Pepijn Brandon, Sabine Go, and Wybren Verstegen
At the end of his inaugural address as Professor of Economic and Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), Karel Davids directly addressed his gratitude to four mentors in the profession, Jaap Bruijn, Dik van Arkel, Wim Blockmans, and Peter Klein. The terms he used characterize Davids as much as they revealed his attitude to his profession. After singling out Jaap Bruijn as the person who taught him the “craft” of the historian, he thanked the other three particularly for:
showing how important it is for the historian not only to pay attention to the beautiful and well-composed sentence, or the telling detail; but also to ask big questions, to take on large problems and open up broad perspectives. In short: To construct a wide frame.1
It is no coincidence that Davids drew his analogies straight from the workshop to describe the kind of intellectual labour expected from a newly appointed Full Professor.2 They were connected with his insistence on knowledge-production as a practical enterprise, which he himself developed in his dissertation on the evolution in the Dutch Republic of the science of navigation. Originally trained in maritime history, perhaps Davids was particularly well attuned to the need to combine the vista of the horizon ahead with the down-to-earth realization that it takes a lot of hard – and competent – work to get there. Of course, his choice of craft-related metaphors also bore with it the connotation of Marc Bloch’s description of history writing as a métier. With his democratic temperament Davids must have felt some affinity with this co-founder of the Annales. Bloch had famously offered posterity his thoughts on the profession as “the memorandum of a craftsman who has always liked to reflect over his
The opening essay of this volume, “Davids and Goliath”, written by his close friend and collaborator Jan Lucassen and co-thinker and life-partner Marjolein ’t Hart, lays out how Davids managed to combine the search for large questions and broad perspectives with skilful use of a toolbox derived from the best of the empiricist school. It also shows how his search led him to subjects and comparisons that, although remaining firmly grounded in the study of the early-modern Low Countries, drew ever wider circles in space and time. As the bibliography attached to this essay shows, Davids has remained one of the most prolific social and economic historians of the Netherlands. His work has been instrumental in opening up the field of Dutch economic history to Global History. Branching out widely from his starting point of maritime navigation in the context of early modern European expansion, Davids became an internationally renowned scholar of the history of knowledge, technology and innovation, as well as of economic institutions, labour, religion, and the interactions between human beings and nature.
With such eminent scholars in the field of Karel Davids-studies as Marjolein ’t Hart and Jan Lucassen providing the opening shots, our editorial preface may limit itself to some brief remarks as to the contents and background of this book. A Liber Amicorum, it is offered to Davids on the occasion of his retirement in October 2018 by his friends, colleagues, and students in celebration of his manifold contributions to the field. The contributors present new research that touches on the core themes developed in Davids’s own work. The volume is divided into five sections:
Section I: Resources of knowledge, cultures of learning
Section II: Institutions for a global economy
Section III: Chasing whales, crossing oceans
Section IV: Chains of profit, chains of labour
Section V: Humans and their natural environment
As can be seen from the titles, the book reflects Davids’s omnivorous character as a scholar. Nevertheless, there are common strands that run throughout the introduction and fourteen chapters gathered here, freely crossing the borders of the different sections. Davids’s over-arching interest in the origins of global inequality and in diverging trajectories of economic development
Together, these fourteen essays provide a fascinating panorama of social, economic, and environmental history of the past millennium. Within each of the five sections the book seeks to bring back the different levels of geographical scope, fusing the local, the national and the global. Following the approach of De Wereld en Nederland, the handbook for Global History of which Davids was co-editor, and of his work more broadly, the Netherlands are often the starting-point for examinations that bring together transnational or global comparisons and connections.
Throughout his career, Davids valued the cooperative and collaborative nature of scientific endeavours. That is true for his research but also determined his attitude to his students at the VU Amsterdam as well as the other institutions in which he taught in the Netherlands and abroad. As a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie der Wetenschappen (the Dutch Royal Academy of the Sciences, KNAW) and of many international committees watching over the quality of higher education, he gave his time generously in the service of the academic community. The example of Davids’s own spirit of
Our only regret as editors is that the nature of such a volume precludes the inclusion of a synthesizing contribution by Davids himself. We should have really loved to see his knowledgeable comments on, supportive engagement with, and in some cases stern but friendly polemics against the scholarship presented here in his honour. However, we are sure that Davids’s voice resonates throughout the fourteen chapters and we are looking forward to the new and undoubtedly highly productive post-retirement phase of his work which is about to begin.
Bibliography
Bloch M. Apologie pour l’histoire, ou métier d’historien. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1949.
Blockmans W.P., C.A. Davids, and E.K. Grootes. “Inleiding: Literatuur als bron voor sociale geschiedenis.” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 10, no. 3 (1984): 223–227.
Davids C.A. De macht der gewoonte? Economische ontwikkeling en institutionele context in Nederland op de lange termijn. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 1995.