HarperPress, 496pp, £25
THERE'S A GLORIOUS STORY WELL outside the grasp of this fat and strenuously pretty book: a story startling enough to turn schoolroom history upside down. It's the story of Europe before the 19th-century brand of nationalism
split us up to control us better – of Britain before all the cheap braying about "Britishness" and the not-at-all-coincidental emphasis on policing borders.
For in the 17th century, what you knew, what you valued, didn't ever stop at frontiers (unless, of course, there was actual shooting). You could go to Scottish church services in Rotterdam, trade with Italians in Lisbon, get shot alongside French, English, Scots and sometimes Polish soldiers in Brazil. The Dutch court did Italian dances in imitation of the French. English theatrical companies toured the German states in the 1600s. Alchemists connected from London to Prague with their secret news of miracles. The Scots, the Lauderdales, the Clerks of Penicuik, knew the exact glory and value of a fine Dutch painting. And links of friendship weren't broken, just interrupted, even by war – even between soldiers.
Factor in the bright news coming from the West and East Indies, and you can track the connections round the globe. Indeed, if you can't find connections, the odds are you haven't looked hard enough.
Quite apart from what the gentry was doing, populations were forced westward across Europe by the relentless fact of war, filling up cities like Amsterdam with foreigners, forcing some to go out as the soldiers and traders of new empires. A world that never was stationary, as nationalists like to pretend, was instead unmissably on the move and always changing.
It's a story that the English used to miss. At the time, "Empire" mostly meant "Ireland", London's new faces came mostly from the British Isles and the island's attitudes were insular. Yet connections across the North Sea and far beyond were reinforced by English politics – for example the time Royalists spent in Dutch or French exile; or the need that Bible-reading Puritans felt for the expertise of the Jews, who truly understood Hebrew, and who were often to be found in Amsterdam.
Now Lisa Jardine is not exactly without ambition. She tells us, in the style of the better accountancy firms, that the "continuing Jardine project" is "the urge to know and to change the world through knowledge". But this is not an ambitious book. Instead of restoring the great, lost picture, it simply footnotes a few, rather familiar connections: the story of measuring longitude; the history of microscopes; the trade in paintings between just two of the nations of Europe, the Dutch and the English (several of whom are Scottish, but let's not quibble, at least not yet). Jardine also says she knows the book was needed because the "charming young French waiter" she met in Val d'Isère kept getting his English history wrong. Well, we've all done worse, and more, for charming young French waiters, but something in that story defines the sense, as you read the book, of being patronised. This professor's ideal reader knows nothing, not even other books.
By the end, she feels the need to say that various British banks scrapping for the American holdings of ABN-AMRO somehow show the British and Dutch "continuing to share fundamental attitudes and outlook". The Queen might say so on a state visit, but you and I couldn't possibly, not with a straight face: the 17th century may be suggestive, but it ain't topical. You get the impression Jardine may have been too pressed for time to work out what her book is for.
It can be mean to look too closely at the rhetorical décor in a book, but Jardine also has some very basic problems. There's the tendency to bravely go where everyone has gone already, and write a book correcting misapprehensions nobody actually has – uncovering the "subterranean" connections that have been in full view for at least a half-century of scholarship.
There's the tendency to write about whole nations and whole cultures and whole connections from the viewpoint of those gentry who were kind enough to leave lots and lots of neatly organised papers: in this case a rather awful and Pooterish Dutch family called Huygens, whose account of their fiercely self-aggrandising selves she takes at face value.
And lastly, she has no respect for what must be the golden rule about studying the Dutch, who have not been idle about propagating warm, fuzzy clichés concerning themselves: if it seems familiar, you've got it wrong.
The problems start on the cover. I'm not sure why Vermeer's Procuress is the right image for a book about cultural exchange – there's not a single, practical whore in it. There are several patent offices, but I guess they're not as glamorous.
And I'm still unsure why the book is about how England (sic) plundered Holland's Glory: even Jardine acknowledges the process was "considerably more subtle and extended" than her own words on the cover imply. She seems to mean that there's a Dutch side to the story of how money started moving out of Amsterdam (which is, in large part, the story of why Dutch artists worked more in Britain than at home). She starts with the impressive navy and army that came stomping into England in 1688, bent on making sure the difficult Catholic and Francophile King James and his questionable offspring went away, and the malleable and Protestant King William and Queen Mary took their place. She says there was such a smokescreen of rhetoric about shared values that we've all forgotten the armies.
But we haven't. Jardine's account adds very little to what Jonathan Israel published in his definitive history of the Dutch Republic 13 years ago. If the standard work says what you say, perhaps you are not as radical as you think, especially when you call Israel "the bedrock for what I write here".
She isn't entirely consistent, either, which may be her editor's fault. She once (p229) even has the wrong Dutch stadhouder, or local lord, welcoming the showy Winter King and Queen to the Hague; but it wasn't the equally courtly Frederick Hendrik who welcomed them, but Maurits, that old Calvinist trout. The slip makes the story less remarkable than it is.
She honours today's obligations, for example shoe-horning in tulipmania as one might expect in any illustrated book about the 17th century. She postures a bit about how everyone has got it wrong; but when she corrects the record, she's mostly paraphrasing a 2007 book it might have been more tactful to name and quote directly. She barely discusses the remarkable thing about the tulip craze – it was a market in futures, an abstraction the Dutch learned by finding money to ship herring to the Baltic and grain out again, which pretty much turned into what we know and love as capitalism.
Indeed, she doesn't seem to like the big picture at all, unless it corresponds to her very modern pieties. There is science, there is high culture, but what's missing is the key to Dutch culture in the 17th century, which is mathematics.
Maths and its possibilities bring together the map-maker, the engineer, the surveyor, the soldier, the alchemist, the scientist, the book-keeper, the astronomer, the navigator and the philosopher – who can sometimes be the same man, and who might also be a rather good sketcher, painter, musician and poet. You'd think Professor Jardine, with her mathematical background, would notice this, but like Simon Schama before her she'd rather make culture seem entirely familiar: tunes, pictures, poems. We get Rembrandt but not one mention of the man without whom much of the Dutch 17th century is unthinkable: the mathematician Simon Stevin.
Indeed, for all the claims to new thinking, Professor Jardine writes an old-fashioned kind of history: the grand narrative that can't quite find the story. It's all about great persons, it manages in the end not to mention war much and it sometimes reads backwards in the oddest way imaginable. Thus the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam is made much more orderly and successful than it was so that it can properly mutate into New York (she doesn't mention the splendid, scholarly edition of the few surviving New Netherland papers, which would have given her a rather clearer picture). Failures, of course, are invisible to the historian who writes about progress.
What's left is a series of essays, neither strikingly original nor entirely accurate, with far too many full-length portraits of middle-aged men in black, murkily reproduced in the tones of dried blood. This is sad. Jardine is an immensely talented populariser, which means a book like this may have the power to distort and shut down a subject, to make it seem thin and unimportant. Yet behind it, very well hidden, lies the historical key to who we are and what our Europe still could be.
The full article contains 1527 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
