Newcomers / druk 1

This book is en attempt to reconstruct the complete picture of the arrival of foreigners In the Netherlands from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, and to describe how they acquired a place in Dutch society. This is done by combining end integrating the sociological approach with the historical one. The authors turn their attention not only to the foreigners themselves. and their place in society, the question of how their descendants have fared is of much greater importance in the tong-term perspective chosen for this study. The deliberate choice to examine the arrival of newcomers and the process of the reception of immigrants end their descendants in the Netherlands over a len9thy period covering more than four centuries has important consequences for the nature of this study. It cannot attempt to give a full description, or make any pretensions to be one. The object is not encyclopaedic comprehensiveness, but the considered analysis of immigration end settlement processes, of the causes end the consequences associated with them, end of the constantly recurring elements which can be identified in each immigration flow and in each process of the settlement of a group of newcomers end their descendants. The tong-term perspective, and the restriction of discussion to the level of the group, leads to a detached analysis, which may sometimes appear even clinical, particularly if compared with the often strongly committed positions taken in the current Dutch literature on newcomers. From these central objectives it follows that attention must also be directed to Dutch society.