Abstract
The main focus of our research is on the modernisation process and the social changes that took place in the Dutch countryside during the nineteenth century under the influence of processes of state-formation and nation building and processes of commercialisation and professionalisation. During the nineteenth century the Dutch farmers strengthened their hold on the countryside while the large landowners and elite started to lose their positions. How was this process of democratisation possible and what were its implications? What caused the farmers associations (boerenbonden) to compete with the older agricultural societies (maatschappijen van landbouw) at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century? Within those agricultural societies, why did the power of the smaller farmers increase rapidly? The countryside became more and more identified by agriculture and the interests of the farmers ? a situation that would be taken for granted during much of the twentieth century and became seen as the natural state of affairs instead of a historical one. There are no simple and general answers to these questions valid for the whole of the Netherlands. In some parts of the Netherlands, such as Groningen, the growth of the power of the farmers had already taken place before the main period of the present study. The answers will also be complex because they need a political, economic, social, cultural and regional dimension. Our hypothesis of what happened is as follows. From 1815, within the new context of the monarchy and the national state, the gentlemen in the countryside (we use this ?label? for the gentry and the large, sometimes urban, landowners) tried to represent the rural interests and at the same time to modernise the rural economy. The constitution of 1848 and the municipal corporations act of 1851 changed the position of the gentlemen and the urban and rural elite in the government of the provinces and the countryside. At the same time they changed the significance of the local government vis à vis the national government. So from the 1850s the political circumstances changed in favour of the farmers thanks to changes in the general political order. From the 1850s the economic circumstances also became favourable for the farmers. Agriculture flourished and both the farmers and the smallholders, who grew in number, profited from it. The agricultural crisis of the seventies and eighties strengthened the need for organisation of the agricultural sector. At first, again it was the gentlemen who tried to provide the answers to the crisis and to organise the new developments, but at the local level all kind of changes took place. The most important one was the growth of the co-operative movement that gave the farmers and smallholders the opportunity to organise themselves. A complicated social struggle took place where several developments became intertwined with each other. These include the contention of the churches against the liberal character of the national state, the contention between urban and rural interests, the contention of the outer provinces against the real or perceived domination of the national state by the sea provinces and the desire for a regional identity within the nation-state. As a result of this, the organisation of the countryside in the 1920s was very different from the one around the middle of the nineteenth century. The countryside had been democratised. The farmers had become the local power holders. They occupied the seats in the boards of the co-operative movement, they were aldermen and councilmen, and they were active within the district water board. The link with the national state was no longer the mere domain of the gentlemen with their personal connections who for a long time had tried to play the old game by the new rules, but also and more and more of the (denominational) farmers associations.