The Scholarly Atlantic: Circuits of Knowledge Between Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Americas in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter shows that Dutch actors, and especially scholars based in Leiden, played a significant role as creators and brokers of knowledge in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Remarkably, their role in the development and maintenance of networks of knowledge in the Atlantic persisted long after the Dutch Republic had entered its terminal phase as an economic and political power. The influence of Dutch scholars in Atlantic circuits of knowledge in the eighteenth century was in part a consequence of the peak in the international appeal of Dutch universities reached between ca. 1680 and 1730. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, almost a third of all graduates of Dutch graduates came from abroad. Of all students from the British Isles and North America in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, nearly three-quarters took a degree in Leiden. Keywords: Atlantic circuits; British Isles; Dutch Republic; Leiden; North America