Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [1]
There also seemed to me to be a seductive similarity between the fortunes of the United Provinces (the seven provinces of the northern Netherlands) at the end of the Dutch Golden Age, and that state Britain finds itself in today. Visibly losing power on the world stage, and with her commercial supremacy increasingly challenged by other enterprising nations, the Dutch Republic nevertheless continued to hold its place culturally in Europe. Its style and taste, in everything from art, architecture and music to faïence, lace and tableware, permeated the European sensibility – and beyond it, the sensibilities of those settling new lands across the ocean (faïence and silverware made to the highest Dutch standards survive from the early Dutch colonies on the east coast of the United States). That Dutch sensibility continued to exert influence long after the Dutch nation had lost its last foothold on world power, and might be considered, I shall argue, still to define what we consider northern European in cultural terms today.
The most powerful stimulus for my undertaking this piece of work, though, was the way the investigations conducted as I carried out the research for it intersected again and again with a set of questions close to my own heart about family and about migration – about the ways in which communities are permeated, and their cultures altered and shaped by the ideas, skills and attitudes of those they allow in as immigrants.
I am of fairly recent immigrant stock myself. My father’s family arrived in London from Poland via Germany in 1920 – economic migrants in search of a new life. My mother’s family had arrived a generation earlier, though her father only left eastern Europe on the eve of the First World War. None of my grandparents, so far as I know, ever returned to their country of origin, not even for a family vacation. My father was the only one of his siblings ever to revisit Warsaw, the city of his beloved mother’s early life, and then, not until he was well into middle age. Uprooted and cut off from their cultural origins, just as they brought no material possessions, they carried with them only vestiges and memories of their eastern European heritage.
Historians have tended to treat the intellectual and cultural influence of migrants in the seventeenth century as though the movement of groups of Europeans displaced from their country of origin for political, religious or economic reasons in earlier periods was always thus one-directional. They might be settled residents of their adopted country, in which case they were assumed to make the culture of their new home their own, or they might be ‘visitors’, diplomats or those performing some short-term service as non-residents, in which case their ‘foreign’ contribution to the culture could be marked out as unassimilated to the growth and development of the field of their endeavour.
Because these early immigrant communities carried so little with them, historians – with good reason – tend to emphasise the identifiable differences between the arriving community and the one it joins. They lovingly uncover pockets of ‘resistance’, whose occupants live cheek by jowl with settled communities, providing exotic or unusual additions to their way of life.
The story I am about to tell will try to encourage the reader to look beyond such simple assumptions. The seventeenth century was a period of political upheaval and social turmoil in England and the Dutch Republic, resulting in repeated, voluntary and forced, movements of peoples from one to the other. Men and women moved