Product Description

This is the book that made Simon Schama's reputation when first published in 1987. A historical masterpiece, it is an epic account of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen. In this brilliant work that moves far beyond the conventions of social or cultural history, Simon Schama investigates the astonishing case of a people's self-invention. He shows how, in the 17th-century, a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, without a shared language, religion or government, transformed themselves into a formidable world empire -- the Dutch republic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150696 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Review
'Simon Schama writes with grace and wit, and his enthusiasms are contagious.' Anita Brookner 'Schama is one of the few historians writing today who can recreate the mentalite of another culture.' Jonathan Miller 'One reads it all with mounting enjoyment and at the end one's sense of Dutch civilisation in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen is not just salted and enriched -- but remade.' Robert Hughes 'This is history on the grand scale, and like all generously conceived historical works leaves us reflecting about the present as well as the past.' John Gross, New York Times 'Seldom has a people opened its doors so wide. A performance on the epic scale.' Independent

About the Author
Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. He is the author of 'Patriots and Liberators', which won the Wolfson Prize for History, 'The Embarrassment of Riches', 'Citizens' which won the 1990 NCR book award for non-fiction, 'Dead Certainties', 'Landscape and Memory' which won the W H Smith Literary Award in 1995, and 'Rembrandt's Eyes' (1999). He is also the author of the monumental 'History of Britain' published in three volumes. He was art critic of the 'New Yorker' from 1995 to 1998 and was made CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours list.

Customer Reviews

An outstanding cultural interpretation of the Dutch Republic
This is narrative, factually dense history at its best. Schama demonstrates an immense range of knowledge and insight in this analysis of the rise and fall the 17th century Dutch Republic. Using art particularly, but Dutch culture of the Golden Age as a whole, he shows the heart of the nation with all its neuroses and religious idiosyncracies. A fantastic tour de force. One of the best history books I've read.

A great book: erudite yet very readable
A fascinating insight into the origins of one of our closest neighbouring states. Wonderfully readable, superior in this respect to many other bestselling history books. The themes are often surprising (the popularity of breakfast paintings, for example) but help to demonstrate how widely distributed was the wealth of the nation in that era. It's interesting to consider the confluence of trade and democracy in such a centrally-located country, when all around was despotism, and to reflect on its importance in sowing the seeds of liberal democracy to its neighbours in succeeding centuries.

Nurturing a new republic
From a rich foundation of material and an exquisite writing style, Schama guides us through the formative years of the Dutch Republic. The politics of that creation, however, he leaves to others. Instead, he addresses the underlying conditions of Dutch society of the period. At the outset, he decrees he will avoid Culture in favour of culture. This welcome departure makes this book a treasure of information. However, it isn't a volume for the novice. Much background history in Enlightenment Europe in general and the Dutch role in particular, is required before tackling this book.

That a beached whale can become a cultural artefact seems aberrant at first glance. The Dutch, as Calvinists, could find a moral message in a wide disparity of events. Whale beachings proved no exception. Pamphlets, articles, even books could make use of cetacean corpses to invoke metaphors of nationalism, extravagance, profit, indulgence and divine messages. Schama shows how easily the besieged Protestant nation at the edge of Catholic Europe found means to justify and define their existence. This form of thinking and expression gave the Dutch strength to sustain a novel experiment in society and nationhood. It also refutes the suggestion that the Dutch were governed by a dogmatist Calvinism. Flexibility and tolerance, no matter how often challenged, remained the foundation of Dutch culture. Against all odds, the Republic survived and flourished.

The flourishing becomes the pivotal point in Schama's account. The influx of riches from global trade challenged aspects of Calvinist values. Extravagance was condemned, but not impaired. The lure of commerce was strong and the accumulation of wealth too rapid to be hampered. Calvinist ministers might rail at the influx of gold, but their wrath was constrained by a society manifestly stable. Excesses remained rare as the burghers pursued their wealth soberly. Ostentation, Schama notes, didn't mean extravagance.

As Schama clearly describes, flourishing trade opened minds as well as purses. Opinions flourished with bank accounts and the Dutch Enlightenment attracted exiles from more dogmatic societies. He pulls together many threads in weaving his tapestry of Dutch culture, enhanced by numerous illustrations conveying the wealth of allegorical images used to influence social and national mores. The varieties of thinking meant that the Dutch Republic came into existence without an underlying ideology or dogma. Even the Republic's borders remained too fluid to establish a certain national identity from them.

If there are faults in Schama's sweeping account, they are few, but significant. An introductory chapter on the chronology of events would ease the novice's entry to this weighty narrative. His focus, while a needed supplement to general histories, is a bit tight. He spends many pages recounting the history of a single midwife as exemplary. On the other hand, the role of immigrants is given short shrift. Jewish contacts in Iberia and the New World were an important facet of economic growth. Trade with the Far East is granted only marginally more attention. As the roots of "the embarrassment of riches" one would expect more attention be given them. He ignores many major thinkers, perhaps slotting them into his disdained Culture. Yet many major figures of the era go begging for ink space in his book - Spinoza, Descartes and others were not writing for themselves. Even posthumously, their opinions affected the thinking of literate Dutch - and in a burgher society, there were many of those. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]