Crooked justice. Corruption, inequality and civic rights in the early modern Netherlands

Abstract

With the help of several case studies from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, this article focuses on two key questions. How did ordinary Dutch citizens protect themselves against corruption and misuse of power by law enforcement agents, public prosecutors and the courts? And, whose interests were actually being served by the early modern criminal justice system? Or, put another way: whose order was being maintained and who was excluded from it? Its is argued that the weakness of a critical traditional in Dutch -and possibly even more widely, in Continental European- historiography concerning these issues fits in with the Continental perspective in which the rights of the state are emphasized rather than the rights of the individual. In England (perhaps even in the wider Anglosaxon context) the opposite seems to be the case: a critical historiographical tradition juxtapo-sed to a past in which civil rights rather than state privilieges were emphasized, together with resistance to the state and other bastions of power.