The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of Modern Society and a European World Economy

FAIN: FV-50324-12

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (North Dartmouth, MA 02747-2356)
Gerard M. Koot (Project Director: March 2012 to November 2014)

Funding details:
Original grant (2012) $171,011.00
Supplement (2012) ($17,090.37)
Supplement (2013) $8,896.00

A five-week seminar for sixteen school teachers comparing the development of modern economic systems in the Dutch Republic and Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The purpose of this five-week NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers at the Historical Institute in London, UK, and in Leiden, The Netherlands, is to investigate how a region of Northwest Europe, centered on the North Sea, acquired the characteristics that historians have labeled as modern. We will study how the national economy of the Dutch Republic rose to dominance in the new European led world-economy of the seventeenth century, how Britain acquired this supremacy in the eighteenth century, and how it transformed itself to become the first industrial nation. Using a comparative method, we will study contemporary accounts, historical documents, and seminal historical interpretations. We will also visit some of the key places that experienced this world-historical transformation.