The friend of Havelock Wilson, the founder of the National Union of Seamen, who once told him that true unity among seamen would never be achieved because seamen were like "a rope of sand", washed away with every tide, would no longer be considered a sage.1 It was not only Wilson who, during his career as trade unionist, proved beyond any doubt that the "rope of sand" could indeed hold together.2 The seamen, too, had shown long before the rise of the new unions at the end of the nineteenth century that they possessed more cohesive power than Havelock's friend was prepared to credit them with -at least, if British employers are to be believed. One of the first occasions on which British employers appealed to the Combination Act of 1799 was during a labour dispute in December 1799, when coal merchants (through the intermediary of the Mayor of London) urged the Home Secretary to take action against an alleged combination of seamen in Shields.3 The Coal Trade Committee of 1800 blamed combinations of seamen for the high wages, which had reached an unprecedented level. 4 Looking from the bottom up rather than from the top down, Marcus Rediker recently highlighted the growth of a "collectivism of necessity" among seamen in the first half of the eighteenth century. "A specifically maritime occupational consciousness gradually moved toward class consciousness as seamen began to develop wider patterns of association, sympathy and identification", he claims. In fact, Rediker argues that seamen, as "the most numerous of the mobile workers in early modern England and America" were in a most favourable position for transmitting information, experiences and ideas between different groups of the labouring poor. Far from being merely "a rope of sand", seamen pro-* I would like to thank Piet Boon, Jan Parmentier and Paul van Royen for their valuable references and Jan Lucassen and Piet Lourens for their kind permission to use their data base on guilds in the Netherlands.

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This paper examines the working of the patent system in the Dutch Republic during the period when the incidence of patenting reached its peak, between around 1580 and 1720. It looks at the system primarily from the viewpoint of the patent-holders, by analyzing the geographical background and social profile of patentees, the evolution of careers of patenting and the growth of commercial tendencies in the obtainment and exploitation of patents. It is argued that the development in the Netherlands in these respects resembled the evolution in England rather than that in France or the United States, but that in contrast with England the practice of patenting in the Dutch Republic to some extent fell into disuse. A turning point was reached around 1640. While the number of patents granted by the States General and the States of Holland began a long-term decline and the filing of specifications became a more and more rare occurrence, the relative importance of "multiple" patentees diminished, the geographical spread of patentees lessened and the role of the commercial and professional classes increased. Although a decrease in the number of patents did not necessarily reflect a falling-off in the rate of invention, it certainly meant a decline in the demand for patents on the side of inventors. The author suggests that this decline must at least in part have been induced by the evolution of the patent system itself.

This article examines the similarities and divergences in the evolution of knowledge concerning river control in China and Europe, between about 1400 and 1850. The analysis concentrates on four densely populated and relatively prosperous regions, which were faced with comparable problems caused by unruly rivers: the coastal plains of the Yellow River, the basin of the middle Yangzi, the coastal area of Northern Italy, and the Rhine delta in the Netherlands. During the period under discussion, Northern Italy was the first region to witness a 'cognitive leap' in knowledge of river hydraulics. The author analyses why this particular transformation in the body of knowledge took place in Northern Italy, rather than in any of the regions in China. He also examines why the Netherlands, in contrast to regions in China, offered a receptive environment to this new approach in river hydraulics from c. 1770. He suggests that differences in the development of knowledge can be explained primarily in terms of underlying socio-political structures.

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