University of Groningen General Dutch Population development 1400-1850 Paping, Richard IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Publication date: 2014 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Paping, R. (2014). General Dutch Population development 1400-1850: cities and countryside. Paper presented at 1st ESHD conference, Alghero, Italy. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). The publication may also be distributed here under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license. 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Download date: 29-09-2021 General Dutch population development 1400-1850: cities and countryside Richard Paping University of Groningen Version September 2014 Paper to be presented at the First Conference of the European Society of Historical Demography (ESHD), Sassari/Alghero, Sardinia, Italy September 25-27, 2014 Abstract In this paper new estimates of the development of the population of the (northern) Netherlands in the period 1400-1850 are presented using many more or less recent estimates concerning regions and cities from numerous other authors. To add up these figures they have been interpolated to obtain annual estimates. This procedure resulted in estimates for the population of every town and for the rural parts of most of the provinces. Missing data have been extrapolated using trends of comparable regions. A distinction has been made between cities (with legal town rights) and countryside, and between coastal and inland provinces. Already around 1400 the Netherlands were heavily urbanized, with about a third of the population living in towns. Differences in urbanisation between coast and inland were limited. However, the coastal region (Holland) experienced a phase of rapid urbanisation between 1500 and 1650 related to the Dutch Golden Age, resulting in urbanisation-rates of over 55%, while the inland urbanisation-rate was slowly decreasing. In the countryside, the coastal population increased also quite rapidly between 1500 and 1650, whereas the inland regions showed only a gradual increase. In general, the centre of gravity shifted in this period from the inland to the coastal region. After 1700 an extraordinary long phase of de-urbanisation started in the coastal region, while the slow inland de-urbanisation continued. The Dutch urbanisation-rate fell from 46% in 1700 to 37% in 1850. In most of the eighteenth century the Dutch population stagnated. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, however, population started to increase again. This increase, mainly originated from the countryside as in the inland regions the rural population began to grow rapidly. The relative shift in population after 1650 from town to countryside and from coastal to inland accompanied a shift in the economy from industry and services to agriculture in the early nineteenth century. Introduction In recent Dutch historical literature the estimates of the early-modern Dutch population for every 50 to 100 year from Faber and the Wageningen research group of Slicher van Bath (Faber e.a. 1965) are still being used widely (among others: De Vries and van der Woude 1995, p. 71; Bieleman 2010, p. 38). There have been some attempts to come to new estimates using alternative methods (especially Nusteling 1989 who, however, also uses the 1 Wageningen figures as a starting point). However, these results are not completely convincing, so they did not become generally accepted. The Wageningen population figures were actually tentative estimates based on a limited number of provincial and regional population figures constructed by this research group, who was specialized in in-depth regional social-demographic studies of the countryside. The Wageningen figures offer some indications of the population size, but the authors admitted that they were quite uncertain, what is also shown by the large interval which is given for every estimate. There are several good reasons to look again at these old Dutch population estimates. First, in the last half a century a large number of new population estimates of larger and smaller parts of the Netherlands have been published, which can be included in the estimates of the total Dutch population. Second, because of the enormous increase in digital possibilities and the accompanying rise in calculation power it has become much more simple to make annual estimates using the basic data material, which are at the same time also more precise. Third, the computer makes it also possible to refine the Wageningen method of adding up regional and provincial developments, through the making of a distinction between towns and countryside, and between the Dutch coastal area and the more inlands parts of the Netherlands. The economic structure and the economic development of these two parts were quite distinct in the early-modern period, what makes it probable that the population development also differed significantly. This contribution wants to offer a first attempt to come to new estimates of the Dutch population between 1400 and 1850.1 I am aware that the quality of these estimates can still be increased significantly. First, the division in comparable regions can be refined further, as at the moment only provincial frontiers have been used to separate regions. Second, local listings of the number of baptisms, funerals and marriages could be used to refine the developments from year to year (compare: Nusteling 1989; Nusteling and Van der Weegen 1984), although Wrigley and Schofield’s (1981) backward projection method (see also Oeppen 1993) using also this kind of data seem to offer only limited prospects for the whole of the Netherlands, due to the high religious diversity and the absence or low quality of local parish registration in the seventeenth century and before. Third, the number of local and regional estimates of the population-size can be increased through large scale research in sources. Fourth, the estimates of population-size in literature have been used as a starting- point of our estimate, although there are large differences in estimation techniques used, for instance on the assumptions on the average size of each household. Next, the used method will be explained. In the following section we will present the newly estimated population numbers, afterwards we will briefly discuss what they mean for the Dutch development in the very long run, concentrating on the differences between the development of the rural and the urban population, and on the difference between the early modernizing and capitalistic coastal region (including Holland with Amsterdam) and the more moderately developing inland area. In the Appendices, the used data material and the choices made are presented and discussed in more detail, and the estimated figures will be presented. Method As a starting point a large bunch of more or less recent estimates of the population development in several Dutch regions and cities from the fourteenth century onwards from 1 In DeVos, Lambrecht and Paping (2012, p, 159-160) some provisional results have been published. 2 numerous other authors have been collected (see Appendices A and B).2 Unfortunately, these estimates usually relate to very diverging years. It is only the census of the years 1795-1796 (published: Ramaer 1931) that offer the first quite reliable estimates for the population-size of the whole of the Netherlands. This census has been used as an anchor point for the geographically and in quality strongly diverging late medieval and early-modern regional estimates. From 1795 (mainly Oomens 19893) onwards abundant information on Dutch population figures is available. Population censuses have been held on a more or less regular base, for instance in 1809 (De Kok 1964), 1814, 1829, 1839 and 1849 (Oomens 1989). The accurateness of the resulting figures can be criticized (see for example Nusteling 1985, p. 249-250). However, it is beyond doubt that they in general give a very good impression of the development of the Dutch population-size in the first half of the nineteenth century (for overviews of the period after 1795 see for instance Hofstee 1978; Hofstee 1981; Engelen 2009). An important merit of these population figures is that they are available for every municipality, and sometimes even for every village. There are two different reasons to stop this analysis in 1850. Looking at the sources, there is an enormous amount of very reliable and very detailed population figures from nearly every geographical level available, from 1850 onwards (for instance: NIDI 2003), which makes it possible to answer a broad range of detailed demographic questions (Kok 2014). So, offering new estimates is not of much use, although it has to be admitted that with this argument an end year of 1815 could also be defended. However stopping in the year 1850 is also attractive, because by that time the rather peculiar Dutch de-urbanisation process - starting more than a century before - came to an end. Recently, this de-urbanisation process has been put forward as one of the main characteristics of the Netherlands in the period 1750- 1850 (Brusse and Mijnhardt 2011).