Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory
A fascinating exploration of the relationship of competition and assimilation between the Netherlands and England during the 17th century, revealing the ways in which Dutch tolerance, resilience and commercial acumen effectively conquered Britain by reshaping its intellectual landscape, long before Dutch monarchs sat on the English throne.This edition does not include illustrations.Working backwards from the bloodless revolution that set William and Mary of Orange on the English throne in 1688, this bold and ambitious work redefines the history of cultural and commercial interconnection between two of the world's most powerful trading empires at a time of great intellectual and geographical discovery.Weaving together the lives of the great thinkers of the time, Lisa Jardine demonstrates how individuals such as Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Christiaan Huygens and Margaret Cavendish, usually depicted as instances of isolated genius, in fact evolved within a context of easy Anglo-Dutch exchange that laid the groundwork for the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.Beautifully illustrated throughout, this is a fascinating history of big ideas and remarkable individuals. It denounces the traditional view that the rise of England as a world power took place at the expense of the Dutch, asserting instead that what is usually interpreted as the decline of the Dutch trading empire was in fact a 'passing on' of the baton to a Britain expanding in power and influence.
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For Moti
Contents
Map: The United Provinces, or Dutch Republic
Authorâs Note: Names, Money and Dates
1. England Invaded by the Dutch: The Conquest that Never Was
2. From Invasion to Glorious Revolution: Editing Out the Dutch
3. Royal and Almost-Royal Families: âHow England Came to be Ruled by an Orangeâ
4. Designing Dutch Princely Rule: The Cultural Diplomacy of âMr Hugginsâ
5. Auction, Exchange, Traffic and Trickle-Down: Dutch Influence on English Art
6. Double Portraits: Mixed and Companionate Marriages
7. Consorts of Viols, Theorbos and AngloâDutch Voices
8. Masters of All They Survey: AngloâDutch Passion for Gardens and Gardening
9. Paradise on Earth: Garnering Riches and Bringing Them Home
10. AngloâDutch Exchange and the New Science: A Chapter of Accidents
11. Science Under the Microscope: More AngloâDutch Misunderstandings
12. AngloâDutch Influence Abroad: Competition, Market Forces and Money Markets on a Global Scale
This is a book about cultural exchange between England and the Dutch Republic â an extraordinary process of cross-fertilisation which took place in the seventeenth century, between the life and thought of two rapidly developing countries in northern Europe. The two territories, jostling for power on the world stage, politically and commercially, recognised that they had a great deal in common. Still, each of them represented itself â and has continued to do so ever since â as absolutely independent and unique.
As a historian I was prompted to write Going Dutch by recurrent questions I faced from readers of my previous work on the seventeenth century, including my biographies of Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, concerning the so-called âGlorious Revolutionâ (neither glorious, nor a revolution) of 1688. Could I explain what that was, and how it happened? Could I also explain how two countries which regularly declared themselves sworn enemies (to the point of declarations of war) in the period should, apparently seamlessly, have merged administrations and institutions by 1700?
When I tried to provide succinct, straightforward answers I quickly realised that I could not give a halfway comprehensible account of the arrival at Torbay in November 1688 of William III, Prince of Orange, with a large fleet and a considerable army, without providing my questioners with a complicated back-story. Indeed, in the end, the story leading up to the invasion turned out to be an involved, far-reaching narrative on an almost epic scale, that needed to be told. So here it is.
Aside from such direct requests for information, as someone with an abiding interest in the way cultural currents and patterns of thought form and are sustained through time, I was drawn to thinking about AngloâDutch relations in the seventeenth century because in my own research I found myself increasingly unable to understand the intellectual, cultural and scientific worlds of Britain and the Netherlands if I kept them apart. Documents â letters and manuscripts â relating to the rise of science in the period, for example, regularly involved correspondents or collaborators across the water. Would British members of the Royal Society in London, including Robert Boyle, Wren and Hooke, have arrived at many of their important original scientific and technological discoveries if they had not been in continuous and mutually advantageous intellectual contact with their Dutch counterparts, among them Christiaan Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam?
In art and music the cross-fertilisation was even more obvious as soon as one gave the matter any serious attention. Musicians moved between the courts at London and The Hague, exchanging repertoires and techniques. Almost without exception, the great painters of this period, whose works hang prominently at the National Gallery and Tate Britain in London, and include many familiar portraits of the English royal family and prominent members of the court and city circles, were of Netherlandish origin, including, most obviously, Anton van Dyck, Pieter Lely and Pieter Paul Rubens. Of course, there were other players in the cultural exchange game (France in particular), but it seemed to me that the interplay between Britain and the Low Countries deserved more attention than it had traditionally been given.
There also seemed to me to be a seductive similarity between the fortunes of the United Provinces (the seven provinces of the northern Netherlands) at the end of the Dutch Golden Age, and that state Britain finds itself in today. Visibly losing power on the world stage, and with her commercial supremacy increasingly challenged by other enterprising nations, the Dutch Republic nevertheless continued to hold its place culturally in Europe. Its style and taste, in everything from art, architecture and music to faïence, lace and tableware, permeated the European sensibility â and beyond it, the sensibilities of those settling new lands across the ocean (faïence and silverware made to the highest Dutch standards survive from the early Dutch colonies on the east coast of the United States). That Dutch sensibility continued to exert influence long after the Dutch nation had lost its last foothold on world power, and might be considered, I shall argue, still to define what we consider northern European in cultural terms today.
