Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/595

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 587 Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van de Leidsche Textielnijverheid. Verzameld door MR. N. W. POSTHUMUS. Vierde Deel, 1611-50. Vijfde Deel, 1651-1702. Zesde Deel, 1703-35. ('s Gravenhage : Nijhoff 1914, 1918, 1922.) THESE three volumes of the ' Kijks Geschiedkundige Publication ', together with the three already noticed in this Review. 1 constitute the fullest and best-edited body of material for the study not only of the textile in- dustries, but of the civic economy and of gild organization and of their expansion and modification from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The documents from local and national sources, usually given in full and accompanied by a brief precis, are arranged in sections, the first dealing with the textile industries in general, and the others with each of the nine or ten chief branches, bays, says, linen, fustians, &c. ; and finally the precis of all the sections are arranged in chronological order so as to provide the student with a general view of the development of the industries as a whole. Of the two centuries here represented the first down to 1670 was one of industrial revival and expansion, the second one of rapid decline. The decay, at the time of the industrial revolution, of an industry essentially based on the ' town economy ' is not surprising ; it is the ' Indian summer ' of the seventeenth century that needs accounting for. One of the issues involved in the war of independence had been the conflict between the privileges of the cities and the territorial or imperial economy of the Habsburg rulers, and one of the results of the establishment of the republic was that, in the north, Dutch conservatism mitigated by Dutch realism and common sense entrenched itself in the ' town economy ' for another two centuries, whilst in the Spanish Netherlands the decay of the older urban industries was counterbalanced, in spite of inferior political con- ditions and the closing of the Scheldt, by a great expansion of country industries whose competition the textiles of Leyden were ultimately unable to sustain. How did they contrive to sustain it so long ? Was it by virtue of gild organization, or was it secured by countervailing advantages in spite of gild restrictions ? These six volumes with their three thousand pages of documents preclude a hasty answer, but make possible a considered one. Some countervailing advantages, at any rate, are obvious. As an asylum of toleration, freedom, and relative peace, Holland attracted the skill, capital, and enterprise of Walloon, Huguenot, English, and German refugees, and during the religious wars of Great Britain and Germany captured whole branches of textile industry. A very interesting document of 1642 (VI, no. 462), in which the case for the final expansion of the city boundaries is argued at length, finds the main reason in the outbreak of the civil war in England. And as English resentment at the inevitable displacement by a friendly neutral was one of the contributory causes of the Navigation Acts, so the revival of English competition in 1663 (simultaneously with the unscrupulous anti-Dutch policy described in Clarendon's auto- biography) is adduced by Leyden manufacturers as a reason for imposing a tariff onEnglish textiles and for diminishing the privileges of the Merchant 1 Ante, xxix. 156. See also ante, xxxvi. 308.