A Corpus of Early Modern Decision-Making - the Resolutions of the States General of the D utch R epublic (2025)

Abstract: This paper presents a corpus of early modern Dutch resolutions made in the daily meetings of the States General, the central governing body of the Dutch Republic, over a period of 220 years, from 1576 to 1796. This corpus has been digitised from over half a million scans of mostly handwritten text, segmented into individual resolutions (decisions) and enriched with named entities and metadata extracted from the text of the resolutions. We developed a pipeline for automatic text recognition for historic Dutch, and a document segmentation approach that combines ML classifiers trained on annotated data with rule-based fuzzy matching of the highly formulaic language of the resolutions. The decisions that the States General made were often based on propositions (requests or proposals) submitted in writing, by other governing bodies and by citizens of the republic. The resolutions contain information about these submitted propositions, including the persons and organisations who submitted them. The second part of this paper includes an analysis of the information about these proposition documents that can be extracted from the resolutions, and the potential to link the resolutions to their corresponding propositions using named entities and extracted metadata. We find that for the overwhelming majority of propositions, we can identify the name of person or organisation who submitted it, making it feasible to (semi-)automatically link the resolutions to their corresponding proposition documents. This will allow historians and genealogists to study not only the decision making of the States General in the early modern period, but also the concerns put forward by both high-ranking officials and regular citizens of the Republic.

## introduction we present the dataset of resolutions of the states general of the dutch republic (from 1576 until 1796), a corpus of 692,712 resolutions (decisions) and 130 million words of early modern dutch text. in addition, we release a dataset of almost 8 million associated entity mentions, and at least partial disambiguation and linking to entities for 5 million of these mentions. 1 the resolutions are the decisions taken by central governing body of the dutch republic, which were written down as minutes during daily meetings for a period of 220 years, and extended and recorded in resolution books. this corpus is of great relevance to researchers for multiple reasons. first, for political historians, the states general (sg) of the dutch republic is an important example of early modern republic decision making, and the long period allows researchers to trace the different steps in decision making processes as well as analyse the interaction of the sg with foreign powers, regional organisations and individual citizens. second, for linguistics, the consistent recording of decisions during daily meetings for 220 years, by a relatively small group of clerks, represents a great resource for studying changes in spelling, word choice and syntax in a specific domain. third, the resolutions were made in response to requests or proposals submitted to the sg, mostly in written form, and these documents have been archived and recently digitised as well. this offers an opportunity to link the resolutions to the archive of correspondence send to the sg and improve accessibility to those documents. in this paper, we describe how the corpus was constructed, analyse which organisations and individuals send requests or proposals to the sg to understand how the sg interacted with different groups in society, and with that, explore the potential for linking the resolutions to the archive of incoming correspondence. each resolution consist of a proposition (a request or proposal submitted to the sg, mostly in written form) and the decision on that proposition. an example handwritten resolution, made on 28 january 1647, is shown in figure 1 , in which a secretary, henrico cops, has send two missives foot_1 , figure 2: first part of a printed resolution of 1756-09-01. source: https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/ onderzoeken/archief/1.01.02/invnr/3811/file/ nl-hana_1.01.02_3811_0303 in august and november 1646 from constantinople (current-day istanbul). the transcription of the proposition paragraphs read: ontfangen een missive vanden secretaris henrico cops geschreven tot constantinopolen den 24e. augustij lestleden, houdende advertentie, waerop egeen resolutie en is gevallen. ontfangen een missive van deselve, geschreven ter plaetse als vooren den 23e. november 1646 houdende in effict dat den vezijer bem hem heeft doen roupen, ende met groote alteratien furien, ende injurien geseijt dat van alle canten seeckere advisen hebben becoomen, ... (en: received a missive of the same, written on location as previous on the 23rd of november 1646, stating in effect that the vizier bem had summoned him and, with great agitation, fury, and insults, declared that they had received certain reports from all sides, ... no detail is provided about the content of the first missive and no decision is taken, but in the second missive, cops asks for an 'ad omnes populos' (a passport) for his housekeeper, which is granted in the decision part (not shown). an example of a printed resolution, taken on 1 september 1756, is shown in figure 2 , in which the proposition is a 'requeste' (petition) by jeanne bruches, widow of etienne caulet, living in delft, requesting a annual pension of 300 guilders. the resolutions have a very regular structure and contain many formulaic phrases @xcite , which allow us to algorithmically extract metadata about each resolution. this includes the date of the resolution and how the proposition was submitted, e.g. orally during the meeting, or in writing. for written proposals, the resolutions mention the type of documente.g. a missive or a petition as in the examples above, but there are various other types-which is strongly related with the status of the proposer. missives are always associated with formally appointed representatives of the sg, while petitions could be submitted by anyone. we also tagged the corpus of resolutions with seven types of entities, including four common types-persons, locations, organisations and dates-and three domain-and corpus-specific types: committees, references to earlier resolutions and person attributions. committees were small groups of persons selected from the members of the states general and tasked to investigate a matter and report back before a final decision is taken. references to earlier resolutions represent a link between two resolutions. together, the committees and references allow one to trace the chain of decision making around specific matters. finally, person attributions are part of person entities that have been tagged separately to separate person proper names from other identifying attributions like professions (e.g. carpenter, ship captain, ambassador or lawyer), titles (duke, earl or queen) and legal status (e.g. daughter, son, widow, minor, orphan or heir) outside of our project, the incoming correspondence of written propositions has been digitised as well, 3 prompting us to analyse whether we can use the patterns in the resolutions about the proposer and proposing document that can help in linking the resolutions to their corresponding proposition document. we address the following research questions: in this paper we make the following contributions. first, we publish the resolutions as long serial corpus with rich metadata as an open access dataset. second, we analyse proposition patterns to show that most propositions are submitted by single persons or organisations, mostly from the domains of politics and administration, but that there are tens of thousands of propositions made by regular citizens of the republic. and third, we show that, because of the highly standardised format of the resolutions, we can extract metadata from the majority of resolutions about the proposition, which can help us link them to the submitted proposition documents. ## related work the resolutions of the sg only reflect the decision making process. thomassen calls the sg a decision making machine. final decisions were usually assumed to be taken unanimously, and the deliberations were not recorded @xcite . this contrasts with records of parliamentary debates, which contain not just the final decisions, but also the deliberations, that is, the exchange of political arguments. well-known examples of modern parliamentary debates are the parlamint corpora foot_3 @xcite , but there are also more historical corpora of debates @xcite . there is a long tradition in publishing parliamentary deliberations, decisions and associated papers, that started in the 19th century in book form. more recently, many of these books have been digitised and sometimes extended for better access (see @xcite for an overview of earlier ## the corpus of resolutions we published the corpus of resolutions of the states general of the dutch republic as an open access resource on zenodo @xcite ). 6 this long, serial publication is relevant for research on, amongst other, linguistics, political history and political science. each resolution contains at least a decision paragraph. from 1637, all resolutions consisted of three parts: (1) a paragraph describing a proposition submitted in a written document-e.g. a missive, petition, letter, report, bill or memo-and some details of what was proposed or requested, (2) a decision paragraph detailing what action is to be taken-which can include postponing a decision and asking for advice first, or to not take any action-and (3), a decision making formula that connects the two. this formula is a more-orless fixed phrase, "waerop gedelibereert synde, is goetgevonden ende verstaen dat" (en: upon deliberation, it has been accepted and understood that). however, even once the formula was more-or-less fixed, still variations occurred, either intentionally or unintentionally (omitting parts, changing word order or using different spelling). each resolution has metadata including the date on which the decision was taken, the type of proposition, and whether it was an ordinary or a secret resolution. many decisions relating to e.g. matters of war or political negotiation were considered sensitive and recorded in separate secret resolution books, which were only accessible a small group of actors. ## proposition analysis this section provides an analysis of the proposers who submitted documents to the sg. we first describe the number and entity types of proposers and how they relate to types of proposition documents. second, we look at the syntactic structure of the formulaic phrases and how they can be combined with named entities to identify the proposers. finally, we consider the categories assigned to entities to shed light on what kinds of persons and organisations submitted different types of proposition documents. ## conclusions in this paper we introduced the corpus of the resolutions of the states general of the dutch republic (1576-1796) as an open access dataset of early modern political decision making. we described its construction in terms of text transcription, document segmentation, entity recognition and metadata extraction. using a combination of machine learning and rule-based methods that employ domain-and corpus-specific knowledge and expertise, we were able to transform 657 books of handwritten and printed texts into a corpus of 692,712 individual resolutions (decisions) and automatically assign metadata about the proposition that forms the first part of most resolutions. in addition, we conducted an analysis of the persons who submitted documents to the states general, which were in many cases the source of the resolutions. our main reason for this investigation is that these corresponding documents have been digitised (but not yet segmented or enriched with metadata). next steps include developing a more detailed ground truth set of proposition documents, proposers, intermediaries and relationships and train models to automatically extract the proposition information more explicitly.