Table Of ContentPublic Offices, Personal Demands
Public Offices, Personal Demands:
Capability in Governance in the Seventeenth-
Century Dutch Republic
Edited by
Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten
and Michel Reinders
Public Offices, Personal Demands: Capability in Governance in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch
Republic, Edited by Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten and Michel Reinders
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten and Michel Reinders and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1012-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1012-8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.....................................................................................vii
Contributors................................................................................................ix
1. Introduction
Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten and Michel Reinders..............................1
LONG TERM TRENDS
2. Urban Riots and the Perspective of “Qualification for Office”:
The Peculiarities of Urban Government and the Case of the 1672
Disturbances in the Netherlands
Robert von Friedeburg..............................................................................22
3. Capability, Patrimonialism and Bureaucracy in the Urban
Administrations of the Low Countries (c.1300-1780)
Griet Vermeesch........................................................................................53
SCIENCE AND OFFICE
4. Fit to Measure: ‘Bequamheit’ in Mathematics in the Dutch Republic
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis..............................................................................80
5. The Ideal of the Statesman-Historian: The Case of Hugo Grotius
Jan Waszink.............................................................................................101
CAPABILITY IN POLITICAL THOUGHT
6. Why the Wealthy should rule: Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn’s Defence
of Holland’s Aristocratic Mercantile Regime
Jaap Nieuwstraten...................................................................................126
7. Mercury’s Two Faces: Commercial Candour as the Key to Capability
in the Dutch Golden Age
Arthur Weststeijn.....................................................................................150
vi Table of Contents
CAPABILITY IN PRACTICE
8. Capability and the Transformation of Dutch Citizenship
Michel Reinders.......................................................................................176
9. Subservient to the Stadholder: How William III’s Interpretation
of Capability determined Politics in the Province of Utrecht, 1674-1688
Coen Wilders...........................................................................................199
ENGLISH COMPARISON
10. Office-Holding, Participation and England’s ‘Monarchical Republic’
Glenn Burgess.........................................................................................222
11. Beyond the Republic: Capability and the Ethics of Office
Conal Condren........................................................................................237
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, we would like to thank all participants of the two-day
conference Public Offices, Personal Demands: Capability in Governance
in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic held in Rotterdam in June
2007. This collection of essays is for a large part the result of the intense
debates that were held during this meeting. Of course, gratitude is due to
the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
for funding the research programme Conquest, Competition and Ideology:
Inventing Governance in the Dutch Golden Age. We also thank the
Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam for their generous
contribution. The Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies provided a
pleasant and productive scholarly community. Adrie van der Laan and the
Rotterdam Library were great hosts. Lastly, we would also like to thank
Cambridge Scholars Publishing for giving three young scholars the chance
to make their ideas publicly known.
Rotterdam, May 2009
Jan Hartman
Jaap Nieuwstraten
Michel Reinders
CONTRIBUTORS
Glenn Burgess is Professor of Early Modern History and Head of the
History Department at the University of Hull. He is a Fellow of the Royal
Historical Society. His research and teaching interests lie in the history of
Tudor and Stuart England, the history of political thought, and philosophy
and theory of history. Author of: The Politics of the Ancient Constitution:
An Introduction to English Poltical Thought, 1603-1642 (1992); Absolute
Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996); British Political Thought,
1500-1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation (2009); and, as editor,
The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603-1715 (1999);
English Radicalism, 1550-1850 (2007); European Political Thought,
1450-1700 (2007).
Conal Condren is Honorary Professor at the Centre for the History of
European Discourses, University of Queensland and Emeritus Scientia
Professor at the University of New South Wales. He is a Fellow of both
the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social
Sciences in Australia. He is also a member of Churchill College and Clare
Hall, Cambridge. Among his many publications are The Language of
Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (1994); Satire, Lies and Politics:
The Case of Dr. Arbuthnot (1997); Thomas Hobbes (2000); Argument and
Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and
Offices (2006).
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis is Associate Professor of History of Science at
the Centre for Studies of Science and Technology at the University of
Twente. He has published a book on the history of optics in the
seventeenth century, entitled Lenses and Waves: Christiaan Huygens and
the Mathematical Science of Optics in the Seventeenth Century (2004).
Dijksterhuis is currently working on the cultural history of mathematics in
the Dutch Republic and the ways mathematical thinking have become
dominant in western society.
Robert von Friedeburg is Professor of Early Modern History at the
Erasmus University Rotterdam. His main fields of research are the
Reformation, early modern statebuilding and religious conflict and
political thought in Germany, England and the Netherlands in the sixteenth
x Contributors
and seventeenth centuries. His published books include Widerstandsrecht
und Konfessionskonflikt: Gemeiner Mann und Notwehr in deutsch-
britischen Vergleich, 1530-1669 (1999); Self-Defence and Religious Strife
in Early Modern Europe (2002); and, as editor, Murder and Monarchy:
Regicide in European History, 1300-1800 (2004); “Patria” und
“Patrioten” vor dem Patriotismus: Plichten, Rechte, Glauben und die
Rekonfigurierung europäischer Gemeinwesen im 17. Jahrhundert (2005).
Griet Vermeesch is a researcher at the History Department of the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel. She does research on networks of state officials and
entrepreneurs for facilitating warfare, and on urban aspects of the process
of early modern state building. In 2006 she completed a PhD at the
University of Amsterdam on ‘Oorlog, steden en staatsvorming: de
grenssteden Gorinchem en Doesburg tijdens de geboorte-eeuw van de
Republiek (1572-1680)’ for which she has received the Professor van
Winter Award for best book on local history of the Netherlands of the
years 2005-2006.
Jan Waszink is researcher of early modern political thought and
literature, and editor of 'Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae' at the University of
Utrecht. He translated and edited Hugo Grotius’s De Antiquitate
Reipublicae Batavicae (2000) and Justus Lipsius’s Politica: Six Books of
Politics or Political Instruction (2004). He has published extensively on
Grotius’s Annales et historiae de rebus Belgicis. His current chief research
interests are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tacitism and Reason of
State, and the reception of humanist thought and writings in the eighteenth
century.
Arthur Weststeijn studied at the University of Amsterdam where he
received an MA in history (2004) and philosophy (2005). He is currently
writing a PhD thesis on the political thought of the seventeenth-century
Dutch merchant brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court at the European
University Institute, Florence.
Coen Wilders studied history at the University of Utrecht, where he
graduated Cum Laude in 2005. At the moment he is writing a PhD thesis
on the brokerage system of stadholder William III in the province of
Utrecht in the period 1674-1702 at the University of Amsterdam
