The Revolution In Dutch Foreign Policy (1688)

Chapter Summary

This chapter provides a window onto a series of pamphlet debates to show how they may be used as sources for 'rolling back', from 1779 to 1741, a series of interconnected debates that accompanied the unfolding of a political process that led to the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. The study of mid-eighteenth-century Dutch pamphlets is expected to be fruitful in producing a more differentiated, less isolationist and non-retrospective understanding of Dutch political economy as feeding into wider European debates about commerce, neutrality and state reform that unfolded around the time of the French Revolution. The chapter suggests processes of Dutch economic reform attempts intersected with the dynamics of French state-building since the 1730s, ultimately to be confronted with the intrinsic problems of the political way in which Dutch republican trade was construed.

Keywords:Dutch economic reform; Dutch pamphlets; Dutch political economy; Fourth Anglo-Dutch War; pamphlet debates