Comment on Peter Stabel

Abstract

With considerable justification Peter Stabel sees urban economic expansion and development in the Low Countries from the 12th to the 16th century as characterized by a ‘continuous shift of the centre of gravity’ towards the north with first the Walloon cities, then Flanders, then Brabant and finally Holland emerging as the most developed, innovative and economically dominant centre of the Low Countries urban network. An interesting feature of his approach is that the rise of Holland to dominance in the late 16th century is envisaged as a “mere continuation of the steady process of shifting the core of economic and social life in the complex of the southern and northern Low Countries”. Stabel sees this sequence of shifts as a process driven principally by the inherent logic of changing internal and especially external market conditions. A persistent tendency recognizable throughout, for example, was for growing competition in the woollen cloth and other textile industries to drive the older centres of production towards increased specialization and concentration on production of high-value products manufactured from costly raw materials. Thus, in place of the wide range of textiles of cheaper and middling as well as high quality characteristic of the Flemish cities in the 12th and 13th centuries, after 1300 the rise of comparable woollen cloth industries in Brabant, Holland and later also England pushed the Flemish cities into concentrating exclusively on high-quality products of increasing variety and sophistication.