The “arrival” of the Dutch in the Mediterranean Sea has, generally, not caused much rejoicing among historians. Scholars working in the wake of Ferdinand Braudel have instead come to associate the maritime ventures of Dutchmen during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the so-called Northern Invasion. As such, the Dutch—accompanied by their English and French neighbors of the north—allegedly brought cultural clashes and rising competition (both mercantile and military) to a Mediterranean that would soon lag behind the Atlantic as a space of trade, exchange, and migration. Yet Erica Heinsen-Roach's first book, Consuls and Captives: Dutch–North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean, masterfully flips the script on this narrative of disruption. She shows that it was, in fact, the Dutch themselves who had to learn how to adapt to Mediterranean ways of conducting diplomacy, commerce, and warfare.This learning process proved to be challenging. It took as long as 130 years, from 1596 to 1726. Heinsen-Roach carefully traces the misunderstandings, frustration, and violence that marked diplomatic contact between Dutch representatives and authorities in Constantinople, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé. The result is an impressive work of diplomatic history that draws from multiple Dutch archives as well as a large body of published source collections. Heinsen-Roach accordingly argues that diplomacy in the western Mediterranean “was the product of cultural encounters rather than of a European invention” (p. 2). This is something of a strawman, given the predominant and well-established trends in the historiography.1 Still, the particular story of how Dutch sailors, merchants, consuls, and naval commanders engaged intensively with North African actors over issues of corsairing and captivity has not yet been told (either in English, Dutch, or Arabic) with this degree of detail and insight.What truly characterized Dutch conduct in the early modern Mediterranean was the gradual realization that adjusting to local practices and traditions was not only wise but also necessary. Heinsen-Roach convincingly argues that Dutch actors, particularly the consuls on location, increasingly followed North African outlooks on treaty making, the ransom of captives, and gift giving. She once refers to this as a process of “mediterranization” (p. 4), which is a tantalizingly applicable term here. Consuls and Captives elaborates how that development unfolded in three chronological parts and eight thematic chapters, ranging from initial Maghrebi-Dutch diplomatic contact in the early sixteenth century to the institutionalizing of “normative relations” about a century later.Initially, as chapter 1 shows, the authorities of the United Provinces of the Netherlands wanted little to do with the North African “Barbary States.” They sought to protect their ships and sailors against raiding and captivity through capitulations from the Ottoman sultan. Yet the inefficiency of these capitulations in providing maritime security led to the first treaties with Algiers and Tunis in 1622 (chapter 2) as well as the opening of consulates that represented the Dutch state in North Africa (chapters 3 and 4). Heinsen-Roach then analyzes how the States General of the Republic got involved in the collective ransoming of captives, despite its decided unwillingness to do so (chapter 5), which further substantiates her arguments about the begruntled adjustment to local practices. Chapter 6 illustrates that there were also pushbacks against such adaptation. These took the shape of corruption charges and conflicts between Dutch consuls and Jewish agents over who truly represented the republic in North Africa. Shifting the perspective back to northwestern Europe, chapter 7 pushes the thought-provoking argument that the States General came to act (somewhat) like a central government only because North African authorities demanded that it did. Finally, chapter 8 recounts how diplomatic contact and practices of gift giving slowly turned into a tributary relationship at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the Dutch Republic was expected to deliver weaponry on an annual basis in return for peace. This shift is particularly significant because it would continue to shape Dutch-Maghrebi diplomacy all the way up to the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.Consuls and Captives does an excellent job of tracing this century-long process of adaptation in an impressively modest number of pages. That said, I was less convinced by the work's swift invocation of the (by now) ubiquitous “new diplomatic history,” with its penchant for cultural brokerage and “social practices of diplomacy” (p. 9). Ships and guns play a much more prominent role in the narrative than the cultural or social activities of the Dutch consuls. Naval force appears as a crucial factor at pivotal stages, whether it was on the brink of the first alliance with Morocco in 1607 (p. 27), during Michiel de Ruyter's demonstrations off Algiers in the 1650s (p. 101), or during the onset of the tributary relationships, which Heinsen-Roach attributes to the “decline of Dutch maritime operations in the Mediterranean” (p. 172). This begs the question as to whether sea power could perhaps be integrated into more culturalist approaches to diplomatic history, for instance by stressing the importance of local perceptions of naval might. Neither does Consuls and Captives manage to truly summon the “life and work” of consuls in North Africa like other recent works have, with thorough analysis of the consulates as social worlds and centers of knowledge production.2Still, as a work of diplomatic history, Consuls and Captives deserves praise for its chronological span, narrative finesse, and efficient analysis. It is highly recommended reading for specialists of the early modern Mediterranean, students of Dutch history, or anyone who finds cause to celebrate in seeing the “Northern Invasion” thesis get turned on its head.