page_title: Haarlem
section_title: Cotton mills
hierarchical_section_title: Haarlem / History / 19th century / Cotton mills
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of 3 cotton mills of Haarlem, 19th century. The upper two are positioned across from each other in the engraving, but were on different sides of town from each other. Upper left: Mill "Drukkerij en rood-verwerij" located on Kinderhuissingel/Garenkokerskade. Upper right: Mill "Weverij de Phoenix" located on the Phoenixstraat. Middle: Bleaching mill: "Bleekerij" located on the Kinderhuissingel. On either side of this building (originally owned by Thomas Wilson) two sides of a commemorative coin "Prijspenning" - on the left the text "Belgar Industriae Artes Remuneratae ex Decreto Reg" and on the right the text "Nederlandsche Maatschappij ter bevordering van Nijverheid 1778", which is the club in Haarlem which issued the coin. It was started in 1778 as Maatschappij ter bevordering van Nijverheid, and under the same name but with the "Nederlandsche" prefix, continued to award industrial prizes after 1825 (the Belgian secession).
context_page_description: Haarlem is a city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland and is situated at the northern edge of the Randstad, one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Europe, and is also part of the Amsterdam metropolitan area. Haarlem had a population of 161,265 in 2019.
  Haarlem was granted city status or stadsrechten in 1245, although the first city walls were not built until 1270. The modern city encompasses the former municipality of Schoten as well as parts that previously belonged to Bloemendaal and Heemstede. Apart from the city, the municipality of Haarlem also includes the western part of the village of Spaarndam. Newer sections of Spaarndam lie within the neighbouring municipality of Haarlemmermeer.
context_section_description: The Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM or Dutch Trade Company) was founded by King Willem I to create employment opportunities. As one of the cities in the western part of the Netherlands with the worst economic situation, three cotton mills were created in Haarlem under the NHM-program in the 1830s. These were run by experts from the Southern Netherlands, whom the NHM considered better at mechanical weaving through the local expertise of Lieven Bauwens. The lucky contract winners were Thomas Wilson, whose factory was situated north of what is today the Wilsonplein, Guillaume Jean Poelman, who was in business with his nephew Charles Vervaecke from Ghent and had a factory on what today is the Phoenixstraat, and Jean Baptiste Theodore Prévinaire, who had a factory on the Garenkokerskade and whose son Marie Prosper Theodore Prévinaire created the Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij in 1875.
  These cotton factories produced goods for export, and because the Dutch government levied heavy taxes on foreign cotton producers this was a profitable business for the NHM-factories, especially for export to the Dutch East Indies. The programme started in the 1830s, and was initially successful, but after 1839 when Belgium was split away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the protectionist measures for the Dutch East Indian market were removed and the business began to flounder. When the American Civil War reduced the import of raw cotton significantly after 1863, the business went sour. Only Prévinaire was able to survive through specialisation with his "Turkish Red" dye. The Prévinaire "toile Adrinople" was popular. Prévinaire's son went on to create the Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, which made a kind of imitation batik cloth called "La Javanaise" that became popular in Belgian Congo.
caption: Cotton mills in Haarlem in the 19th century
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