Introduction

Much of the examination of the economy in the preceding chapters has concentrated on the supply side. Production is easier to research than consumption, there were more data on production collected by contemporaries, and until the post-war years most economic policy focussed on the supply side. The characteristics of an economy are easier to pick out in terms of production: what makes it distinctive, unusual, interesting. But very little can happen in the economy without demand for the goods and services produced, and if we are looking for growth trends and particularly for the timing of growth spurts, then for the dynamics of economic growth and development, demand is probably more important than supply. Fortunately some of the work done in recent years on the Dutch economy has begun to redress the historiographical imbalance.

In the course of the analysis we have already noted the importance of foreign demand to certain sectors in the Dutch economy. Three areas predominate. The urban markets of industrialized England could consume almost any amount of food that the Dutch could produce, especially fresh horticultural products and dairy goods. Demand was particularly strong from the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s (a critical time for the Dutch economy) and from the 1890s. Then there was the German giant next door, industrializing rapidly from the 1850s, with a massive demand for raw materials of all sorts except perhaps coal. And finally there were the colonies, and more particularly the East Indies.