Five Centuries of Farming: A Short History of Dutch Agriculture, 1500-2000

The basis of the text before you was my book Boeren in Nederland; geschiedenis van de landbouw 1500-2000 which was published in the spring of 2008: a history of farmers and farming in the Netherlands during the past five centuries. This book in turn was an extended and elaborated edition of my Geschiedenis van de landbouw in Nederland 1500-1950; veranderingen en verscheidenheid that appeared in 1992. The latter was intended mainly to be a textbook for Dutch students at the former Agricultural University of Wageningen (now Wageningen University), taking the course ‘Agrarian History’ for which I was responsible from the mid-1980’s onwards. The book was made possible thanks to the pioneering and modern agro-historical studies that have been published since the 1960’s.
This new English text is in fact a shortened version of ‘Boeren in Nederland’ and by no means a straightforward translation. I have tried to adapt the original text to one which is – I hope – a more suitable one for foreign scholars and students visiting Wageningen University in particular, who may not be familiar with the more specific (geographical) features of this country. For this reason I have reworked the original text leaving out details that might confuse the overall view but without losing the aim of giving an impression of the rich variety in Dutch farming life in the past. What may be called a characteristic of this book as well as its two Dutch predecessors is the rather strong agronomic approach I have chosen. It is indeed very much what some British agro-historians have called a ‘cows and ploughs history’.