ABSTRACT
In 1983 the Dutch journal De Negentiende Eeuw (‘The Nineteenth Century’) published a special issue on voluntary societies in the Netherlands.2 In the introduction the editors observed that associations were a neglected field of academic research, with only the late eighteenth century having attracted the attention of a few historians. For the nineteenth century there was only scarce information on membership, aims and functions of a small number of societies, with nothing at all on topics such as national geographical distribution, popularity over time of different types of societies, their contribution to class formation or their relationship with the state.
