International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The Netherlands escaped most of the social upheavals that devastated much of Europe during the nineteenth century. The revolutionary wave of 1848 , even though it came as close as Belgium, did not extensively disrupt the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Similarly, during the Paris Commune in 1871 , Dutch cities remained relatively quiet, due in part to the substantial revolutionary process the country had endured centuries earlier. The republican form of government was already in place in the Netherlands, well before most other European countries. Moreover, while industrial development proceeded apace throughout much of Western Europe, the Dutch economy, predicated for centuries on commerce and finance, was slow to adopt manufacturing. It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that industrial class conflict broke out in the Netherlands, albeit in the form of strike activity rather than efforts to overthrow the state. The Dutch workers' movement, like those in less industrially developed nations, was originally dominated by anarchism rather than the Marxist socialism taking hold in Germany, and to an extent in France and Belgium. Nevertheless, a fledgling socialist movement emerged in the late nineteenth century rooted in the Socialist Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), which formed an important part of the wider European socialist movement before and after World ... log in or subscribe to read full text