Seigneurial institutions and Holland’s seventeenth-century miracle

This article revisits the claim that Holland owed much of its seventeenth-century efflorescence to the absence of feudal constraints on its economy. Because Holland was relatively late to develop in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it supposedly missed the European Feudal Revolution, thus opening space for an exceptional long-run development. Whilst this view is correct for serfdom and landlordship, it is not for seigneurial lordship, another constituent of feudalism as a controversial concept. A survey reveals that seigneuries were not rarer than in other Netherlandish principalities. Seigneurial surplus-extraction, which might have stifled economic innovation, was low, but this too was not unique to Holland. Rather than being a stumbling block for dynamism, however, seigneuries supported economic change. Apart from shielding burgeoning rural proto-industries from urban rent-seeking, seigneurial regulations put in place a framework for the rise of factor markets for land and labour. There is truth to the claim that the Holland countryside was an open society that prospered thanks to secure property rights and the agency for villagers to pursue a wide range of strategies, but Holland did not have these advantages because it was free of lordship. In fact, seigneuries were part of its exceptional political economy.