What was the so-called ‘Golden Age’ really like for the ‘ordinary’ Dutch person? And what can we learn today from the economic inequality of that period? Historian Bram Hilkens investigated this in his thesis “Living off the land? Land inequality in early modern central Holland, 1543–1708”, which he defended on 26 May. Using land registers, he reconstructed how land ownership in rural areas changed between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discovered that inequality increased, both during and after a period of economic prosperity. In this edition of ESHCC PhD Stories, we spoke to Hilkens about his remarkable journey into the economic past and his views on inequality and the ‘Golden Age’.
What exactly is your research about?
"I am researching the long history of economic inequality, and in particular the relationship between economic growth and the distribution of income and wealth. To gain a better understanding of this, I looked at land ownership in rural Holland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where most people lived at that time. This was the period during which Holland experienced a phase of uninterrupted economic growth, roughly between 1580 and 1650, which we often – somewhat controversially – refer to as the ‘Golden Age’. By examining how the distribution of land changed during the economic boom and then when the economy subsequently stagnated, we can see whether and how inequality increased."
What was your central research question, and why that one in particular?
"The driving question behind the research was: did Holland’s ‘Golden Age’ lead to greater economic inequality? In recent decades, the ‘Golden Age’ has lost some of its glory – and rightly so – because although Holland was thriving economically, it was a period of serious colonial exploitation and violence. However, we do not have a clear picture of how that period of growth played out for the ‘ordinary’ people in the Netherlands itself. We know that income distribution in the 18th century was more unequal than in the 16th century, but how did economic inequality develop during the ‘Golden Age’? By studying inequality in land ownership, we can better understand how that growth affected people in rural areas, and thus a large proportion of the population.
My research therefore serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it teaches us more about the relationship between economic growth and how the fruits of that growth were distributed in the past. On the other hand, it provides insight into social and economic disparities in Holland during one of the most remarkable and controversial periods in Dutch history."
How did you go about your research?
"I made use of what are known as ‘morgenboeken’ (morning books): land registers kept by the Rijnland Water Board for tax purposes, named after the ‘Rijnlandse morgen’, a unit of area (approx. 0.85 hectares). In a wet region like Holland, land had to be protected against water. Everyone contributed to this in proportion to their landholdings. We call that principle ‘morgen morgensgelijk’ – rather lovely, isn’t it?
These ‘morgenboeken’ were compiled by the water board between around 1540 and 1848, and ideally there was a summary for every leap year listing all landowners, tenants and the extent of their landholdings. All the surviving registers have now been digitised. As it would have been too much work to study all sixty villages in Rijnland, I selected three villages in the Leiden area and examined the period 1543–1708.
Using this data, I was able to calculate Gini coefficients. This is a measure between 0 and 1 that indicates how unequally land ownership is distributed, where 0.0 means that everyone owns exactly the same amount of land and 1.0 means that one person owns all the land. This allowed me to track over time whether and when disparities in land ownership increased."
And what did you discover?
"The main finding of my thesis is that inequality in land ownership increased both during and after the ‘Golden Age’, but in two very different ways.
During the period of economic growth, inequality did not rise because wealthy landowners were accumulating more and more land. On the contrary: their share of total land ownership actually decreased. Inequality increased mainly because many new, small landowners emerged at the lower end of the distribution. This was linked to strong population growth, mainly due to migration, including in rural areas. Many newly formed households managed to acquire a small plot of land. On average, this widened the gap, but not in the way one might expect.
After the end of the ‘Golden Age’, when the economy stagnated, we see a different pattern. At that time, inequality rose mainly because wealthy landowners did, in fact, become richer. An agricultural price crisis in the 1650s and 1660s caused land values to fall, and smallholders lost their land more quickly. As a result, the proportion of land held by a wealthy aristocracy (consisting mainly of a new nobility with purchased titles) increased sharply, as did that held by ecclesiastical institutions.
In short: both the period of growth and the period of decline exacerbated inequality and thus also had significant social dimensions, which are easily overlooked when we look solely at Gini coefficients."
Why are your findings relevant to the current debate on inequality, economic growth and our view of history?
"My research highlights two key points. Firstly, that economic growth can increase inequality, but economic contraction can do so just as easily, and sometimes even more severely. That does not, however, mean that we should not set limits on wealth accumulation. The disproportionate influence that the wealthy exert on political decision-making and material conditions is a serious problem worldwide, but we cannot expect these problems to be solved simply because the economy stops growing. So, for example, when we propose halting economic growth in order to reduce emissions, we must not assume that this will automatically solve the problem of inequality. Wealthy groups are often better able to protect themselves against economic downturns. So, although economic growth can in itself bring problems, there are strong positive knock-on effects which, I believe, we would prefer not to do without.
Secondly, the research sheds light on how we view the ‘Golden Age’. As I said earlier, we no longer view the ‘Golden Age’ in such a positive light. The most common argument against using the term ‘Golden Age’ to describe this period of economic prosperity is that not everyone benefited from it, and some were even actively harmed in order to ensure that prosperity. It is, of course, true that the Dutch caused a great deal of harm during this period, particularly in the form of colonial exploitation and even genocide, such as on the Banda Islands in 1621. That is reason enough to be sceptical about the positive associations we have with the ‘Golden Age’.
At the same time, the source material seems to suggest that, in Holland itself, economic growth was not just a story of the very wealthiest. As a result, I am sometimes called an optimist – as one committee member put it so aptly, ‘seeking to save the gold of the “Golden Age”’ – but that is not how I see it myself. I believe that by gaining a better and more accurate understanding of where major societal changes have social consequences, we can better identify where we should intervene and where we should not. By researching economic inequality during this period, we can therefore better understand which aspects of this era we disapprove of and on what grounds."
Has your research changed your view on inequality?
"I think that whereas I previously saw inequality as a problem in its own right, I have now started to think more carefully about the ways in which inequality is problematic. And as far as I’m concerned, this lies primarily in the outcomes that inequality produces, rather than in differences in income or wealth per se. Those differences can mean that a small group has a disproportionate influence on what changes and how quickly it changes, in both a political and a material sense. I think that, as researchers, we still have a long way to go before we fully understand inequality as a problem. Before the project, however, I had thought that I would naturally come to regard inequality in itself as much more important, but I have actually come to see the problem as more complex. That is frustrating when it comes to policy recommendations, but it is also exciting as a researcher: it means there is still a great deal to discover."
What challenges did you encounter along the way?
"I began this PhD programme as a cultural historian specialising in the recent past. My Master’s thesis was on representations of the rapper Kendrick Lamar. The shift to the socio-economic history of the early modern period was a big one. I had a lot to learn – historically, theoretically and methodologically – and that didn’t always come naturally. I spent a few months on an exchange in Lund, Sweden, where they have a large department of economic history, and that’s where things started to click for the first time. This was followed by an intensive learning curve, made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant I was largely left to my own devices.
During my research, I had to learn how to collect data and read old handwriting. I picked that up fairly quickly, but transcribing the sources took a lot of time. I even tried for a while to automate that process using technology. However, the land registers varied so much over time – in terms of handwriting and structure – that using technology wasn’t much more efficient. So in the end, I did everything by hand, with some help from my supervisor and research assistants. We still managed to collect more than 40,000 observations covering a period of 165 years. I’m not dissatisfied with that."
What inspired you during your PhD research?
"I drew inspiration from works that deal with time. That certainly influenced how I came to view time and change; that’s definitely what we do as historians. Haha, it might sound a bit pretentious, but it’s true. In my second year, I read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Often, when you’re reading, you don’t know exactly what’s reality and what’s fantasy, and the book shows that time, although it’s linear, isn’t always experienced or understood as such. A lot of science fiction is good at that too, such as Dune. Sand is, of course, an excellent metaphor for time. Or the Foundation trilogy, which is literally about historians as social scientists who can predict the future using infinite amounts of data. Whilst writing my thesis, I listened a lot to the piece Zauberberg by ambient producer GAS (Wolfgang Voigt), inspired by the book The Magic Mountain, at a time when my sense of time wasn’t always quite so linear either."
What’s next?
"I’ll be continuing to teach at Utrecht University for the next few months. Beyond that, I’d like to carry on with my research. I’ve got plenty of ideas and am already working on some new research. I hope that, in time, I’ll have the opportunity to expand that."
If you could share a message with the world about your research, what would you say?
"Economic inequality is a timeless problem, and we need to think carefully about the circumstances under which, and the areas in which, that inequality manifests itself. In doing so, we mustn’t fixate on whether a single specific figure is rising or falling; rather, we must pay close attention to contextualising those figures, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Only then can we truly understand how social relations have evolved over time."
- Researcher
