11: The Society of Humanitarianism
The free-ish, the not-quite-free, and the un-free colonies of Belgium
This is the eleventh part of a series. You can find part one here.
I was reading James Plunkett’s End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken – and how we can fix it in the quiet week between Christmas and New Years Eve when I came across another piece of information that was so obvious no one had seen fit to mention it to me. As he explained the origins of means testing for social benefits, he listed off how:
“In Belgium, an entire settlement – the Merksplas Colony – was founded to house the poor; it was referred to as ‘a city of vagabonds, the largest colony of mendicants in the world’. At its peak, it became a labour camp of 5,000 inmates over 3,000 acres, filled with ‘physical degenerates’, ‘intellectual inferiors’ and ‘moral delinquents’.”
Perhaps if I had been a better tourist, I would have come across this sooner, as it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.
The Colonies of Benevolence were created in 1820 by Johannes van den Bosch, a military man on a break between restoring the Prince of Orange to power and restoring Dutch control over the West Indies. The colonies were run by his Society of Humanitarianism.
People were rounded up and sent to live in Geel – or within other prisons, traditional or colonies – en masse when the United Kingdom of the Netherlands outlawed vagrancy. They dealt with orphans, widows, the disabled, criminals, and the poor by shipping them off to low-population areas, which usually meant the Campine.
They were sorted by their willingness and ability to work and sent to colonies with various levels of freedom. Some were issued homes and given farmland to cultivate, while others lived in dormitories and worked under guard supervision. None of them were, however, free. All of them were legally wards of the state. Inmates could be promoted from an “unfree” to a “free” colony or deemed unfit and sent to a traditional enclosed prison. Inmates were issued scrip, rather than cash, to buy goods provided from the company stores.
Geel was very controversial in the 19th century. Here, we see that the “Geel Question” was:
Should we enclose existing rural farming areas into prisons or build custom towns? Should the regular peasants be allowed to mix with the “undesirables”?
Should inmates be given cash to shop at regular stores and cafes or provided with scrip to buy from special colony stores and cafes?
Geel was controversial because the community wasn’t closed and boarders were allowed to be paid in cash, although there was no requirement that they be paid anything at all.
The Colonies of Benevolence are UNESCO-worthy because of their urban planning and utopian social engineering. Google, a conglomerate which dabbles in urban planning, points out how “Nowhere else in the world has anyone ever carried out such a vast, extensive scheme to fight poverty in this way.”
The population of the two colonies in Belgium peaked at 6,000 in 1910. The total number of inmates in the seven Colonies of Benevolence peaked at 18,000 in the mid-19th century. UNESCO says that “After 1918, the colonies lost their relevance and evolved into ‘normal’ villages and areas with institutions for custodial care.”
UNESCO doesn’t mention what happened after 1918. The Koloniën van Weldadigheid picks up the story:
“In Belgium, from the 1920s onwards, the Colonies underwent a transformation. They are initially used as a national asylum, mainly for psychiatric patients. After the Second World War, vagrants and beggars again found refuge there. From 1955 onwards, Wortel-Kolonie became an independent institution for this group. Merksplas is undergoing major changes and is evolving into a penal institution. The abolition of the vagrancy law in 1993 meant the end of the two Colonies as such. Although there are still penal institutions in Wortel and Merksplas, the areas now mainly serve as recreational landscape and agricultural land.”
Wikipedia tells us the colony in Maatschappij van Weldadigheid was taken over by the Department of Corrections and turned into a penal colony by the end of the 19th century.1 Before 1984 only inmates and staff could enter the colony. In 1993 it officially became a prison. In 1998 it became part of the municipality of Noordenveld. It houses a prison museum, which asks us:
“Did you know that there are hundreds of thousands of Dutch people with an ancestor who once stayed in Veenhuizen as an orphan, beggar, vagrant or colonist? Often this history remains hidden within families, because at the time it was considered a disgrace when someone was sent to Veenhuizen.”
Champions of Geel are eager to claim Geel as the inspiration for all sorts of utopian experiments. I find it curious that these seven colonies don’t get a mention, when they were founded so soon after Geel’s initial burst of publicity and are located practically next door.
The Colonies of Benevolence don’t claim to be inspired by a saint. Their inspiration is the industrial revolution pushing the rural poor into overcrowded cities, along with economic turmoil that came with French conquest, the dissolution of the Dutch East India Company, and a poor harvest due to the eruption of Mount Tambora. Men inspired by Enlightenment thinking saw these poor people as lumps of clay to be molded into something better. They removed them from the chaos of their homes, placed them in orderly surroundings, and carefully monitored and controlled their behavior.
The organization now responsible for marketing one of the colonies as a tourist destination explains it:
“The idea behind this plan is very simple: society offers pieces of land and houses to people who are less fortunate. In return, they will provide for their own maintenance by working. As a result, they are no longer dependent on the government for (financial) support. In the long term, they will be able to repay their government debts through (agricultural) surpluses. The Society grows into a national experiment, with Prince Frederik as patron.”2
Alas, the inmates failed to evolve into ideal citizens.
After the Belgian state took over management of the colonies because of financial problems, the Society for Humanitarians became a foundation and shifted their focus to managing natural resources. Maybe I’ve become more Canadian than I realize, since I keep finding myself shocked by how upbeat discussions of the colonies are:
“The Kempen has no fewer than four prisons, two of them at the former charity agricultural colonies in Merksplas and Wortel. If you had no job, permanent residence and no means of subsistence, you were sent to the Colony until '93.
Tens of thousands of vagabonds were forced to work in a healthy, green environment. A blessing for some, a curse for others, but certainly a unique social experiment.”
Ah, yes, the blessing of being sent to a penal colony to perform “unfree” labor!
In addition to the prison museum, there is a museum for the experimental colony, and the two Belgian colonies are open to the public. There is a Benevolent Colony themed restaurant and B&B.
The transformation of a colony of unfree laborers to a prison after imprisonment based on personal traits (poverty, madness, disability, poverty) was outlawed is not unique. One other example is the Louisiana State Penitentiary. It transitioned from the Angola Plantation, which had used both enslaved people and labor through the convict lease system, to a prison in 1901. The prison it eventually replaced served as a receiving station, which assessed and sorted prisoners before sending them to labor, until 1917. The prison, like many others, uses the supposedly voluntary labor of prisoners to produce agricultural products for sale. Laborers earn up to $0.40 an hour today.
The Colonies of Benevolence were created while New South Wales was a penal colony and shortly before the US homestead acts.