Representative Thought and National Policy

Abstract

Of the scores of contemporary books and pamphlets that deal with various aspects of trade and defence policy in England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, a few have survived to become established classics of their kind. The authors who have thus survived have done so, not so much because they are more objective than their fellows, but because they appear to rise, in spite of themselves, above the level of the special interests they represent; and something that began as an ex parte statement is transformed into what may plausibly be regarded as a presentation of a national policy. Such a one is the work often popularly known as The Memoirs of John de Witt. It was first published under the title Het Interest van Holland in 1662. The popular title derived from a translation into French which appeared under that title. An English version—de Witt’s The True Interest and Political Maxims of The Republick of Holland and West Friesland—appeared in London in 1702, and well into the eighteenth century it remained for many English readers the standard description of the Dutch economy and of the political preoccupations which guided its permanent policy.¹