scholarly journals “No Intrigue Is Spared”: Anglo-American Intelligence Networks in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Matthijs Tieleman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Postal Services ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract This article surveys previously underexamined American and British intelligence networks that operated in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and demonstrates the relevance of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to the larger history of the Netherlands, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary Atlantic. The Dutch Republic's favourable geographic location, its postal services, its sophisticated press, and its mercantile economy made it an ideal place to extract information and build intelligence networks, shaping power politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Additionally, this article illustrates how these Anglo-American intelligence networks affected the Dutch Republic and the revolutionary Atlantic. In the late 1770s, American revolutionaries successfully deployed their intelligence network to unleash a propaganda campaign that aimed to convince the Dutch public of their cause. By infiltrating the liberal and sophisticated Dutch printing press, the American revolutionaries not only succeeded in fostering political support among the Dutch public; they also created a transatlantic intellectual exchange with the Dutch opposition that laid the foundations of the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s and ultimately the dissolution of the Dutch Republic as a whole in 1795.

A Loyalist Who Loved His Country too Much: Thomas Hutchinson, Historian of Colonial Massachusetts

2017 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-384
Author(s):  
Liam Riordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Culture ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
British Atlantic World

A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay (published 1764-1828) recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography. Hutchinson's vilification by patriots still obscures our understanding of his loyalism. The article reassesses late colonial society, the American Revolution, and Anglo-American culture in the British Atlantic World.

Intellectual Change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the Reception of Cartesian Thought, 1650–1700

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Provinces

This article argues that intellectual historians' fascination with a narrative of the emerging Scottish enlightenment has led to a neglect of ideas that did not shape enlightenment culture. As a contribution to a less teleological intellectual history of Scotland, the article examines the reception of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian thought enjoyed a brief period of popularity from the 1670s to the 1690s but appeared outdated by the mid-eighteenth century. Debates about Cartesianism illustrate the ways in which late seventeenth-century Scottish intellectual life was conditioned by the rivalry between presbyterians and episcopalians, and by fears that new philosophy would undermine christianity. Moreover, the reception of Cartesian thought exemplifies intellectual connections between Scotland and the Netherlands. Not only did Descartes' philosophy win its first supporters in the United Provinces, but the Dutch Republic also provided the arguments employed by the main Scottish critics of Cartesianism. In this period the Netherlands was both a source of philosophical innovation and of conservative reaction to intellectual change.

scholarly journals Beyond the Subject: Anglo-American Slave Narratives in the Netherlands, 1789-2013

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. VC56-VC84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marijke Huisman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Dutch History

In recent years life writing scholars have increasingly linked the autobiographical genre to human rights causes, such as abolitionism. This article aims to historicize and contextualize the presupposed connection between human rights and the human subject of autobiographical discourse by focusing on the cultural mobility of Anglo-American slave narratives. Tracing their presence in the Netherlands since the late eighteenth century, it is demonstrated that slave narratives were considered of no value to Dutch abolitionism and Dutch debates on slavery and its legacy until very recently. Publishers and readers did, however make sense of slave narratives as sensational, gothic literature. Furthermore, the narratives were appropriated by Dutch fundamentalist Protestants advocating the nation’s emancipation from its state of spriritual “slavery”. Only when secularization converged with post-colonial migration patterns new interpretations stressing Black experience, agency, and subjectivity came to the fore in the Netherlands. Inspired by African-American rhetoric, Afro-Dutch migrants appropriated slave narratives in order to break the public silence on the Dutch history of slavery. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in June 2014 and published in April 2015.

scholarly journals Water and national identity in the Netherlands; the history of an idea

Water History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Mostert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Water History ◽  
Stimulate Action ◽  
National Pride ◽  
External Threats ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Roman Catholics

AbstractAccording to a popular Dutch theory, water has shaped the Dutch national identity. The Dutch fight against the water would have stimulated perseverance, ingenuity, cooperation and an egalitarian and democratic society. Despite the long water management history of the Netherlands, water became an important part of the self-images of the nation only in the eighteenth Century. In the 1780s the idea that the Dutch had wrung their country from the sea became popular. Initially, this idea was especially popular among the (proto-)liberal opposition, who emphasised the importance of the nation and its achievements. By the end of the nineteenth Century, water had become a national symbol for orthodox Calvinists, Roman Catholics and Socialists too, despite their different views on the nation. Whenever there was fast social change, political turmoil or external threats, as in the late eighteenth Century, the 1930s and 1940s and since the 1990s, the link between water and the Netherlands was used to promote national pride and unity and stimulate action. This link has also been used to promote specific hydraulic works, but it is a topic for further research how widespread and effective this practice was. As this paper is part of a special issue, Water History in the time of COVID-19, it has undergone modified peer review.

Natives and Newcomers

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-68
Author(s):  
Brooks Blevins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Louisiana Purchase ◽  
Lead Mining

Chapter 2 follows the earliest history of human activity in the Ozark uplift, from the emergence of the Osages as the overlords of the region to the resettlement of the Cherokees and other “immigrant Indians” from east of the Mississippi and their eventual removal in the 1820s and 1830s. This chapter also explores the arrival of the first European settlers in the Mississippi Valley, the French, in the eighteenth century and the lead mining interests that brought them into the Ozarks, as well as the subsequent administrations of French and Spanish colonial officials. The chapter concludes with the arrival of Anglo-American settlers and their slaves, both before and after the Louisiana Purchase.

Retrospect on J.C. van Leur's Essay on the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Asian History

Itinerario ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
European History ◽  
General View ◽  
History Of ◽  
Limited Scale ◽  
Asian History

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.

Public Orders into Moral Communities: Eighteenth-Century Fast and Thanksgiving Day Sermons in the Dutch Republic and New England

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 218-239
Author(s):  
Peter van Rooden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Civil Authority ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
New England Colonies

In the eighteenth century, both in the Dutch Republic and in the colonies of New England, collective repentance and social reconciliation with God were institutionalized in great common rituals. In both polities, Fast and Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed by civil authority, and these occasions brought people together into churches to hear ministers interpret their common situation. These rituals were the main way in which the New England colonies and the Dutch Republic expressed their unity as political communities. It was this aspect of these sermons that made them of interest to nineteenth-century American and Dutch historians. In the nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands, N. C. Kist, the first holder of the newly instituted chair of Church History at Leiden University, finished his career with his two-volume Neêrlands Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven, offering both an interpretation and an antiquarian overview of all the Fast Days proclaimed in the Netherlands. In the United States, William de Loss Love published his exquisite The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England in 1895, similarly offering both an antiquarian list of all Fast and Thanksgiving Days and an analysis. Kist was deeply involved with the nation-building project of the early nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. De Loss Love, the first chaplain of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, was as inspired by modern nationalism as Kist was. Both scholars interpreted the Fast-day ritual as an indication of the high moral purpose and commitment to the nation of their ancestors.

scholarly journals The Netherlands (Dutch Revolt/ Dutch Republic)

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk van Nierop
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
The Other ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

By the middle of the 16th century the Netherlands consisted of some twenty principalities and lordships, loosely connected under the rule of Emperor Charles V. The heir of the dukes of Burgundy, Charles ruled these lands as his own patrimony. They roughly covered the area of the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as a strip of northern France. During the rule of Philip II, king of Spain (r. 1555–1598), Charles’s son and successor, a revolt broke out. From c. 1580 onward Philip succeeded in bringing the southern provinces of the Netherlands (roughly modern-day Belgium) back to obedience, while the northern provinces (roughly the area covered by today’s Netherlands) retained their independence. The northern provinces came to be known as the “United Netherlands” or the “Dutch Republic,” the southern ones as the “Spanish Netherlands.” What had begun as a rebellion turned into regular warfare between the Dutch Republic, on the one side, and Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, on the other. The so-called Twelve Year Truce interrupted the fighting between 1609 and 1621. It was not until 1648 that the belligerents finally concluded peace. After 1585 (the capture of Antwerp by the Spanish army), the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands gradually drifted apart as they became two separate states, and, even more slowly, they developed their own national cultures and identities. The consequence for historiography is that the history of the Netherlands until the end of the 16th century is best studied as a whole, while the histories of the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands during the 17th century are usually studied separately.

Boundaries and Paths

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-46
Author(s):  
Angela Calcaterra
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native People ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
Line Survey ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
William Byrd

Chapter 1 traces intersections between Indigenous maps in the early eighteenth-century colonial southeast and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (written in the years following the 1728 boundary-line survey). It shows that the creation of an Anglo-American colonial border and a text considered highly literary cannot be separated from the real and figurative lines Catawba, Cherokee, Weyanoke, and other Native people drew to distinguish polities in the region. Native peoples’ maps, narratives, and political assertions of space and relations shaped the Virginia-North Carolina boundary dispute and survey at every turn, contributing to the meandering form of Byrd’s History, a text he never completed to his satisfaction. Native creative practices were central to colonial American literatures of space and place.

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