From at least 1600 three countries led in the overall prosperity of Europe: the Netherlands, Britain, and Belgium. Sometimes first in wealth, other times third, by common consent Belgium became the first nation state in Continental Europe to experience sustained industrial development, that is, to systematically apply power technology to mining and manufacturing. An equally known commonplace, and a perpetually puzzling one, is the Dutch failure to industrialize until decades after the British and the Belgians. Yet unlike Belgium, throughout much of the eighteenth century the Dutch Republic enjoyed a remarkably free press; a habit of religious toleration born of necessity, openness to immigrants and their skills; and not least, abundant capital. Like Belgium, the Dutch Republic was also highly urbanized, but it possessed a gross domestic product per head of the population better than both Britain and Belgium. By 1725 wages in both Britain and Belgium were comparable; they were even higher in the Dutch Republic. In addition, assuming that adult height bears relation to nutritional levels and economic development, in 1800 the male population of the Dutch Republic was significantly taller than their French counterparts, an advantage that disappeared in the 1830s and returned only in the 1860s.

We asked in previous chapters – however unfashionably – about the causes of French retardation; so, too, the different patterns of industrial development evident in the Low Countries after 1750 require attention. In France, scientific education occurred in fits and starts: renewed and strengthened in the 1790s by French revolutionaries, only then to experience significant stagnation from the second decade of the nineteenth century until well into the 1830s. It seems entirely reasonable to ask whether comparable trends in scientific culture relating to education can be seen in the Low Countries, both north and south.