“Maritime Labour in the Netherlands, 1570-1870”

Summary

Introduction

Although the study of the history of maritime labour in the Netherlands has made great strides in the past twenty years, a survey of the development of the labour market between 1570 and 1870 still is necessarily incomplete. First of all, research on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been more extensive than inquiries on the period before 1600 or the era after 1800; labour in the Dutch navy and mercantile marine after 1825 has up to now hardly been studied at all. Second, most pre-1800 studies have concentrated on the navy, the East India Company (VOC) and whaling rather than on the fisheries or the merchant marine. Third, inquiries on maritime labour until recently were more concerned with themes like geographical origins, mortality rates or wage levels than with analyses on a micro-level of the mechanisms that made the maritime labour market operate as it did. Career patterns, labour cycles, earnings, marriage rates, age distribution or reproductive behaviour of seamen - to mention but a few salient topics - are as yet still insufficiently known. Fourth, the movement of foreign maritime labour to the Netherlands has received more attention than the flow of Dutch maritime labour abroad. These biases are to some extent reflected in the following survey.

The survey starts with an overview of aggregate data on maritime labour in the Netherlands. This section summarizes the evidence available on such general aspects as levels of employment; the size, structure and productivity of shipping; the geographic origins of crews; and the movement of Dutch labour abroad. Having sketched the parameters of the maritime labour market at large, I will then take a closer look at the operation of the labour market itself. Starting from the model of the “segmented labour market,” which at present holds sway in the study of labour in the early modern Netherlands, I will attempt both to integrate the findings so far and to pinpoint the principal issues that require further research. This survey naturally leads to the con- elusion, I will argue in the final section of this essay, that the study of maritime labour in the Netherlands is now especially in need of more micro-level research.