In the 19th century, the Netherlands was one of the unhealthiest and most backward countries in Europe, as Auke van der Woud repeatedly shows in The cities, the people. Netherlands 1850-1900. Infant mortality was high. In the years 1874-1884, 78 out of 1,000 children were stillborn, 307 did not survive their first year of life and another 137 died before their fifth birthday. The average lifespan of Dutch men was then far below the Western and Central European average. In Limburg, men had a respectable life expectancy of 40 years, but in North and South Holland they lived on average only 27 and 25 years respectively. Van der Woud explains this major difference with the varying living conditions in the different regions. In the cities of the western Netherlands, many more people lived tightly packed in moldy hovels on stinking canals from which they got their drinking water than in the south and north of the country.
The ‘social question’, as the pitiful conditions were called under which approximately half of the four and a half million Dutch people had to spend their poor, dirty, brutal and short lives in the 19th century, is the common thread in The cities, the people. The big question in the book is: why did successive governments dominated by liberal politicians do nothing about the social issue until parliament passed the famous Housing Act in 1901? Van der Woud does not consider the usual answer that the liberal national administrators, led by Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, were supporters of the liberal-economic principle ‘laissez faire, aissez aller’, to be sufficient: ‘Laissez faire is a cliché, a stopgap that hinders thinking about the 19th century government to stop’.
Van der Woud himself also used the darning cloth Kingdom full of slums, his 2010 book about the 19th-century hellish ‘underworld’ of alleys and corridors with shacks in Dutch cities that wealthy citizens did not dare to enter. As the most important explanation for the Dutch underworld, he gave the thorough aversion of liberal Dutch politicians to government intervention. However, he added that there was no support for government intervention in the underworld, because poverty was generally regarded as part of the natural or divine order.
After, among other things A new world (2006) and The new man (2015). The cities, the people the fifth book by Van der Woud about the Netherlands in the 19th century. It has the same structure as the previous parts: in about fifty short chapters, which are preceded by a black-and-white photo of people, cities, landscapes, etc., an aspect of the modernization of the Netherlands in the 19th century is discussed. Van der Woud also uses his own method that he has developed over the years. He does not do research in archives. He describes the rapid modernization that the Netherlands underwent in the second half of the 19th century using articles from contemporary newspapers, magazines, novels, government reports, lectures, etc. – and quotes from them extensively.
Almost bankrupt
Van der Woud considers the Constitution of 1848, drawn up by the liberal statesman Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, as the starting signal for the modernization of Dutch cities. In the first half of the 19th century, the Netherlands was burdened by autocratic regimes, first by the French occupiers and, after 1813, by King William I. He ruled with a barrage of Royal Decrees, usually aimed at filling the treasury. The country was paralyzed by it. Businesses, cities and villages groaned under the finicky royal regulations. In 1844, four years after the abdication of King William I, the Netherlands almost went bankrupt.
Thorbecke’s Constitution woke the Netherlands from a ‘death sleep’, as Van der Woud makes clear in the first sixty pages of The cities, the people. In the revolutionary year 1848, the Netherlands became a parliamentary democracy with civil liberties, in which entrepreneurs could operate freely and the 1,200 Dutch municipalities regained the autonomy they had had in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.
He then shows in detail that the liberation from royal rule led to a stormy development of the once dormant Netherlands. The rule of law was established with the Municipal Act of 1851 and many other laws that arose from the Constitution. Cities and villages were overhauled. City walls were demolished and new residential areas built. (Railway) roads were built, streets paved, canals and harbors dug. The cities had water factories that produced good drinking water and gas factories that made good lighting of streets and interiors possible. In the last quarter of the 19th century, a real energy transition took place that led to the ‘electric light revolution’ and electric trams that replaced horse trams in the cities.
Cobblestones and clinkers
Sometimes Van der Woud gets lost in overly detailed descriptions and lists. For example, in the chapter ‘Cobblestones and clinkers in the city’ he explains in detail the origins, properties and advantages and disadvantages of the different types of stone with which the streets in the cities were paved. “Queenast boulders are extremely hard and can withstand the heaviest vehicles, but become slippery with wear,” he writes. ‘Some species from the quarries near Namur are a bit fragile, but they are good for making sidewalks.’ On the other hand, strangely enough, he does not devote a word to the rise of the textile industry in, for example, Twente, where villages such as Almelo quickly turned into factory towns. He also leaves undiscussed the first housing associations that wanted to build good homes for workers, as well as Van Houten’s Children’s Act from 1874, which was a violation of the policy of laissez faire.
But this doesn’t mean that The cities, the people is a haphazard description of the enormous progress in the Netherlands in the second half of the 19th century. Based on what he does discuss, Van der Woud wants to show that in the liberal Netherlands of the second half of the 19th century there was never an unlimited laissez faire. The 19th century liberals did not desire a small government, according to Van der Woud. When the public interest demanded it, the central government intervened. For example, the Railway Act of 1860 already stipulated that the railway lines were constructed at state expense, because, it was known, the market would never provide an adequate railway network. Later, the drinking water and gas factories started as private companies, but they were changed into municipal utilities after a few years, with an appeal to the public interest.
Only in the social issue, the biggest problem of the 19th century, did the government not intervene for a long time. Van der Woud cites the main cause for this as the ‘decades-long impasse’ that was the result of the suffocating rule of ruler William I. ‘The Netherlands carried with it the legacy of half a century of authoritarian centralism and a bureaucracy that left its citizens defenseless’. he writes. ‘The impasse arose because the government did not make a law that affected municipal autonomy, while the municipalities did not do much because they had no legal framework to tackle the reorganization of the cities drastically and on a large scale.’ Only when a strong government at the end of the 19th century found a solution to the social issue of general interest and introduced the Housing Act in 1901, was the impasse broken.
The Housing Act, which, among other things, obliged municipalities to build good homes with government support, led to impressive results in the 20th century, not only in housing construction but also in spatial planning, Van der Woud concludes in the penultimate chapter ‘ A strong government’. Only when the neoliberal era began almost a century later and ‘the public interest disappeared from political discourse and was privatized’ did the law become less effective.
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Tags: nineteenth century Dutch city hellish underworld corridors alleys slums
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