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

FAIN: FV-50389-14

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (North Dartmouth, MA 02747-2356)
Gerard M. Koot (Project Director: March 2014 to May 2016)

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 Institute for Historical Research in London and at Webster University 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 modern. We will study how the economy of the Dutch Republic rose to pre-eminence in the new European world-economy of the 17th century, how Britain acquired this supremacy in the 18th century, and how it transformed itself to become the first industrial nation. Using a comparative method, we will use contemporary accounts, historical documents, seminal historical interpretations, and visits to the remains of the material culture of the period not only to explore these important topics in European and World history, but to ask how our approach can help us appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of humanistic studies.