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An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic and Social Transition. By Michael Wintle. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 416 pp. Photographs, figures, tables. Cloth, $69.95. ISBN 0-521-78295-3

Michael Wintle is the first English historian to write a comprehensive account of the economic and social history of the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. His splendid and thought-provoking synthesis will undoubtedly attain the canonical status already enjoyed by The Low Countries, 1780-1940 (1978), as it complements and corrects E. H. Kossman's grand overview of political history. Wintle places the Netherlands in a much wider context than Kossman has ever done by discussing demographic, economic, and social changes characteristic of Northwest Europe as a whole, not just the Low Countries. He emphasizes again and again the modernity of the Dutch experience during the long nineteenth century, a theme that is largely absent from Kossman's account. It will come as no surprise that Wintle is critical of early modern historians like Jonathan Israel, Jan de Vries, and Ad van der Woude, who credit the Dutch Golden Age with "the first modern economy." Wintle does not deny, of course, that high levels of urbanization, commercial agriculture, and dominance of world trade put the United Provinces—Holland in particular—far ahead of its neighbors in the seventeenth century. (England's per capita income caught up with the Dutch Republic only in 1790, for example.) Yet he proves conclusively that it was the Kingdom of the Netherlands, not the Republic, which made the transition to a modern demographic regime and (post-) industrial economic and social structures, including full political democracy, in the period from 1850 to 1920.