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The thousands of pamphlets presented here constitute an essential source for
understanding these tumultuous periods of history. They range from political
apologies and manifestoes to tracts for and against predestination in theology.
Along the way, battles, sieges, treaties, riots, and political assassinations
form the subject matter of many pamphlets. Domestic issues of all sorts are
commented upon or caricatured, sometimes in rhyme, and political events outside
the Lowlands are also chronicled. Tracts on astrological predictions and the
appearance of comets permit the study of popular culture and mentalities.
In short, historians of all sorts can draw on these texts for their research.
The majority of the pamphlets are in Dutch but there are also texts in French,
German, Latin, and English. The IDC collection incorporates all pamphlets cataloged by W.P.C. Knuttel in the last decades of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century.
Part I: 1486-1648
The period from 1486 to 1648 was of crucial significance for the history of the
Low Countries and the present Dutch State. This period witnessed first the
consolidation of 17 quite disparate provinces under the hegemony of the Habsburg
Monarchy. Later the Revolt of the Netherlands against the Spanish Habsburg king
Philip II led in the course of 80 years of warfare to the establishment of the
Republic of the United Provinces, the forerunner of the modern Netherlands State.
The southern Netherlands - now the modern states of Belgium and Luxembourg -
continued under Habsburg dominion. Inextricably bound up with these developments
on the political level, was the history of the Reformation in the Low Countries.
The successful implantation of Calvinist Protestantism in the North and the
triumph of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the South were recognized in
1648 in the Treaty of Munster, which ended the Eighty Years War.
Part II: 1649-1750
After the official recognition of its independence in 1648 the Dutch Republic
quickly established itself as an economic, political and military power in Europe
and a formidable contender in the struggle for trade and glory overseas. The
second half of the 17th century was a golden age for the Dutch. Economic
rivalry with England led to several naval wars, but in 1689, the Dutch
stadhouder William of Orange was invited to assume the throne of that country
after the Glorious Revolution had driven James II from power. In the disaster
year of 1672 French and other armies penetrated deep into Dutch territory,
exacerbating the internal conflict between the States and Orangist parties
that led to the murder of the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother
by a mob in The Hague. The Republic survived this ordeal, recovered and prospered.
The 18th century brought a relative eclipse of the Republic on the European stage
and the beginnings of the reforming Patriotsmovement at home.
Part III: 1751-1853
Dutch pamphlet-writing in the second half of the eighteenth century was dominated
on the home front by the struggle between the conservative Orange 'party' and the
reformist 'patriots', a conflict which culminated in near revolution in 1787, and
by the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780-84) between the Dutch Republic and Great Britain.
Meanwhile, milestones of international history such as the American War of Independence
and the French Revolution did not, of course, pass unnoticed.
The turn of the century witnessed the transformation of the worn-out
Dutch Republic into a modern state through the French invasion of 1795,
the formation of a semi-independent Batavian Republic and Napoleonic Kingdom
of Holland, the annexation by France and finally the creation of the Kingdom
of the Netherlands as we know it today, under the restored House of Orange in
1813- 1815.
The Belgian insurrection of 1830 and the political reforms of 1848 were the
principle events of the next forty years to form the basis for discussion, while
many pamphlets were devoted to subjects such as the colonies and slavery, the
introduction of railway transport, the discovery of smallpox vaccine and the
re-establishment of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy.
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