Abstract

This review article discusses recent publications by David Onnekink, Sophus Reinert, Gijs Rommelse, Jacob Soll, and Arthur Weststeijn from the perspective of the reception of Dutch economic and political thought in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The Dutch Republic has been called ‘the first modern economy’ by Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude. It looms large in ongoing academic and public policy debates about ‘The Great Divergence’, i.e. the question why the West made the transition to an industrialized economy around 1800, while China did not. Just how innovative the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic were in nearly all aspects of life is well-documented. Less attention has been paid to the reaction of contemporary Europeans. How did they perceive the Dutch example? What did they learn from it? Was the miracle really mirrored elsewhere? These are questions that deserve more attention than they have received in Dutch historiography hitherto.

Highlights

  • This review article discusses recent publications by David Onnekink, Sophus Reinert, Gijs Rommelse, Jacob Soll, and Arthur Weststeijn from the perspective of the reception of Dutch economic and political thought in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe

  • One question left unanswered by A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge 1995) – a classic in the field – is how other Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reacted to the

  • What were the lessons learned by the allies and enemies of the United Provinces? How did theorizing on the Dutch Golden Age – in the

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Summary

Techniques of information management

The digital revolution has made information flows in times past a burgeoning field of inquiry. There are at least three international, crossdisciplinary e-humanities projects mapping scholarly networks in early modern Europe. Not surprisingly, these projects confirm that the Dutch Republic formed a nexus of intellectual exchange.. Knaw.nl/), ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ at the University of Oxford For Dutch history, there is nothing as yet that compares with, for example, Jacob Soll’s The Information Master, a highly original and engaging study of the statecraft of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. If we may believe Soll, Colbert created the ‘universal state archive’ He understood the signal importance of ‘having, or claiming to have, the most complete document bank in Europe, which could be used in questions of international law, precedence, ecclesiastical rights, and theology’ [101]. Could a riveting study be written of the statecraft of John de Witt?

The role of diplomats
Ideology in foreign policy
Political economy and the circulation of knowledge
Political economy in Holland
Commercial Republicanism examines the political thought of the
Rethinking mercantilism?
List of reviewed publications
Full Text
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