How was industry faring in Flanders in the first half of the 18th century? Wouter Ryckbosch and Anne Winter (VUB) investigated industrial production and labor in nineteen Flemish towns in 1738. Using the industrial survey from that year, the results of which are available in STREAM, they examined the extent and nature of urban industries, the role of craft guilds, and local labor relations.

Their analysis confirms the dominance of textile production and guild crafts in the examined towns. The research also reveals the presence of industries focused on consumption, such as the manufacturing of glass, tobacco, and soap. While these industries were numerically marginal at the time, they would experience significant growth in the second half of the century. The study also indicates that these sectors were less organized on a craft guild basis and had a higher degree of proletarianization.

Article:

Ryckbosch, Wouter and Winter, Anne. “Between corporatism and capitalism? Urban industry and labor in eighteenth-century Flanders”, TSEG – The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 20 (2023): 37-80.

Isabelle Devos from the Quetelet Center is the co-supervisor of the COST Action ‘The great leap. Multidisciplinary approaches to health inequalities, 1800-2022 (GREATLEAP)’.

A COST Action is an interdisciplinary research network that brings researchers and innovators together to investigate a topic of their choice for 4 years. COST Actions are typically comprised of researchers from academia, SMEs, public institutions, and other relevant organizations or interested parties.

Embracing the COST Mission, the Great Leap takes a unique, multidisciplinary approach from a historical perspective to understand better the roots and drivers of health inequalities across regions and countries in Europe and beyond. To achieve this mission, the Great Leap creates an international, multidisciplinary network that will bundle expertise, techniques, insights, and data to create

(1) the first international comparable dataset of individual-level historical cause of death data,

(2) innovative analytical tools to analyze it, and

(3) insights into how this information can be used in current public health policy and practice.

The network includes a wide range of academic expertise in history, social sciences, life sciences, and epidemiology and involves university-, research-, government- and (international) health institutes and organizations, including statistical offices and national archives. 

By fostering the strengths of this unique, multidisciplinary, and diverse network, the Great Leap aims to generate ground-breaking insights into the historical roots and drivers of health inequalities across regions and countries in Europe and beyond.

Interested parties can apply here to participate in one or more of the five working groups of the Cost-Action. 

Isabelle Devos, Sarah Heynssens and Sven Vrielinck were awarded an Annual Prize for Science Communication by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (Koninklijke Academie van België) and the Young Academy (Jonge Academie) for the project S.O.S. Antwerp. 

In the citizen science project on demography and death in Antwerp, citizens not only participated in data collection and analysis, they were also encouraged to engage in historical research themselves. The jury awarded S.O.S. Antwerp the distinction because, thanks to training, assignments and exchanges with team members, citizens gained real insight into the process of science . 

You can learn more about the database that resulted from this project here:

POPPKAD, the database of the Belgian land registry from the nineteenth century, is gaining popularity among a wide audience. Researchers, local historians, genealogists, and other enthusiasts are increasingly exploring the database, which contains the names of 540,000 property owners from the mid-19th century in over 1,000 Belgian municipalities. According to the latest statistics, 10,000 users have extensively utilized the website. The top 5 most searched terms include (not surprisingly) the names Janssens, Peeters, Willems, Maes, and De Smet. On the project website, you can not only discover the most common surnames but also access scans of the original land registry records. These records provide detailed information about property owners, buildings, and lands from the nineteenth century. Preliminary figures indicate that over 25,000 records have been downloaded from the site after consulting the database. 

Explore the rich past via POPPKAD!

Farms were under tremendous pressure during wars. In addition to the destruction and the diseases spread by the roaming bands of armies, the governments or occupiers also increased the tax burden. This burden was so high that some farms went bankrupt. 

In Coastal Flanders, the wars went hand in hand with farm expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries, with large (tenant) farmers gobbling up the downtrodden small- and medium-sized farms. This indicates that large (tenant) farmers were better able to withstand the heavy pressure of rising taxes. 

Combining accounting data from farms and tax collector accounts, Sander Berghmans (UGent, Dep. History) shows that taxes played a crucial role in the enlargement of farms in Coastal Flanders. First, his research showed that taxes were a very important expense for farms, especially during wars. Second, he was able to proof that large farms were able to secure payment deferrals. 

Although granting payment deferrals was not allowed by local governments, it was found that local tax collectors did so for large farms. Large farms possessed the social and economic power to obtain payment deferrals from the tax collector. Smaller and medium-sized farms did not have this power and were therefore declared bankrupt very rapidly in the event of arrears. Their abandoned farms could then be leased for little money by the large farms. Territorial data from the STREAM-database were used for the spatial representation of data in this study.