The Haarlem 1771 prize essay on the restoration of Dutch trade and the economic branch of the Holland Society of Sciences

In my younger years I have witnessed the emergence of a patriotic association for the encouragement of national industry. She is still alive under the name of the Oeconomic Society, and continues to provide the most important services by awarding prizes on an annual basis. This association renewed the design of William IV, and her members have for quite a considerable time favoured the manufactures of their Fatherland. Yet, this second attempt, just like the first has failed.

Thus wrote Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, architect of the 1813 Dutch constitution, in 1831. The previous year had seen the separation of what is still Belgium from the Dutch United Kingdom and Hogendorp’s work served to ensure that the Dutch tax system remained footed on the fiscal principles that best suited the characteristics of the state.

The significance of Hogendorp’s statement resides in that here one of the most influential figures in Dutch political history commented on the creation of the Economic Branch, the most famous Dutch economic society, in relation to the major eighteenth-century challenge to counter the economic decline of the Dutch Republic, which he compared with the nineteenth-century predicament of the new Dutch state.