Jan Luiten van Zanden is one of the winners of the NWO/Spinoza Award for 2003, as announced today by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The award is the highest honour for scholarship in the Netherlands and equals 1.5 million euros for each researcher. This is the first time this award has been presented to a history scholar.
Leading economic historian
Van Zanden specializes in the economic history of the Netherlands for all periods since the Middle Ages. His impressive publications include Arbeid tijdens het handelskapitalisme [Labour under mercantile capitalism] (1991), in which he explains the rise of the Dutch economy between the late Middle Ages and the Golden Age.
To improve general understanding of the Dutch economic changes during this period, Van Zanden supervised a research group that reconstructed the national accounts of the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. Based on this reconstruction, Van Zanden wrote a book about the state, institutions and economic changes in the Netherlands between 1780 and 1914 (Staat, instituties en economische ontwikkeling, 2000, with Van Riel). Here, he attributes the relatively slow growth of the Dutch economy until 1865 to the development of the state and institutions that regulated the markets.
In his reference work Een klein land in de lange twintigste eeuw [A small country in the long twentieth century] (1997), Van Zanden reviews Dutch economic history in the twentieth century. He is presently working on an ambitious multi-volume project about the rise of Dutch corporate industry in the twentieth century. In 1993 he wrote Groene geschiedenis van Nederland [A green history of the Netherlands], the first account of the ecological history of the Netherlands, with S. Verstegen.
The other publications by Van Zanden cover areas of common ground, the rise of income equality and discrepancies, history of banking and finance and the countryside of Overijssel. He has been described as the most productive historian in the Netherlands in the Historisch Nieuwsblad.
Van Zanden's reputation as an economic historian extends beyond the Netherlands. Both his work about Dutch economic history and his comparative studies about subjects such as wages and prices, the standard of living and agricultural productivity have received international acclaim. He has published monographs about Indonesia in the nineteenth century to reconstruct the national accounts. His current focus is the history of the Royal Dutch / Shell Group of Companies and a new economic history of Indonesia.
Jan Luiten van Zanden (1955) studied history and economics at the Free University. In 1985 he completed his PhD thesis on Dutch agriculture in the nineteenth century. In 1987 he was appointed professor at the Free University, and in 1992 he received a similar appointment at Utrecht University. In 2001 he became a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and now divides his research time between Utrecht University and the IISH in Amsterdam.
In 1998 Van Zanden was elected general secretary by the International Economic History Association, the most important organization of economic historians world-wide. In 1997 he was appointed a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.