The Dutch economy in the Golden Age: nine studies

Abstract

"In a survey on economic historiography in the Netherlands published in 1989, Jan Luiten van Zanden remarks that the period 1500-1650 received far less attention from Dutch economic historians during the past few decades than it did before 1960. The issue of the expansion of the Dutch economy up to the middle of the seventeenth century no longer ranks as prominently among topics considered worthy of theoretical reflection and empirical research as it did when the discipline of economic history was still in its infancy. This volume does not represent a new synthesis of scholarship on this period. It is not a new textbook. Its aim is more modest: to stimulate interest in the problem of the expansion of the Dutch economy in the early modern era by offering a variety of studies on key aspects of economic life at the time.The nine essays included in this volume all centre on the period of relatively rapid growth, which is generally taken to have ended somewhere between 1650 and 1680. The starting-point chosen by the authors is not always the same [...]. What most of the nine essays have in common, though, is their interest in the issue of continuity, or discontinuity, between economic development during the Republic and in the period that went before it"--Introduction.