Davids, K. & J. A. Lucassen, A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European
Perspective (1995), 539.
This volume of twelve essays is an interesting attempt to answer the question of
what made the Dutch Republic such a distinctive entity during the seventeenth century
and how it became just another European nation state by the nineteenth century. During
the early 1990s the authors held a collective fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Studies and subsequently published this often cited collection of comparative
historical essays, which seeks to identify the historical identity of the Netherlands. While
the authors do not offer a clear answer to their question, the volume serves as a good
introduction to some of the major questions raised by Dutch social and economic
historians about their history, many of which continue to be of Dutch historiographical.
Henk van Nierop compares the Dutch Revolt to the French Wars of Religion and
concludes that by about 1560 the majority of the population of the Low Countries appears
to have resigned themselves to the view that, while the old religion appeared to be dead,
there was yet no clear alternative. William Speck compares the political system of the
English and the Dutch in the late seventeenth century and suggests that there was much
truth in William III’s famous remark “that he was indeed the Stadholder-King, albeit a
Stadholder in England and a king in the United Provinces.” Speck finds many similarities
between England’s constitutional monarchy and the Dutch Republic while both differed
more fundamentally from stronger continental monarchies. Marc Boone and Maarten
Prak provide a good introduction to a strong tradition of rebellion in the Low Countries
from the medieval period to the Patriot Revolution during the late eighteenth century,
Margaret Spufford explains that the rate of literacy was considerably higher in the
Netherlands than in other European commercial centers. Peter Spufford provides a good
summary of how Europe’s financial leadership moved from Renaissance Italy to
Augsburg, Antwerp and Amsterdam. Wiebe Bergsma discusses religious pluralism and
Michael North offers a discussion of Dutch art as an important economic commodity.
Karle Davids explains the rise of technological leadership and its decline while Jan
Lucassen treats the segmentation of the Dutch labor force among various guilds and
localities. While most of these essays are not major original contributions to scholarship,
they are almost all well written, rooted in solid scholarship and serve as a handy
introduction to major topics in Dutch social and economic history. The essay by Luiten
van Zanden and Leo Noordegraaf does break new ground and is a good introduction to an
important on-going research program that seeks to explain in a worldwide comparative
perspective on why Dutch workers enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world
during the early modern period. Van Zanden has done a great deal of work on this
subject since this essay was published and perhaps the wealth of the Republic’s workers
and middle classes has become its most lasting legacy.