The Rise of Landless Households in the Dutch Countryside, c. 1600-1900

This article first sketches the developments in the shares of landless and land-poor rural households in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, after briefly going into changes in the earlier centuries. It has to be taken into account in this respect that landless and land-poor households can be divided into three categories: 1. farm labourers with hardly any land; 2. very small peasants or cottagers who cannot sustain themselves from their holdings; 3. Artisans and others wholly or partially specialised in non-agricultural work. Their importance differed distinctively regionally, for instance between coastal and inland parts of the Netherlands. Later on the article concentrates on the last part of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century and on the first group of landless unskilled labourers, especially in coastal Groningen and partly also in inland Drenthe, both situated in the north of the Netherlands. The survival strategies over the lifecycle of labourer families are discussed, taking into account the varying employment opportunities over the seasons in the nineteenth century of the different family members (husband, wife, children).
It is shown that with the rapidly rising share of unskilled labourers from the 1750s onwards in line with population growth and a rather stable or only slowly rising number of land holdings, the labouring class in the Groningen countryside became more closed in the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, there shad still been quite a lot of mobility between middle class positions and landholding farmers on the one hand, and unskilled labourers on the other hand. In the course of the nineteenth century downward social mobility into the labouring class especially out of the group of farmer households diminished enormously, while upward mobility of labourers children to the social class of farmers also decreased somewhat. Although around 1900 there must have been a considerable improvement in the prospects of children of labourers, opportunities within the Groningen countryside remained fairly limited, with the share of unskilled households continuing to increase until at least 1910.