Urban Networks on the Move: The Austrian Netherlands’ Transit Policy and the Development of the Belgian Urban Networks in the Eighteenth Century (1704–1793)

Serruys, Michael Washington

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-27599-0_4

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The Estates of Flanders, the representative institution at the provincial level which was housed in Ghent, undertook an ambitious policy of improving the roads and waterways outwards from Ghent throughout the eighteenth century, whilst at the same time raising import duties on English coal. 108 Although the network of barges in seventeenth-century Holland had been unsurpassed in its time, the road and waterway network surrounding Ghent had, by the end of the eighteenth century, become among the densest in continental Europe. 109 The fact that coal could also be supplied from within the Austrian Netherlands provided an incentive for investments and reforms that helped to lower transaction costs.…”

Section: Energy and Industrial Mechanisation: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fuelling the urban economy: A comparative study of energy in the Low Countries, 1600–1850

Ryckbosch

Saelens

2022

The Economic History Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What was the role of energy in shaping modern economies and fuelling the transition to sustained economic growth? In the historiography on the industrial revolution, the transition to fossil energy carriers plays a central role. Despite recent efforts to gather new empirical evidence, long‐term comparative studies on energy transitions and their economic impact before and during the first industrial revolution remain rare. As a contribution to this literature, this article presents new quantitative data on energy consumption from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Low Countries. To explore differences in the chronology and impact of energy transitions, we compare the total levels of energy consumption, the energy mix, and the prices of fuels between two cities in the northern and southern Low Countries: Leiden and Ghent. This analysis enables us to explore more clearly which factors played a key role in the interaction between energy, economic growth, and industrialisation. The transition towards a cheap‐energy economy in Holland was associated with economic growth, but not with mechanisation. On the other hand, the rapid mechanisation process in Ghent was associated not with a cheap‐energy economy (relative to that of Leiden), but more specifically with a cheap‐coal economy.

show abstract

Section: Energy and Industrial Mechanisation: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%