This monograph is announced as the first textbook to present early modern Dutch history in a global context. The authors, David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse, are experienced historians who have both made a significant mark on the field of early modern Dutch history, especially in its various connections with European diplomatic and military history. As such, the textbook is primarily in line with these scholarly interests and is a genuinely well-written, well-informed and up-to-date survey of the history of the foreign policy of the Dutch Republic. This book, to facilitate understanding the main developments in foreign policy, has six chapters, arranged chronologically, that explore five different aspects of it: (1) the foreign policy itself, (2) domestic political organization, (3) economics, (4) global expansion, and (5) culture. The challenge, of course, is to unite these aspects to gain a better understanding of each of them and, in particular, of the main focus of the book: early modern Dutch foreign policy. More importantly, it aims to connect the role of the Dutch Republic in Europe to the rest of the world. Hence, around a quarter of the book is dedicated to the history of Dutch expansion in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Much less than is the case with the Dutch and European chapters, these global parts of the book are not primarily based on the authors' expertise but instead rely almost exclusively on the most recent historiography on Dutch overseas history, more in particular on the Dutch-language survey Oorlogen Overzee (2015) by Gerrit Knaap, Henk den Heijer, and Michiel de Jong. As a result, this makes the book an informative read for an audience that does not have access to Dutch-language publications on these topics.

Unfortunately, the book's strength as a broad historical survey of Dutch foreign policy does not hold for the book as a whole. By far the best chapters are those on Dutch diplomatic and naval history, where the more conventional chronological narrative is illustrated through the employment of some lesser-known but telling case-studies that strengthen the argument. However, even in these parts of the book, it is difficult to find a truly original perspective on the more familiar events that results from the integrated approach that was promised by the authors. The main reason for this is that the main topic—foreign policy—is not really the focus of the book but is instead merely one of the five ingredients mentioned. This fact means that, apart from the historical survey provided, there is hardly enough space in the book to fully detail the development of Dutch foreign policy as a result of the other four spheres. Hence, there is a relatively conventional picture of moving from an emerging (Chapter 1), confident (Chapter 2), ascendant (Chapter 3), combatant (Chapter 4), stagnant (Chapter 5) to a dissolving (Chapter 6) Republic, with lots of engaging information on politics, economics and culture that is, however, poorly integrated. This lack of integration is exacerbated by the fact that the themes under each chronological chapter tend to cover the entire period so that the inquisitive reader loses sight of the specific period. As a result, significant changes, such as the Enlightenment, are mentioned but never analysed adequately for their impact on the various spheres.

Although the book claims to deal with foreign policy in a global context, the authors fail to successfully translate their findings for the European theatre to the rest of the world. For example, one would have loved to have seen their new diplomatic history applied to relations between the VOC and the many Asian polities or to have had the detailed analysis of naval developments in Europe translated into the context of Dutch maritime power in the Indian Ocean. Also, in the global chapters, the narrative is enlivened by case studies and anecdotes, but these are not particularly telling and often stand on their own without sufficient explanatory context. Indeed, the fact that the authors assume that when writing about Dutch power in Asia one can write about a global context without seriously engaging with the relevant Asian societies themselves is the most severe shortcoming of this book. Here, the authors follow the prevailing tendency in the so-called New Imperial History, where the global tends to be more about the Empire at home than the Empire abroad. The same goes for most of the historiography on the Great Divergence, where the rest of the world acts merely as the background to what is still considered a European miracle. Better examples of what could be in store from an approach that employs the global context more seriously is the work on the Iberian empires by scholars such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Jorge Flores, Joa-Pau Rubies and Giuseppe Marcocci.

Another praiseworthy objective that fails to materialize is the authors’ aim of object-based research, perhaps because CUP did not allow the illustrations that are selected and described so well by the authors to be published in the book. Despite these shortcomings, this book does offer an attractive and well-written introduction to early modern Dutch history for the uninitiated. I feel, though, that the authors could have more fruitfully opted for a survey that more thoroughly discussed Dutch foreign policy in a European rather than a global context.