Prolegomena to a Social History of Dutch Archives

On several occasions Jaap Kloosterman has shown his interest in and mastery of the history of collections. In his historical overview of the labour history libraries before World War I he demonstrates that contemporary problems associated with industrialization provided an incentive to collecting. The history of a collection provides a biography of the scholarly discipline served by that particular collection. ¹ Because that history needs to be placed in a broader social and cultural context, the history of the Iish written by Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen begins with a sketch of the political, economic, social, and cultural backgrounds: the “dynamic world filled with new ideas about social planning, emerging political parties, and trade unions.” ² The later vicissitudes of the Iish are treated against the backdrop of the lead-up to ww ii, the reconstruction of Europe after the war, the Cold War, and the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union.