good repute being denied naturalisation or refusing it because of administrative requirements became much less common after the naturalisation law from 1881.

One applicant, Alfred Schuchard, a German citizen who was born in Prussia, conducted trade in Antwerp and held the position of vice-consul of Uruguay. He is a telling example of the multiple, synchronous belongings that characterised many port city dwellers.⁶⁷ The transnational life path of the aforementioned Carolus Karcher too indicates that the 1881 legislation encouraged mobile people to apply for Belgian nationality and citizenship. Upon Karcher’s arrival in Antwerp, the German national, born in Saarbrücken in Prussia, proved his identity with a certificate issued by the consul of the United States of America in The Hague. Karcher’s national belonging was unclear to the point that the Ministry of Justice wrongly referred to Karcher as a French national in its communications with the city administration. In 1887, he applied for grand naturalisation, available to him thanks to his father’s naturalisation. Karcher’s application for grand naturalisation, which also ensured his political rights, was supported by the Antwerp mayor. He owed this to being part of a successful and locally rooted family business. Moreover, his father’s status as a naturalised Belgian meant that Karcher had no obligation to have served in the Belgian or German military.

The military service requirement was problematic for many applicants with confusing transnational trajectories. However, not having served in the army was not an insurmountable obstacle for an application to receive support from the Antwerp authorities: if the foreign national was a ‘desirable person’, the city authorities might support his application anyway. Sigismond Weiler, born in Prussia in 1857, was denaturalised of his German nationality at seven years of age and arrived in Antwerp at the age of eighteen without a nationality. As he had not completed any military service at that point, he would have been required to register for the drawing of lots by which military recruits were chosen in Belgium every year.⁶⁸ Weiler failed to do this, as the Antwerp mayor reported to the royal prosecutor in May 1882.⁶⁹ His naturalisation procedure was suspended, but six years later, Weiler re-applied for naturalisation though he had still not fulfilled all legal requirements, having neither served in the military, nor been married. The Antwerp mayor decided to support Weiler’s application nonetheless. He professed in a letter to the royal prosecutor that Weiler’s ‘behaviour and morality have remained irreproachable and his commercial reputation is good’.⁷⁰ In fact, he had turned into a successful businessperson and thereby into a desirable Antwerp citizen, as the police commissar’s report confirmed. The candidate’s seed and flour business had done very well and his revenues were high.⁷¹ The Antwerp city administration too supported the application of David-Emiel Spudich, the owner of a popular eatery in Antwerp, whose history was even more complicated. Since Spudich had no genuine place of origin, he had not completed any military service. Born in 1856 in a village close to Alt Christburg in West Prussia⁷², Spudich’s father emigrated to Russia in 1859 and was eliminated from the Prussian registers. Spudich himself travelled around Prussia and lived in Poznań, moved to Rotterdam and then to Amsterdam, where he lived without official registration, before settling in Antwerp.

The cases of these candidates suggest that the Antwerp authorities were eager to accommodate the particularities of the port city’s mobile inhabitants and the legal requirements for naturalisation. Local authorities showed a strong interest in supporting the rather problematic applications from these individuals with transnational trajectories, no fixed residency, and whose connection to Belgium as a nation was minimal, but who were operating successful businesses in the port city. The local authorities certainly felt legitimised to reinforce these applications thanks to a legal context that, since 1881, made Belgian nationality more accessible for foreign-born residents. In Rotterdam, on the contrary, the authorities dealing with applications for naturalisation on the local level had to take into account the more restrictive regulations of the 1892 nationality law that entered into force on 1 July 1893.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Rotterdam expanded demographically and transformed economically into an international port. Around 1850 the city had about 90,000 inhabitants, but this number grew to approximately 320,000 by 1899. Rotterdam began to attract migrants during the 1870s port expansion, many of whom arrived from the national hinterland. Between 1880 and 1900, only a small share of migrants came from abroad, primarily from Germany and Belgium, with the community of German-born residents representing approximately two percent (circa 4,010 people) of Rotterdam’s population in 1889.⁷³ The German-born residents, whose move to Rotterdam was often prompted by commercial and trade interests, had, on average, a higher social status than Rotterdam-born inhabitants.⁷⁴ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the community of Eastern Europeans had grown in Rotterdam just as it had in Antwerp. Russian migrants especially became more numerous, but their overall number remained small, with only 229 registered Russian nationals living in Rotterdam between 1893 and 1914.⁷⁵As in Antwerp, applications for naturalisation came almost exclusively from people from neighbouring countries, with Germany representing the majority.⁷⁶

Before 1893, when the nationality law abolished the denizen status, in contrast to Antwerp where this procedure seemingly became obsolete after 1881, foreign-born residents in Rotterdam were more likely to apply for civil equality with Dutch nationals than for naturalisation. The mayor and municipal council carried out 106 equalisation procedures between 1866 and 1892.⁷⁷ Among these 106 applicants, mostly from the German Confederation and later the German Empire, there was only one woman, supposedly unmarried. In contrast to the application for Dutch nationality, the equalisation procedure was straightforward: the candidate was only asked to prove that he had resided in the municipality for at least six years. Such evidence could easily be produced if the foreign national had, in compliance with legal requirements, registered with the Rotterdam authorities upon arrival in the city.⁷⁸

The certificates verifying a foreigner’s legal equality with Dutch nationals were collected by the Gemeentesecretarie van Rotterdam, afdeling bevolking (municipal government Rotterdam, population department) in a huge volume of forms. The forms, filled out by the civil agents, recorded the foreign national’s name and his town and country of birth, and attested to the applicant’s uninterrupted residency in Rotterdam, a requirement to attaining legal equality with Dutch nationals according to Article Eight of the Civil Code. This reference to the Burgerlijk Wetboek was the only reference made to the nation state on the form. On the form, the city and its representatives were clearly presented as the central actors conferring legal equality, with the form’s title stating that ‘Burgemeester en wethouders van Rotterdam verklaren bij deze dat [...]’ (‘the mayor and aldermen hereby declare that [...]’). The same holds true for the certificate granted to the successful applicant: it contained the stamp of the city of Rotterdam as the only official signature and made no mention of the Dutch nation state. Local authorities were decisive actors and residency was the only criterion for becoming legally equal to Dutch nationals, though it should be stressed that this precondition was taken very seriously. Johann Hermann Joseph Lindemann from Hannover in Prussia, for example, saw the equal rights he acquired in 1869 withdrawn after the Rotterdam police commissar discovered that his statement of an uninterrupted six years of residency was false.⁷⁹

The abolition of this rather easy way to gain Dutch civil rights in 1893 did not provoke a rise in naturalisation numbers, because the new nationality law also made the naturalisation procedure more costly. Between 1839 and 1900, only 126 people were naturalised in Rotterdam. In 1890, for example, six residents were naturalised, some of whom had a professional incentive to become Dutch: Michael Feilzer, a cook born in Prussia; David Croll, an engineer born in Scotland; Matthias Högel, a photographer born in Prussia; Egenius Coremans, a customs officer at the Dutch railway company born in Belgium; Ernst Luhde, a sergeant in the armed forces in the Dutch-Indies born in Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Louis Müldner, a machinist at the Dutch railway company born in Prussia. In 1892, only two foreign-born Rotterdam residents received naturalisation: Peter Bruckschen, a civil servant born in Prussia and Gustav Schenk, a merchant born in Hamburg. In 1894, four people from Germany and one from Russia were naturalised and none received naturalisation in 1896.⁸⁰ The city’s election registers of the 1890s only list a total of seventy-seven naturalised electors.⁸¹

Similar to Belgium, naturalisation in the Netherlands was a parliamentary decision: it was conferred by law, approved by both parliamentary chambers, and executed by the Ministry of Justice. The municipal authorities received a copy of the law, which was also introduced into the Staatsblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (Official Gazette of the Kingdom of the Netherlands). Once the law was approved, the foreign national had to declare to the municipal authorities that he – between 1839 and 1900 not a single women figured among the naturalised in Rotterdam – accepted his naturalisation. By noting this declaration in the register book, the Rotterdam civil agent completed the naturalisation procedure. Nevertheless, even before this final act, naturalisation was a municipal concern. As in the case of legal equality, the applicant had to provide a certificate demonstrating that he was registered as a resident of the city. But, this formal proof of local residence did not suffice; in addition, the candidate’s neighbours or acquaintances had to confirm by written statement that the applicant had a continuous presence in the neighbourhood and that they were personally familiar with him.⁸² The local residents acted as guarantors by signing a formal declaration stating that ‘op hunne persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid’ (‘on their own responsibility’) they affirmed being ‘zeer goed bekend’ (‘very well acquainted’) with the candidate. Only a few dossiers contain, apart from this declaration of oath, a note from the Rotterdam police commissar confirming these declarations and commenting on the applicant’s good behaviour. In the case of Carl Clemens August Schade’s application for naturalisation in 1893, the commissar noted that the guarantors claimed to know Schade very well, having conducted business with him.⁸³

It is certainly no coincidence that the police were involved with naturalisation applications made by two Eastern Europeans in 1892. In the context of mass migration through Western European port cities where a great number of emigrants were stranded for long periods of time, people from relatively poor regions in Eastern Europe increasingly raised suspicion among authorities fearing these people would become a burden to the municipal poor relief.⁸⁴ In the case of Frantz Julius Benjamin Voelcken, born in Danzig in West Prussia⁸⁵, the police commissar confirmed his marriage, commented on his Rotterdam addresses, and noted his professional position and moral behaviour.⁸⁶ In the case of August Johann Gustav Hernmarck, born in Riga in Russia, the police commissar simply confirmed that his acquaintances had testified to his continuous presence in the city.⁸⁷ As in Antwerp, the local rootedness of a foreign national, as assessed by local authorities, was an important precondition for the success of a naturalisation request.

Dissimilar to Belgium, where categories of good behaviour and morality were a part of the application forms for naturalisation, the Dutch 1850 Nationaliteitswet (nationality law) dropped the formal requirements concerning moral behaviour and sufficient means of subsistence. In practice, however, these criteria were still relevant, as attested by dossier notes from the Rotterdam police.⁸⁸ A new national’s ‘bad behaviour’ or insufficient financial means would have first and foremost affected the local rather than the national community, so the Rotterdam authorities continued to check the applicants’ moral and economic behaviour. But, the control that Rotterdam’s local authorities had over naturalisation procedures did not extend to reinforcing the naturalisation of ‘desirable’ immigrants. Unlike in Antwerp, where authorities supported or even pushed for the naturalisation of foreign nationals who could contribute to the local economy, we do not find evidence of such endeavours in the Rotterdam archives.

Compared to the Belgian procedure, the number of formal requirements to be met locally was low in the Netherlands, as morality and sufficient financial means were stricken from the formal criteria. In comparison to Antwerp, the individual naturalisation dossiers held at the Rotterdam archives are much thinner: the latter contain a certificate of registration, a declaration of oath signed by the local resident, and in some cases a note from the police commissar, most often regarding the applicant’s morality. The Antwerp authorities manipulated different formalities by ignoring, overlooking, or insisting on one requirement over another. With numerous formal requirements to be met at the local level, Antwerp authorities adapted their assessment of these criteria to suit the port city’s interest in integrating a foreign national. If the person was married, possessed sufficient financial means, or if he had fulfilled military service, these formal criteria were assessed, with special consideration for economic merits. The Antwerp authorities did so in a legal context designed to facilitate the integration of foreign-born residents into the legal nation. The opposite was true in the Netherlands, where the nationality law of 1892 made naturalisation even less accessible. Costs related to naturalisation rose and, most importantly, naturalised people were forced to relinquish their original nationality. While some states like Russia generally refused denationalisation requests, others, like Belgium, had special regulations regarding the denationalisation of young men bound to do military service.⁸⁹ In a legal context where foreign nationals were deterred from requesting formal integration into the Dutch legal nation, Rotterdam authorities, unlike their Antwerp counterparts, did not endeavour to foster the naturalisation of the city’s foreign-born residents.

In the late nineteenth century, both Dutch and Belgian nationalisation legislation attempted to define the connection that foreign-born nationals had to their new home countries. However, the application for naturalisation both originated from, and was concluded in, the local context. After examining the local practice of naturalisation procedures in both Antwerp and Rotterdam, we can assume that local belonging played a role in whether an application for naturalisation was successful. In Rotterdam, applicants had to prove their local rootedness by mobilising their neighbours to speak on their behalf. In Antwerp, if candidates were not able to convince the mayor and police commissar to issue the necessary certificates and to speak in their favour, they would have little chance of becoming naturalised, given that parliament generally rejected a large number of applications.

In both port cities, local authorities checked and reported on the applicants’ morality and behaviour. In Antwerp, this control was not primarily a local initiative. The Belgian law required the local authorities to conduct these checks and applications could be rejected by parliament if candidates were considered to be political opponents.⁹⁰ According to the Dutch law of 1850, local authorities were no longer required to investigate and report on the applicants’ morality. The Dutch state further refrained from openly expelling foreign anarchists because such action would have harmed the state’s liberal image.⁹¹ We might deduce that the Rotterdam authorities did not feel comfortable with the nation state’s liberal attitude and, hence, took their own initiative to ensure that those applying for naturalisation in their locality were morally irreproachable and would not disrupt the social order.

On the other hand, the local authorities in Rotterdam intervened less on behalf of their local candidates for naturalisation than their Antwerp counterparts did, as shown by the comparatively thin application files stored in the Rotterdam archives. One reason for this difference might be that the legal context in which the Dutch local authorities were acting provided no incentive for foreign nationals to apply for naturalisation. Compared to the authorities in Antwerp, the Rotterdam authorities seemed to feel less empowered to speak in favour of their local candidates. While acting in their cities’ interests – either by further integrating an economically successful resident or by making sure that the new national would not disrupt the social order – the local authorities were operating within a national legal context. We therefore need to acknowledge that the port cities’ authority was shaped by national legislation with practices reflecting state-determined politics surrounding nationality and citizenship.

National ideology did not drive administrative procedures in the port cities. Yet, due to the importance of social standing and esteem, which, considering the competition between Europe’s leading ports, were generally linked to the candidate’s economic performance, most people who received Belgian or Dutch nationality via naturalisation, were Western Europeans. The members of the migrant communities from neighbouring countries, German communities in particular, were most successful economically, while they were, at the same time, particularly mobile and in many cases not especially attached to their country of residence. The Antwerp authorities endeavoured to accommodate these applicants’ transnational life paths with the legal requirements, which expected the naturalised citizen to be loyal to the Belgian state rather than to any specific city.

In both cities, the local naturalisation practice favoured the naturalisation of Western Europeans by insisting on personal contacts between the applicant and their local acquaintances. This procedure benefitted those who were similar to the local population more than those who were different, thereby curbing the development of a diverse legal community. Moreover, the local naturalisation procedure in Antwerp and Rotterdam did not mirror the gender diversity of the port cities’ migrant population: apart from very few exceptions, applicants for naturalisation were male, a reflection of women’s marginal position within the legal nation. The cities’ actual openness to mobile people, which increased during the age of steam (c. 1870-1940), did not mean that all newcomers were equally welcomed into formal membership in the city or national community. The vast majority of foreigners who lived in the port cities did so without requesting naturalisation.