Debates on Industrialisation and Economic Growth in the Netherlands

With the renewed interest in macro-economic quantifi cation since the 1950s the study of long-term economic growth and development became also an important theme within the discipline of economic history. It developed into a major tool to analyse the process of industrialisation and to identify the forces which explain long-term growth and stagnation of the rich and poor parts of the world. This chapter examines the new branch of macro-economic history as it developed in the Netherlands after 1945. This new approach initially focused on the problem of the slow industrialization during the nineteenth century, but gradually branched out to include the early modern period and the twentieth century. Studies in this fi eld were characterized by a strong quantitative orientation, and resulted in systematic overview of the growth of the Dutch economy from the Late Middle Ages to the present.