TY - JOUR
AU - Brauner, Christina
AB - It is a promising and alluring topic: in their study, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the ‘birth of advertising’ in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. They introduce their readers to a fascinating world of information, people and things—a world that proves to be a microcosm of contemporary Dutch society. The authors explain that in some regards, the book itself has grown out of the allure of the topic and material: its first draft was not written with a fully-fledged monograph in mind but was intended to serve as an introduction to the edition of advertisements that the authors have published in the same series (Brill’s Library of the Written Word). The volume at hand sufficiently demonstrates that the topic deserves a book-length treatment and indeed calls for further research, not least in comparative perspective. The study is based, at its core, on the analysis of advertisements published in Dutch newspapers between 1621 and c.1700, with some chapters moving on well into the eighteenth century. While the few previous studies of early modern advertising are often framed within to the paradigm of the ‘consumer revolution’, Pettegree and Weduwen discuss their subject more specifically within the context of the development of newspapers and the history of the printing world. They not only point out the intimate connections between the book trade and the onset of newspaper advertising but also (even if implicitly) help to challenge the well-worn modernising projections which the ‘consumer revolution’ narrative entails. Advertisements are not only directed to customers and buyers but also address—and probably more often than not in the early days—potential competitors, serving as announcements of business ventures and privileges. Furthermore, unlike the dominant image today, the buyers and customers addressed were not consumers and private individuals but, rather, other merchants or manufacturers. Indeed, retail trade only made a relatively late appearance in the printed world of advertisements (with some exceptions with regard to services and the book trade)—and appeared later in Dutch than in English newspapers. The study contextualises newspaper advertising within contemporary communication practices and astutely sets out the role of newspapers and their publishers as information brokers. Take, for instance, the fascinating story about the Zutphen market. In 1643, the magistrates of Zutphen sought to advertise their newly established horse market: they had a poster printed and sent out messengers through the whole Republic to proclaim the news and publicly post the announcement. While these messengers usually addressed the burgomasters of the different towns they visited, in Amsterdam the newspaper editor Broer Jansz took the place of magistrates: he agreed not only to post the notice at the usual places in the city but also to put out an advertisement in his paper. This story vividly illustrates the continuum and co-existence between different forms and media of public communication and announcements and also demonstrates that the study relies on much more material than ‘just’ the newspaper advertisements themselves. The first three chapters focus on the formation of Dutch newspapers within the contemporary book industry and printing world, assessing their different local and regional profiles and the varying roles advertising played therein. Not least, the authors demonstrate how advertisements make visible what is otherwise lost and goes unrecorded: from the Texel printing press, about whose existence we only know because of two advertisements from 1666 and 1677 respectively (p. 51), to the sheer number of book auctions conducted in the Republic which seems to have been at least double that estimated by earlier calculations based on the surviving catalogues (p. 98f.). These conclusions will also have important methodological implications for the study of the early modern book trade in general. Chapters Four and Five introduce us to the ‘kaleidoscope of human experience’ and the world of things, services and people surfacing in the advertisements. The authors carefully emphasise the selectiveness of the view which the advertisements provide of seventeenth-century Dutch society and economy, dominated by the written word and the book industry and—to a lesser and varying degree—by public authorities (for a reflection on the lacunae, see esp. pp. 110–13). Still, the numerous microhistories of single advertisements give fascinating insights into many facets of everyday life (and emotions) in the early modern Dutch Republic—from fears for missing children (and even of child-abduction) and paternal aspirations for finding good schooling for their offspring, to anxieties about thieving servants and to rousing national sentiments during the Rampjaar of 1672. The richness of the material is overwhelming and can itself provoke many innovative research questions, although it comes sometimes at the cost of the internal structure of the argument. The last three chapters equally draw on microhistorical analyses but combine them with broader questions about diachronic changes, even taking the reader well into the early nineteenth century. They also put the Dutch case into a comparative perspective, with regard to the Southern Netherlands (ch. 7, pp. 254–8) but also with regard to England, France, the (North) American colonies and ‘Germany’ (ch. 8). However, there is some discrepancy between these rich and nuanced empirical observations and the conceptual frameworks the authors operate with. In their analysis, they often juxtapose ‘advertising’ and ‘advertisements’ with ‘announcements’ and ‘notices’, without giving criteria or explicating these terms and their relationships—which seems to be of central importance for a book entitled ‘The Birth of Modern Advertising’. In face of the continuum of practices the authors so astutely describe, it is quite possible that neither can the ‘birth’ actually be pinpointed to one single date, nor can a clear-cut definition be established—however, for analytical purposes, it would have been helpful and indeed necessary to include an explicit discussion of terminology and concepts here. Similarly, the study’s engagement with the overarching narrative of modernisation remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the authors help to dismantle anachronistic assumptions about early modern advertising; on the other hand, their own argumentation is still very much indebted to a story of progress—the comparative chapters (chs 7 and 8) in particular tend to employ an implicit yardstick of modernisation, both with regard to economy and politics, couching the described historical phenomena in terms of ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. Equally, the tendency to seek out and highlight ‘firsts’ (the first advertisement for something, first correction of an advertisement, first attempt to take out advertisements in several newspapers at the same time, etc.) is somewhat at odds with the repeated reflections about a high percentage of loss and the fragmentary base of the evidence. This, as well as the usage of national stereotypes for explanatory purposes (allusions to the ‘ruthless Dutch cost-cutting instinct’ [p. 6] are employed, for instance, to explain the format of Dutch newspapers), provide a somewhat surprising contrast to the otherwise differentiated analysis the authors provide. Overall, this is a rich study which not only assesses a huge and important body of new material but also opens up manifold avenues and innovative perspectives for further research. The comparative chapters in particular demonstrate that there still remains much to be done in order better to understand the fascinating and diverse world of early modern advertising. This goes in particular for the German case, for which the authors only cite one single article; while the historiography of early modern German advertising is not particularly rich, there are certainly more and more comprehensive studies available (Bendel, Hauke, Homburg, Borscheid/Wischermann, etc.). Furthermore, the intriguing case-studies presented by Pettegree and Weduwen show that we need to think more about the relationships between different media, oral communication and marketing practices to further explore early modern advertising—even beyond metaphors of birth and narratives of revolution. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising, by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/ceac148
DA - 2022-07-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-dutch-republic-and-the-birth-of-modern-advertising-by-arthur-der-CNNuGP8sJc
SP - 1253
EP - 1255
VL - 137
IS - 587
DP - DeepDyve
ER -