This article documents and explains the rise of capitalist cattle farming in the sixteenth-century eastern Low Countries. The case of the two parishes of Zeddam and Netterden shows that by 1570, a small group of graziers, specialised in the fattening of Danish-bred oxen, had come to hold a prominent place in the local rural economy. In some localities, their pastures represented more than 40 per cent of the total value of taxed landholdings. When conceptualising capitalist farming based on its internal logic of accumulating capital through exchanging commodities, these graziers can be considered to be capitalist farmers. Because capitalist cattle farming in the eastern Low Countries emerged in a different context than the typical capitalist tenant farmer in the western areas of the Low Countries, the case offers a fresh perspective on the causal factors allowing a capitalist logic to take root in farming. The rise of the capitalist graziers in Zeddam and Netterden was the combined consequence of the expansion of long-distance trade networks, local geographical conditions, and local property relations. The studied case thus shows how the two currently dominant explanatory models focused on 'commercialisation' and 'property relations' can be integrated to explain the rise of capitalist farming.
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, workplace occupation belonged to the standard repertoire of workers' and trade union activism in the Netherlands. Between 1972 and 2000, 177 of them could be identified. In this article I analyse the character, causes, and changes in the use of this repertoire. What kind of occupations can be identified and how did they relate to other, similar actions? In what branches did they occur and what was the relationship with the process of deindustrialisation? How successful were they in the short and longer term? The article focuses on the motives and incentives of the occupiers, including women and migrants, with special attention for the emotions that were involved. It is also meant as a first step towards the integration of the emotional turn in the historiography of the labour movement.
This article challenges the assumption that the late medieval Low Countries were predominantly an immigrant-receiving region by highlighting the significance of emigration from these supposed 'promised lands'. It examines evidence from the migrant confraternity of Saint Barbara in Florence. Database research on its membership register from 1445-1456 reveals details of 457 individuals who migrated from the Low Countries to Tuscany, revising Mario Battistini's earlier figures upward. Migrants from these areas constituted the largest share of the confraternity, questioning its previous characterisation as 'German'. Primarily composed of cloth and linen workers displaced by issues in their native urban textile industries, these migrants had different economic profiles compared to those moving to fifteenth-century England, who were mostly highly-skilled artisans. Cloth weavers found wage-based opportunities in Florence, while linen weavers faced less competition there. The confraternity also included many female migrants, but due to limited information, it is challenging to determine their reasons for migrating.
