The Dutch Foreign Policy in the National Historiography of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

In this article the author examines the stages of formation of the Dutch historiography on the issues of the country's foreign policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author has tried to identify all the studies in the field during the specified period and present them in chronological order. Interest in the development of Dutch foreign policy became particularly evident after the Belgian revolution of 1830, while the authors of numerous polemical writings were mainly politicians, statesmen representing the liberals and conservative clergymen (J.R. Thorbecke, G. Groen van Prinsterer), and law professors. In the middle of the century, as the international situation grew increasingly tense, political journalism gradually gave way to the first scholarly studies of foreign policy. A further step that gave impetus to historians' work on the subject was the work of the jurist G.W. Vreede, author, in addition to a large number of serious works on Dutch foreign policy, of a truly groundbreaking work on the history of the country's diplomacy since the end of the sixteenth century. In the early decades of the formation of the Dutch school of history only isolated dissertations on the subject of foreign policy appeared, namely works by the jurist J.C. de Jonge and the accomplished professional historians H.T. Colenbrander, N. Japikse and A.J. D'Ailly. They were written under the supervision of the country's leading historians, R.J. Fruin and P.J. Block at Leiden University and H.K. Rogge at the University of Amsterdam. At the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign policy became the subject of research by A. Kalshofen, S.V.A. Drossars, dissertators in the Department of National History at Leiden University. The author’s aim is to draw the attention of Russian scholars to the history of small states, the history of the Netherlands in particular, and its relevance stems from the possibility of working with many of the Dutch library collections, which have already been digitised in recent years. This allows one to embark on a more detailed study of the problems of foreign policy of the Netherlands in the Modern and Contemporary era and to introduce a set of new sources and monographs into the academic circuit.