Abstract

"Practitioners' Solutions: Practical Problems and the co-creation of Economic Policy in the Early Modern Dutch Republic"

Joris van den Tol, Radboud University (joris.vandentol@ru.nl)

This paper offers a new research agenda on the importance of informal institutions for economic policy and the role of firms and merchants (practitioners) as co-creators of these institutions. The paper challenges the existing literature’s emphasis on European philosophers and European formal institutions by studying the petitions of economic practitioners in the Dutch Republic. Moreover, while the early modern Dutch Republic is at the core of economic development and corporate innovation it is suspiciously absent almost entirely in the history of political economy. Petitions form the missing link between the ideas of practitioners and economic policy enacted by the state.
By analysing the underutilized source of petitions in the Dutch Republic and its colonies, this paper focuses on the bottom-up formulation of problems and solutions in political economy. In sum, this paper answers questions such as why and how did economic practitioners articulate norms and ideologies on issues of political economy to solve problems of exchange, land, labour, and capital?
This paper solves a problem in the literature that belongs to the school of New Institutional Economics (NIE) which takes European development as the baseline, or yardstick, to measure economic performance in other regions against (Conrad 2016, 74). NIE positions Europe as the centre of innovation, arguing that Asia and Africa fell behind and that it was just a matter of time before ‘the periphery’ caught on (Pearson 1991, 69; Austin 2008). Therefore, this paper takes practitioners’ problems in both the metropole and the colony as its starting point (rather than the laws and regulations) because this avoids prioritizing solutions.