Impressed and inspired by the results of German, but increasingly also of international
research in the field of conceptual history, a group of Dutch scholars in the 1990s
decided to initiate a research project in Dutch conceptual history. In this initiative they
were much aided by the award of a research group at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) during the academic
year 1994-1995 and which resulted in the pilot study ‘History of Concepts;
Comparative Perspective’s edited by Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans and Frank
van Vree in 1998. The Dutch project, which now is part of the research program of the
Huizinga Institute, the Netherlands Graduate school for Cultural History, as it has
developed since then is, certainly in comparison to the existing German projects,
relatively modest in scale. The aim of this article is to explore the late-medieval and
early-modern development of the concept of citizenship in the Netherlands in a
comparative perspective. This also means that the paper seeks to transcend the hitherto
dominant national framework for studying the history of concepts. There are two main
ways to attempt this, both of which are explored in the paper. The first and most
obvious one is systematically to compare conceptual histories, that is, to compare the
history of the key concept of citizenship in different European countries over a longer
period of time in the hope of illuminating the parallels and differences in national
conceptual development. To compare the history of the Dutch concept of citizenship
with that of the same concept in Germany, England or France, for example, is to derive
important insights into both national peculiarities and shared patterns of development.
But although such cross-national comparisons may be crucial, they cannot capture the
entire story of the international dimensions that are involved in conceptual development,
as part of a normative discourse on citizenship. In order to bring this latter aspect out in
all its richness and complexity, it is necessary to go beyond the comparison of various
national patterns of conceptual development, and to attempt to study also the processes
of international interaction and diffusion over time
Revised version 25.09.2008
