Water's worth. Urban society and subsidiarity in seventeenth-century Holland ...

By taking water as a viewpoint, this dissertation reveals that the urban communities of seventeenth-century Holland were highly subsidiary in nature. Individual townspeople, men and women alike, knew how to fend for themselves, incidentally having recourse to other inhabitants, businessmen, corporations or magistrates. Together, they constituted a tiered society, wherein nearly each entity bore the responsibilities that fitted its capacities. For this PhD thesis, the reports of human encounters with water were used to evaluate the allocation of duties and responsibilities within Holland's urba... Mehr ...