The Dutch Republic was a cultural powerhouse in the modern era, producing lasting masterpieces in painting and publishing, and in the process transforming those fields from modest trades to booming industries. This book asks the question of how such a small nation could become such a major player in those fields. Claartje Rasterhoff shows how industrial organisations played a role in shaping patterns of growth and innovations. As early modern Dutch cultural industries were concentrated geographically, highly networked, and institutionally embedded, they were able to reduce uncertainty in the marketplace and stimulate the commercial and creative potential of painters and publishers-though those successes eventually came up against the limits of a saturated domestic market and an aversion to risk on the part of producers that ultimately brought an end to the boom.

One of the first novels to openly explore gay love and eroticism, Pathologies is a lost classic that is now translated into English for the first time.
 
At the start of the twentieth century, Jewish anti-Zionist Jacob Israël de Haan led an eventful life as a poet, journalist, teacher, and lawyer in the Netherlands. His autobiographical novella Pipelines caused a storm of controversy in 1904 with its portrayal of a subject that was considered scandalous at the time—a romantic relationship between two young men. He lost his teaching job, and the entire print run was pulped.
 
In his iconic 1908 novel Pathologies, he once again openly and radically explored the topic of homosexuality. The story centers around adolescent Johan, who lives a secluded life with his father and their elderly housekeeper in a large house. For a while, Johan has been plagued by erotic fantasies about his classmates. When, to make matters worse, he finds himself feeling attracted to his father—first in a dream, and then in real life—he grows desperate. Johan moves out, finding room and board with an older married couple in Haarlem, where he meets René, a young confident artist. Johan falls head-over-heels in love, and the two men enter a sadomasochistic relationship that soon begins to spiral out of control.
 
Johan is one of world literature’s most tragic, troubled young heroes, at par with Goethe’s Werther and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. His struggle to come to terms with his fantasies and desires—rife with taboos that continue to resonate today—forms the beating heart of this daring novel. Written in De Haan’s precise, lyrical prose, Pathologies has lost none of its force more than a century after it was first published.
 

In 1662 the great sea-lord dynasty of the Cheng family expelled the Dutch from Taiwan, beginning a curious and little-known episode in cross-cultural diplomacy. China's new Manchu-Chinese Ch'ing dynasty and the greatest mercantile-colonial power of the seventeenth century negotiated with each other concerning conditions of trade and terms of military cooperation against their common enemy, the Cheng family. Conflicts between the two negotiating powers are seen as a great deal more than clashes between the Chinese tribute system of diplomacy and the Western "international system." The author's study suggests new perspectives on Chinese diplomatic tradition which may lead to a re-examination of foreign relations across cultural barriers.

An examination of the work and influence of historian Pieter Geyl.
 
Pieter Geyl (1887—1966) was undoubtedly one of the most internationally renowned Dutch historians of the twentieth century, but also one of the most controversial. Having come to the United Kingdom as a journalist, he started his academic career at the University of London in the aftermath of World War I and played an important role in the early days of the Institute of Historical Research. Known in this time for his reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs that challenged existing historiographies of both Belgium and the Netherlands but was also linked to his political activism in favor of the Flemish movement in Belgium, Geyl left his stamp on the British perception of Low Countries history before moving back to his country of origin in 1935. Having spent World War II in German hostage camps, he famously coined the adage of history being “a discussion without end” and reengaged in public debates with British historians after the war, partly conducted on the airwaves of the BBC. A prolific writer and an early example of a public intellectual, Geyl remains one of the most influential thinkers on history of his time. The present volume reexamines Geyl’s relationship with Britain (and the Anglophone world at large) and sheds new light on his multifaceted work as a historian, journalist, homme de lettres, and political activist.

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. 
 
 
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.
 
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.
 
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
 

This book is about postcolonial memory in the Netherlands. This term refers to conflicts in contemporary society about how the colonial past should be remembered. The question is often: who has the right or ability to tell their stories and who do not? In other words: who has a voice, and who is silenced? As such, these conflicts represent a wider tendency in cultural theory and activism to use voice as a metaphor for empowerment and silence as voice’s negative counterpart, signifying powerlessness. And yet, there are voices that do not liberate us from, but rather subject us to power. Meanwhile, silence can be powerful: it can protect, disrupt and reconfigure. Throughout this book, it will become clear how voice and silence function not as each other’s opposites, but as each other’s continuation, and that postcolonial memory is articulated through the interplay of meaningful voices and meaningful silences.