Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800MaartenPrak and Jan LuitenvanZanden, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. pp. 280. ISBN 9780691229874. Hbk £30)
本书综合了荷兰中世纪至近代的经济史研究，运用新制度经济学和资本主义新史学的视角，分析了荷兰从1000年到1800年资本主义市场经济的兴起及其对国内和殖民地社会的影响。
Economic and social historians interested in medieval and early modern economic history in general and the region of what would become the Netherlands should get a hold of this new synthesis. More succinct than its direct predecessor – Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude's The first modern economy: success, failure, and perseverance of the Dutch economy, 1500−1815 (Cambridge, 1997) – Pioneers of capitalism contributes at least three new perspectives to Dutch economic history. First, Prak and van Zanden argue that the longue durée matters in the case of the Low Countries. The Golden Age in the seventeenth century can only be understood by going back to the year 1000, when the Low Countries were at the margins of the European economy at the time. Important societal and economic changes from the High Middle Ages onward laid the base for later prosperity. Second, Pioneers of capitalism is deeply informed by New Institutional Economics. Applying the idea of inclusive versus extractive institutions of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson to the Low Countries, Prak and van Zanden tackle the problem of the connections between capitalism and colonialism. In the northern Low Countries, there was a strong civil society based on consensus decision-making (the famous Dutch poldermodel). This system of political checks and balances, and institutions that sought to prevent wild speculation and excessive profit-seeking that would hurt the general economy and Dutch society, led to a mix of inclusive institutions which underpinned economic development that benefited large groups of inhabitants of this region. Within its colonial empire from the 1600s onwards, the Dutch continued existing or implemented new extractive institutions such as polygamy and slavery, thus strengthening social and economic inequalities and racial hierarchies. Third, Pioneers of capitalism engages with the flourishing historiographical strand of the New History of Capitalism. Prak and van Zanden argue that, in the premodern Dutch economy, (varieties of) capitalism went hand in glove with an open civil society. Pioneers of capitalism seeks to answer the questions about the ‛how and the why of the emergence of a capitalist market economy’ [in a market economy important economic decisions are based on prices, and such a market economy becomes capitalist when there is unequal access to the means of production, with a large part of the working population being dependent on wages earned in the market (pp. 2–3)] and about the effects of this emergence on Dutch society and its economy. Chapter 2 brings together several sets of data in a quantitative overview of economic growth (population and GDP series but also relatively surprising series on manuscript and book production and on church construction) and well-being (real income, literacy, body height and life expectancy, and female participation in labour and capital markets) from 1000 to 1800. In chapter 3, Prak and van Zanden investigate the regional differences in economic development in the feudal and less feudal, more free parts, of the medieval Low Countries between 1000 and 1350. Particular attention is paid to land reclamation and its consequences for the political economy and social organization of the region. Increasing urbanization, so typical of the Low Countries, led to alternating relations of competition and collaboration between the towns, nobles, and the Church. In chapter 4, dealing with the period 1350 and 1566, the Dutch Sonderweg is explained in terms of two external shocks: the Black Death of 1348 and the environmental crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In a period of population decline, the urbanization rate of Holland went up, and its GDP per capita increased. The authors attribute this to the growing importance of the market economy. The second shock, the subsidence of reclaimed peat bogs, dramatically decreased the available land for arable production. Farmers turned to livestock-keeping. This move made them turn to the market economy. It remains unclear, however, what this apparently smooth restructuring – the move into other types of agriculture and into the industrial and services sectors of the labour market – actually meant in terms of the welfare of these late medieval farmers. In the fifteenth century, the Dutch economy became largely market oriented. Chapter 5 deals with the Dutch Revolt (1566–1609) and its consequences for the political organization of the Dutch Republic. The federal state that arose could only function through coordination between the towns. War, in both the Low Countries and the neighbouring countries, together with the economic opportunities offered by the Dutch labour markets, set in motion large fluxes of immigration and human capital to the Dutch Republic. Chapter 6 turns to the commercial, financial, and colonial empires which the Dutch Republic created in the seventeenth century and the institutions that underpinned it: the Wisselbank, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), outposts such as Batavia, and the use of forced labour and enslaved persons. The institutional buffers that softened the hard edges of capitalism in the Dutch Republic (inclusive institutions) were absent in the Republic's overseas expansion into Indonesia, South Africa, and Surinam (extractive institutions). In chapter 7 the inclusive home institutions are considered. The Dutch Republic's strong economic performance could happen in a climate of strong civic organizations such as the guilds. The continued prevalence of the republican constitutionalism embedded in a strong civil society that was rooted in the later Middle Ages, and the sixteenth century set the Dutch Republic apart from the absolutism that was on the rise elsewhere in Europe. The eighteenth century is usually viewed as a period of stagnation of the Dutch economy. Pioneers of capitalism re-evaluates this view (chapter 8). Inequality did increase, but the middle class was largely left intact, and sectors such as finance and agriculture lost some of their strength but retained their strong orientation on the market. Prak and van Zanden have succeeded in synthesizing the very productive historiography on the Low Countries (the northern and the southern). Pioneers of capitalism on many pages is the reflection of their own empirical research throughout the years. The book, and especially its interpretative framework based on New Institutional Economics and the history of capitalism and its analytical distinction between the economy in the Low Countries itself and that of the global territories it controlled, will surely generate deep discussions among social and economic historians, whether they work on the Dutch Republic or seek to compare it with another economic region.