PhD Ceremony G.G. van Oosterom (AiS), Boeren op de buitenplaats

G.G. van Oosterom will defend his doctoral thesis on Thursday 9 June 2022.

Boeren op de buitenplaats
De relatie tussen landbouw en buitenleven in het Amstellands Arcadië (1640-1840)

Promotores:

• Prof. Dr Y.B. Kuiper
• Prof. Dr ir. M. Spek

Tenant farms were a regular feature of the many country estates south of Amsterdam, along the rivers Amstel, Holendrecht, Gein, Angstel and the Waver and Winkel in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In Boeren op de buitenplaats, this unknown agrarian history of the Dutch country house is reconstructed and explained in detail for the first time.

For this doctoral research, over one hundred and sixty country houses were studied, including their owners, tenant farmers and land ownership. Besides economics, the way in which these farms were spatially integrated as part of the country house biotope receives a great deal of attention. The same goes for the social relations between the owners and their tenants and the ideology behind this unique combination of utility and pleasure. Due to this broad perspective this study states that whilst the farm never was allowed to take centre stage, it did play a key role behind the scenes as part of the wider stage setting through which the owner could present his country house and thus himself, within the larger context of the agricultural landscape.

Gerrit van Oosterom (1975) is a Dutch landscape architect and landscape historian. He investigates country house landscapes on a regional scale and is fascinated by betwixt-and-between phenomena in the social and spatial margins of country-house culture. His dissertation Boeren op de Buitenplaats will be defended at the University of Groningen at the 9th of June 2022.

The University Library publishes the thesis digitally after the defence ceremony.