Anglo-Dutch Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Sjoerd Levelt, Esther van Raamsdonk and Michael D. Rose

This edited collection consists of twenty-three contributions by, mostly, young scholars, along with an introduction by the editors (Sjoerd Levelt, Esther van Raamsdonk and Michael D. Rose) and an afterword by Jonathan Israel, elder statesman of Dutch Golden Age history. Varied and wide-ranging, the contributions are arranged under seven headings: ‘Travel, Language and Education’, ‘Immigration, Empire, and Colonialism’, ‘News, Letters, and War’, ‘Print Culture’, ‘Literary and Diplomatic Exchange’, ‘Religious Pluralism and Radicalism’ and ‘Design, Technology, and Production’. Each contribution is approximately 5,000 words long, providing a taster of the authors’ larger research projects. Indeed, there is an abbreviated, unfinished feel to several chapters. Thankfully, each contribution is followed by extensive endnotes, which allows the reader to dive deeper into a subject, and a consolidated 34-page bibliography is provided.

The entangled histories of the Low Countries and British Isles are examined from a wide variety of perspectives and on a global scale. The time when Anglo-Dutch relations were studied mainly as interactions across the North Sea is long gone. It is encouraging to see a cultural history inflection throughout the volume, including in chapters on diplomacy, warfare and imperial competition and/or collaboration overseas. Several contributors emphasise the role played by contemporary narratives and narrators in presenting political developments and armed conflict to domestic and foreign audiences in the early modern period. Such stories could be relayed orally, or be written down or printed on paper, and/or could be staged in other ways (e.g. prayer days in churches, bonfires as victory celebrations, etc.). Frequently, these flitted from one medium to the next, reaching new audiences as they went. As shown by, for example, Alan Moss, Su Fang Ng, Deborah Hamer, Nina Lamal and Silke Muylaert, they can be read as both reflecting the balance of power in a given locality and as attempts by individuals (e.g. diplomats) or groups (e.g. the Hituese on Ambon) to change it. Another part of the mix were the political, legal and religious discourses promoting Anglo-Dutch kinship or enmity that appeared in print in Dutch, English and Latin on both sides of the North Sea, as shown by Gijs Rommelse (†), Jack Avery, Sjoerd Levelt, Hanna de Lange and Gary K. Waite. The chapters by Rommelse and De Lange complement my own 2021 article in the History of European Ideas on the publication of John Selden’s Mare Clausum and its diplomatic repercussions. This is a refreshing way to look at Anglo-Dutch competition and collaboration, which takes us far beyond set-piece naval battles in the North Sea and high politics conceived as the equivalent of a game of chess.

However, the volume does raise the question how ‘connected’ people were (or considered themselves to be) who were born or lived in the early modern Low Countries and British Isles. Competition and conflict at various levels was, and is, different from collaboration and mutual support and friendship. Are we talking about different phases of Anglo-Dutch relations, with friendship and collaboration the dominant mode in the first half of the seventeenth century and competition and conflict predominant in the second half, as suggested by Jonathan Israel? Or were there significant spatial differences, separating European theatres of interaction from the ones overseas, as implied by Hamer and Silvia Espelt-Bombin and Martijn van den Bel?

A useful corrective to lazy assumptions about ‘connection’ are three chapters with arresting quantitative data, compiled by Martine Zoeteman-Van Pelt, by Jelle van Lottum and Lodewijk Petram and by Yann Ryan and Esther van Raamsdonck, respectively. The graphs in their chapters show, for example, ‘British’ student numbers at the University of Leiden across two centuries (figure 3.2), English seafarers as a share of yearly documented new hires by the VOC in the period 1680–1794 (figure 8.2) and rankings for counts of the words ‘Dutch’ and ‘Orange’ as found in the abstracts of the Stuart State Papers preserved at the National Archives in Kew for the period 1600–1700 (figure 11.2). These authors also include maps indicating, for example, the places of origin of the VOC’s seafaring personnel in the period 1680–1794 (figure 8.1), ‘migratory connections in the North Sea around 1670’ (figure 8.3), and the places of origin for letters mentioning the word ‘Dutch’ in the SP 84 abstracts (map 11.3). What do we make of these graphs, tables, and maps? One important factor in the counts of the words ‘Dutch’ and ‘Orange’ in the SP84 abstracts must be the productivity of letter writers and the survival rates of their correspondence—Dudley Carleton, James I and VI’s ambassador in The Hague, outranking everybody else in this respect (table 11.1). Still, few historians will be surprised by the clear peaks in figure 11.2 for the second half of the seventeenth century, or by the fact that most letters in SP 84 were written in the coastal areas of the Low Countries and in ports along Britain’s south and east coasts. It reflects the volume of Dutch maritime trade through the English Channel and across the North Sea, and, of course, the impact of the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the Glorious Revolution.

More surprising perhaps are figures 8.1–8.3, which reveal that Englishmen constituted just a tiny percentage of the seafaring personnel hired by the VOC in the eighteenth century and that most of the VOC’s mariners came from the Low Countries, the German lands, and the Baltic area. As noted by Van Lottum, Englishmen migrated to London and took ship there for Asia or the Americas. As always, the Scots were a different kettle of fish, migrating primarily to Ireland and the Baltic area, but also to London and the Low Countries. Figure 3.2 shows that Scottish students outnumbered English ones at the University of Leiden in the period 1675–1725, for example. This kind of quantitative data suggests that the alleged ‘connections’ across the North Sea were far more complex than they appear to be at first glance. It also points to the urgent need for comparative research that considers many more areas in western and northern Europe than just England and the Dutch Republic.

Still, this collection provides both students and more established scholars with a useful entry into a great variety of research projects and fields of study, reflecting the most up-to-date scholarship.