How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500–1800 by Jonathan Scott, and: Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 by Bram Hoonhout

Abstract

Reviewed by: How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500–1800 by Jonathan Scott, and: Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 by Bram Hoonhout Evan Haefeli (bio) How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500–1800 jonathan scott Yale University Press, 2019 392 pp. Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 bram hoonhout University of Georgia Press, 2020 272 pp. Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Anglo-Dutch relations played a decisive role in the creation of the Anglo-American Atlantic world. It was an ambivalent relationship, beginning with the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt against their Spanish Hapsburg monarchs, a revolt prompted in large part by the rise of Reformed Protestantism within the Low Countries. In general, the British benefited from this relationship more than the Dutch. Politically, this connection produced an Anglo-Dutch alliance against the Roman Catholic empires first of Spain and then of France. That alliance led to involvement with each other's domestic politics, which led to the marriage of the Dutch Prince William of Orange to the English Princess Mary Stuart and culminated with the two becoming King William and Queen Anne of Britain and its colonies in 1689, providing a degree of political stability that Britain's indigenous dynasty could not. Religiously, the affinity between Dutch Reformed Protestantism and British Protestants allowed the original Dutch [End Page 588] rebels to find shelter in England. After they created the comparatively tolerant Dutch Republic, English dissidents, like the Separatists who eventually founded the colony of Plymouth as well as the royalists driven out by the revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, found refuge in Holland. Economically, the English followed the path to global trade pioneered by the vibrant shipping industry of the Republic. Emulation was part of this relationship, but mostly it involved an aggressive takeover of Dutch trade and territory. They seized from the Dutch New Netherland in North America, the lands in South America and Africa that became Guyana and South Africa, as well as parts of Asia, not least the island of Sri Lanka. By the early nineteenth century the British were far wealthier and more powerful at home and overseas thanks to what they were able to take from the Dutch. However, this was not a purely parasitic relationship. The Dutch may have gotten the short end of the stick, but at least they survived—and a number of them got quite rich. Without British support it is likely that the Dutch would have lost their independence to either the Spanish or the French. Both countries conquered and controlled the Republic at various points between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When revolutionary French armies overran Holland, Britain sheltered the aristocratic House of Orange and then ensured that it was restored to its homeland as a monarchy, creating the dynasty that still presides over the Netherlands. The two books considered here capture different aspects of this saga, reminding us that neither the British nor the Dutch made it to modernity on their own. Jonathan Scott's wide-ranging synthesis attributes Britain's Industrial Revolution, the event that put an end to the "Old World," to the dynamic of competition and interchange between these neighbors across the North Sea. He pulls in North America to a certain extent, but most colonial issues, like slavery, are marginal to his narrative. They cannot be avoided if one looks farther south, to the Caribbean, however, and slavery is central to Bram Hoonhout's monographic study. Drawing on the scant available sources, he has pieced together a compelling history of the largely overlooked case of the Dutch South American plantation colonies along the Demerara and Essequibo Rivers that, together with those along the Berbice, became British Guyana after 1814. These works appear at an opportune time for reevaluating the Anglo-Dutch relationship and its contribution to modern life. Scholarship on the Dutch role in the Atlantic world has increased substantially over the past [End Page 589] two decades, and increasingly that work is appearing in English, opening up a world otherwise isolated from Anglophones by one of the leastknown Western European languages (for...