PROFESSOR DR. B.H. SLICHER VAN BATH

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Bernard Hendrik Slicher van Bath was born in 1910 and died in 2004. In 1941 he married Jacoba Petronella de Jong (1918-2009). Slicher was educated as a historian and archaeologist in Groningen and Utrecht. In 1945 he received his doctorate cum laude in Amsterdam on Mensch en land in de middelleeuwen. Bijdrage tot een geschiedenis der nederzettingen in Oostelijk Nederland (Man and Land in the Middle Ages. A Contribution to the History of Settlements in Eastern Netherlands). He became Rijksarchivaris (head of the Public Record Office) in Overijssel soon after that. He took advantage of this position to do research on the history of the province. In 1957 he published Een samenleving onder spanning. Geschiedenis van het platteland in Overijssel (A Society under Pressure. Agrarian History of Overijssel). He continued to work on the agrarian history of this province as well other areas of the Netherlands and Europe until 1970. In 1960 he published the authoritative De agrarische geschiedenis van West-Europa (500-1850) (The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500-1850), which he had written at the request of the editors of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. It was translated into English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese and brought him international recognition. He was professor of Economic History at the University of Groningen and Chair of Agrarian History at the University of Wageningen. A series of research programmes was launched on the social-economic history of agrarian regions in the Netherlands under his supervision at the Department of Agrarian History at Wageningen University.

By 1950 Slicher had also developed an interest in the history of Latin America. In 1951 he began giving lectures in Wageningen on the history of the continent. His two-year position as guest professor at the University of Chicago finally gave him the chance to travel in Latin America. The European regional agrarian history that he had researched for so many years became less and less interesting to him. What he now wanted to do was to begin a research programme on Latin America. In 1972 he resigned, and 30 years of studying the agrarian history of Europe was ended.

Two years later Slicher became the director of CEDLA, where he worked closely with the historian Adrian van Oss, who died young (1947-1984). This was the beginning of the next thirty years of scholarly research – much of which was carried out after he retired. In these productive years he published five lengthy books: Spaans Amerika omstreeks 1600 [1979], and recently published in Spanish [2010]; Bevolking en economie in Nieuw-Spanje (ca 1570-1800) [1981]; Real hacienda y economía en Hispanoamérica (1541-1820) [1989]; Indianen en Spanjaarden: een ontmoeting tussen twee werelden. Latijns Amerika 1500-1800 [1989]; and De bezinning op het verleden in Latijns Amerika, 1493-1820: auteurs, verhalen en lezers [1998]. He was appointed Endowed Professor in the History of Latin America at Leiden University (1976-1981) and at the Catholic University of Nijmegen [now Radboud] in 1983 as the L.J. Rogier Chair in the History of Latin America.

His collaboration with Van Oss had centred on an integral historiography of Latin America. The quantitative methodology he applied was very similar to the approach he had used in the previous decades for the agrarian history of Europe, but because the two researchers now aspired to write an integral or holistic historiography, a broader scope was covered that included culture, science, art, church and religion, government, and politics. His last book De bezinning op het verleden in Latijns Amerika (A reflection on Latin America’s past), on which he worked almost daily for eight years, concerns the an interpretation of the historiography of Latin America.