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  • The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland 1572–1588
  • Laura Cruz
The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland 1572–1588. By James D. Tracy. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. 343. $120.00. ISBN 978-0-199-20911-8.).

More than twenty years ago, James Tracy published his groundbreaking work, A Financial Revolution in Habsburg Holland (Berkeley, 1985), and it seems fitting that toward the end of his career he returns to ponder the nexus among war, finance, and politics as it played out in the late-sixteenth century. While the earlier book speculated on the possible implications of the titular revolution, The Founding of the Dutch Republic seeks to turn speculation into fact. The result is a richly detailed account of the interlocking and evolving political economy of what would become a highly decentralized republic.

On the surface, Tracy’s interpretation smacks of the traditional. Because it is the largest and most economically powerful province, he argues, the province of Holland controlled the outcome of the war of independence that led to the economic burgeoning of the Dutch Golden Age. As many foreigners continue to confuse the province of Holland with the entire country, this argument appears surprisingly insensitive. Much of the historiography of the Revolt has fought the Holland-centric tendency (with varying degrees of success) and tried to replace it with broader ideas that place proto-national unity, the stadhouder, and/or the Reformed Church at center stage. One should not forget, however, that one defining characteristic of Tracy’s scholarship over [End Page 573] the years has been the testing of broad assumptions about Dutch history versus the archival record. In this case, he has returned to the archives for a thorough accounting, both literally and figuratively, of the first sixteen years of the Revolt. Literally, in the sense that he has uncovered extensive records of the various accounts and account holders for war debts, and figuratively, in the sense that he examines these through the lens of both wartime exigencies and the shifting balance of political power at even the lowest levels of government.

Tracy leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to provide as accurate a picture of the complex relationships created through the financing of war, and the result is a picture rife with details, especially numbers. In an attempt to disentangle these rather tangled webs of interaction, he divides the book into four chronological periods that roughly correspond to major shifts in the political landscape (for example, section 2 begins with the arrival of Alba; section 3 with the Pacification of Ghent); and then further divides each of these into sections on historical context, war, finance, and politics. While finance serves as the linchpin for each section, what emerges as the primary focus of the research is the politics of consensus that the province of Holland wielded, with increasing degrees of effectiveness as the war continued. Each stage of the unfolding Revolt provided another opportunity for the province to secure its vision for the future of the regions; a vision Tracy exemplifies with the emblem of Holland’s tuin, or garden. What emerges from the muddle of inexorable bureaucracy, shaky tax and credit instruments, and ever-changing alliances is a clear strategy to protect the borders of the garden, that is, the territories that surround Holland, and to cultivate the economy of its major towns so that they may flourish. The irony of Tracy’s conclusions is that while he does privilege the role of one province over the others and does so based on its role in financing war, he does not position conflict as a principal cause of historical change. Rather, in his conclusion, he emphasizes how much the power of consensus has been overlooked in understanding the Dutch experience. By overlooking the importance of negotiation across different levels of government, he suggests, we show our own myopic tendency to misunderstand the historically fundamental nature of republican government.

Laura Cruz
Western Carolina University
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