Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 125, Issue 3, 2012

Security is not just the outcome of physical or political circumstances and incidents. People and organisations have to attribute meaning to those circumstances and incidents. They have to be incorporated into political, administrative, and bureaucratic decision-making processes and procedures. The history of security is not usually described in these terms. This paper provides a brief historiographical account of curre Read More

In this paper the emergence and effect of international anarchism during the late nineteenth century in the Netherlands is analysed as a security and conspiracy dispositive. The dispositive was invoked by anarchists and police officials alike, who used new techniques of suggesting threat and imagining danger. It was legitimized by the late nineteenth-century public fear of chaos, revolution, and moral decay, connected to an e Read More

In this article we scrutinize the construction of complex threat perceptions and security conceptions in relation to the introduction of security measures by the security services. We find that for most of the history of the Dutch security services, political control and interference was limited to the decision to establish or shut down an institution, driven by security considerations, interests, and opportunities. In the meantime it Read More

Between 1966 and 1979 Dutch military safety management was under fire, for which disaffected soldiers and people with anti-militaristic tendencies were responsible. They tried in numerous ways to modernize the military law, or even to abolish the army altogether. In the long 1970s the Dutch military experienced unprecedented criticism from within. This was considered to have resulted in a deterioration in the force’ Read More

In the early modern period mercantile custom and official law, the latter of which was imposed by legislators and applied by judges, did not differ very much. In the second half of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century merchants trading in Antwerp negotiated with the urban and royal authorities for official precepts in order to tackle the fraud endemic in marine insurance. In response to these developments and i Read More

The nineteenth-century construction of the law of energy conservation was the result of long and complex international development. Surprisingly, the Dutch reception of, and contribution to, this law has not yet been investigated. Developments in the Netherlands closely followed international trends. Those within the Dutch scientific community realized the importance of Mayer’s work at an early stage. Word-of-mouth commun Read More

In March 1978 Defence Minister Roelof Kruisinga of the Christian Democratic Party resigned over a cabinet conflict concerning the neutron bomb. It is generally assumed that his resignation was actually due to his difficult personality and his alcohol problem, and that it was therefore of little significance for the Van Agt government. This article argues that this view is incorrect. Kruisinga’s resignation was mainly due to a distur Read More