:Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

Abstract

Lisa Jardine begins this work on Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century with a paradox. Recent historiography (particularly the work of Jonathan I. Israel) has shown that England's Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 was, to a large extent, a Dutch invasion. A foreign force (far larger than that assembled by the Spanish for their Armada exactly a century before) landed in Devon, and then marched on the English capital with a military professionalism that destroyed the resistance of James II. Yet this event has not been remembered as an alien occupation. Within weeks of its occurrence, it was being rewritten as a calm and bloodless return of the English constitution to its proper paths. Jardine explains this remarkable refashioning by pointing to decades of contact between England and the Netherlands, a series of interactions that dated back to at least the start of the Stuart age. As she states toward the end of her ninth chapter: “Mutual recognition cushioned the impact of the invasion. Retrospectively, it blurred and diffused the national memory. Here was no conquest: here was an affinity—a meeting of minds and sensibilities.” The rest of the book illustrates the international exchange which created this shared culture in a wealth of vivid example. Readers are therefore taken through the entanglements of the Orange and Stuart families that led to two dynastic alliances in 1641 and 1677. Jardine also focuses on the multifaceted Anglo-Dutch careers of two Constantijn Huygens (father and son) and their transnational influences in political thought, propaganda, art, architecture, gardening, natural science, and marriage. Again, she argues that English advances in the organization and financing of a large military state, and in the encouragement of an extensive overseas commercial empire (the advances which propelled eighteenth-century Britain to its global predominance in the eighteenth century), were in fact copied from Holland as people travelled to the United Provinces and marvelled at their innovative systems of public credit and their dynamic joint stock companies. All of this matches recent academic stress on analyzing seventeenth-century England in a European context, and Jardine's volume does great service spreading this message. Through its competitive retail price, its engaging prose and attractive pictures, and its generous acknowledgement of other scholars' work, this book will bring Anglo-Dutch transnationalism to a large popular audience and for this, as well as for its interesting reflections on the distorted memory of 1688, Jardine deserves praise.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.