Agriculture, proto-industry and mennonite entrepreneurship

Twente, an area of some 1200 square kilometers in the east of the eastern Dutch province of Overijssel, has been the major Dutch textile district from the mid-seventeenth century until the 1960s. By Dutch standards Twente was an exceptional area. It was not only the first part of the Netherlands to indrustrialize after 1850, but also one of the few areas that escaped the economic and demographic stagnation that hit the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century. In a sense, Twente was an area of proto-industry, because it had large scale textile industries in symbiosis with agriculture, that were producing for far-away markets. To what extent the economic and demographic developments in Twente fall within the scope of the theory of proto-industrialization, is one of the major issues of this study. The special character of pre-industrial textile industries in Twente was not confined to the specific relations of production and to reproduction. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards a group of entrepreneurial families, which belonged to a small Menonnite minority, came to dominate the textile manufacture and economy of the textile centres. Although the share of the Menonnite entrepreneurs in the total wealth in these textile centres had already reached its peak in the mid-eighteenth century, descendants of these old entrepreneurial families played an important part in the development of textile industries in Twente well into the twentieth century. This means that the history of Twente's textile industries offers a select opportunity to study the relationship between religion and entrepreneurship.