The works of EM Uhlenbeck (1913-2003): an annotated bibliography

Eugenius Marius Uhlenbeck – Bob as he was known to his friends – was a multifacited (or many-sided) and multi-talented person. He was an accomplished scholar in the fields of Javanese language and literature and in general linguistics holding the hairs in these disciplines at Leiden University from 1950-1983 and 1958-1979 respectively. In the Netherlands and abroad he was widely acclaimed as an elder ‘statesman’. His publications reflect his rare combination of talents. I will limit myself here to brief comments about his publications on linguistics, both general and Javanese linguistics

Monetary Policies, Guild Labour-Strife, and Compulsory Arbitration during the Decline of the Late-Medieval Flemish Cloth Industry, 1390 - 1435

This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders' monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now rapidly expanding English cloth trade. More narrowly (leaving larger issues of industrial decline to other papers), it focuses upon the sudden imposition and enforcement of Flemish monetary reforms in the early 1390s, after a half century of inflationary coinage debasements; those reforms greatly exacerbated other existing forces of deflation in north-west Europe. In the view of the count, his officials, and entrepreneurs in the cloth trades, this monetary reform could work effectively only if wages were cut proportionately; and such wage-cutting policies naturally provoked bitter resentment (even though the ongoing deflation in fact raised real wages). In the Flemish cloth industry, the only wage-earning artisans who were organized into a guild, and one that resembled a modern labour union, were the fullers, exclusively male workers, whose tasks were crucial in ensuring the luxury quality of the Flemish industry's chief exports. Their reaction to the post-Reform wage cuts of the 1390s was to go on strike (uutgangen), thus forcing the intervention of the count's officials, who imposed compulsory wage arbitration, establishing new wage contracts that gave the draper-entrepreneurs only half of their demanded cuts. One of these contracts specified the fullers' new wages in terms of both the silver and gold coinages, in an era when the gold:silver ratio was unusually low. After the Flemish count had resumed inflationary coinage debasements in 1416, leading to a rise in the gold:silver ratio (i.e. making gold coins more valuable in terms of the silver), some fullers' guilds now cited these contract provisions and demanded payment in gold coin, provoking new labour strife, which ended only with another monetary reform in 1433- 5. The paper also poses and answers the question: why did the draper-entreprenuers not respond to this labour strife by displacing fullers with water-powered machines? Mechanical fulling would have ruined the reputation for luxury quality on which the industry vitally depended, while reducing prices only minimally.

The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late-Medieval Flanders: Annuities, Excise Taxes, and Income Transfers from the Poor to the Rich

The objectives of this paper are three-fold. The first is to rebut Charles Kindleberger�s famous dictum that usury �belongs less to economic history than to the history of ideas�; and in particular to demonstrate that the resuscitation of the anti-usury campaign from the early 13th century led to a veritable financial revolution in late-medieval French and Flemish towns: one that became the �norm� in modern European states from the 16th century (in England, from 1693): a shift in public borrowing from interest-bearing loans to the sale of annuities, usually called rentes or renten. That anti-usury campaign had two major features: (1) the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which provided harsh punishments � excommunication -- for both unrepentant usurers and princes who failed to suppress them; and (2) the establishment of the two mendicant preaching orders: the Franciscans (1210) and the Dominicans (1216), whose monks preached hellfire and eternal damnation against all presumed usurers � including, of course, anyone who received any interest on government loans. There is much evidence that from the 1220s, many financiers in many French and Flemish towns, fearing for their immortal souls, preferred to accept far lower returns on buying rentes than the interest they would have earned on loans. These rentes, based on 8th-century Carolingian census contracts, had two basic forms: (1) life-annuities, by which a citizen purchased from the government, with a lump sum of capital, an annual income stream lasting a lifetime, or the lifetime of his wife as well; (2) perpetual annuities, by which the annual income stream was indeed perpetual, or until such time as the government chose to redeem the rentes, at par. Initially, some theologians opposed sales of rentes as subterfuges to cloak evasion of the usury doctrine. But in 1250-1, Pope Innocent IV declared them to be non-usurious contracts, essentially because they were not loans. Subsequent popes in the 15th century confirmed his views and the non-usurious character of rentes, on two conditions: (1) that the buyer of the rente could never demand redemption or repayment, and (2) that the annual annuity payments (and any ultimate redemptions) be in accordance with actual rent contracts: i.e., that the funds be derived from the products of the land. Ecclesiastical authorities soon agreed that taxes on the consumption of the products of the land (and sea) met this test: i.e., taxes on beer and wine (which always accounted for the largest share), bread, textiles, fish, meat, dairy products, etc. The second objective of this paper is to measure the importance of renten in the civic finances of Flemish towns, in terms of both revenues and expenditures: from the annual town accounts Ghent (14th century only), and Aalst (1395-1550), where they had far greater importance. The related third objective is to measure the burden of the excise taxes for master building craftsmen in Aalst, in tables that measure the values of the excise tax revenues expressed in real terms: first, in the equivalent number of �baskets of consumables� (which form of the base of the Consumer Price Index), and second their value in terms of the annual money-wage incomes of master masons (for 210 days). This provides an entirely new look at the late-medieval �standard of living� controversy � with indications that this consumption-tax burden sometimes rose from about 13,200 to almost 30,000 days� wage income, for a town of perhaps 3600 inhabitants (but obviously less dramatic on a per capita basis). That tax burden rose the most strongly when, by other indications, real wages (RWI = NWI/CPI) were also finally rising; and thus possibly these real wage gains were largely eliminated. That per capita tax burden would have been all the greater if, in the course of the 15th century, Aalst had experienced the same decline as did small towns of Brabant, to the east, on the order of 25%, and some other Flemish towns, in which the population decline varied from 9% to 28 %. In earlier publications I had challenged the widespread view that the era following the Black Death, with a radical change in the land:labour ratio, came to be a �Golden Age� of the artisan and labourer. I contended instead that frequent inflations eroded or eliminated wage gains, and thus that periodic rises in real wages were due essentially to steep deflations combined with pronounced wage-stickiness. As I also calculated, English artisans in the 1340s had earned real wages that were about 50% of the Flemish; but by the 1480s, they had narrowed that gap (with much less inflation) to about 80%. That gap was probably even smaller, until the 1640s, when England�s Parliament finally imposed similar excise taxes on consumption.Flanders, warfare, urban public finances, building craftsmen, annuities (rentes), excise taxes, consumption, living standards, income transfers

Situation in Countries of Continental Europe

published or submitted for publicatio

Belgium’s legal periodicals as vectors of translation policy : how Flemish legal journals contributed to the development of a Dutch legal language

Belgium’s national history has been characterized by linguistic issues. As soon as Belgium gained independence in 1830, French was promoted as the nation’s first and most important language, despite the fact that a large majority of its people spoke Flemish. Constitutionally, the choice of which language to use was free, but the legal world easily adopted French. Flemish was only able to loosen the yoke of French during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, after a few sensational court cases. Jurists played a primordial role in the use of Flemish as a full-fledged legal professional language and one of their instruments were legal periodicals. Editors and authors used their position to offer colleagues translations of legal terminology, and gave guidelines as to how Flemish could and should be used in the Flanders court rooms (in Wallonia, French was used exclusively). This article examines the works that promoted the idea of Flemish as a professional legal language and the methods that were seen as the best way to reach the goal of a unilingual legal world in Flander

Ethnic boundaries in American, Dutch and German national literary policies, 1965-2005

This article addresses the extent and ways in which ethnic diversity has been part of American, Dutch and German national literary policy from 1965 until 2005. By analyzing the content of policy documents of the National Endowment of the Arts and the Dutch and German Literary Fund, I found that ethnic boundaries were weak in the USA, moderate in the Netherlands and strong in Germany. First, national literary policy organizations made much, moderate and little use of ethnic discourse respectively. Cross-national and longitudinal variations were closely related to the need for political legitimacy. Second, ethnic minority granters and grantees were