Repositioning the Dutch in the Atlantic, 1680–1800

Abstract

After some decades of historical debate about the early modern Atlantic, it has become a truism that the Atlantic may better be understood as a world of connections rather than as a collection of isolated national sub-empires. Likewise, it is commonly accepted that the study of this interconnected Atlantic world should be interdisciplinary, going beyond traditional economic and political history to include the study of the circulation of people and cultures. This view was espoused and expanded upon in the issue of Itinerario on the nature of Atlantic history published thirteen years ago—the same issue in which Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster famously asserted that there was no Dutch Atlantic empire. Since this controversial article appeared, there has been a resurgence of interest among scholars about the role of the Dutch in the Atlantic. With Atlantic history continuing to occupy a prominent place in Anglo-American university history departments, it seems high time to appraise the output of this resurgence of interest with an historiographical essay reviewing the major works and trends in the study of the Dutch in the Atlantic.

The Dutch Atlantic world, 1585–1815: Recent themes and developments in the field

“…The inventor of the awkward "un-Dutch," Benjamin Schmidt, is a skeptic of the very idea of a Dutch Atlantic, at least in the sense that its international character makes the word "Dutch" a rather problematic one (Schmidt, 2009 and. Wrestling with the same concern, Oostindie and Roitman (2012) suggest the use of "entanglement" and "nodal points," where each location or node of the Dutch Atlantic had links with different places, some claimed by the Dutch Republic and some not.…”