Several weeks ago I found out that the historian Lisa Jardine had died. This saddened me, as I have appreciated Jardine’s works. In particular two works stand out in my mind. Worldly Goods, which I read when I was 18, and which helped me to understand that there was a different sort of history from the standard one written by diplomats and taught in elementary schools, and Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory.
The subtitle for the second work is in my opinion somewhat misrepresentative of what the tone of the book is, from what I recall. That being said, Going Dutch does impart to one a sense of the menace which was threaded through the symbiotic and antagonistic relationship between these two similar Protestant North Sea nations. And, while the 17th century is recalled as the period when England rose and Holland fell as great imperial mercantile polities, Lisa Jardine’s narrative does highlight that the so called Glorious Revolution was implemented with more of a Dutch fist than is commonly recalled.
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