A 1996 comparative study of the Netherlands from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

In Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge, and Nature the contributors present new research that touches on the core themes developed in Karel Davids’s work. The book reflects Davids’s omnivorous character as a scholar. Nevertheless, there are common strands that run throughout the introduction and fourteen chapters gathered here. Major themes include resources of knowledge, cultures of learning, and humans and their natural environment. Together, these fourteen essays provide a fascinating panorama of social, economic, and environmental history of the past millennium. The book seeks to bring back the different levels of geographical scope, fusing the local, the national and the global. Contributors are: Ulbe Bosma, Pepijn Brandon, Jaap Bruijn, Petra van Dam, Victor Enthoven, Sabine Go, Marjolein ’t Hart, Raoul De Kerf, Jan Lucassen, Karin Lurvink, Joel Mokyr, Marijn Molema, Bert de Munck, Pál Nyiri, Harm Pieters, Matthias van Rossum, Joost Schokkenbroek, Jeroen Touwen, Wybren Verstegen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.

Jonas of Bobbio's life mirrored many of the transformations of the seventh century, while his three saints' Lives provide a window into the early medieval Age of Saints and the monastic and political worlds of Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy.

The novels of Daniel Defoe are set in years during which two Anglo-Dutch wars were fought, a Dutch king took over the English throne, and the primacy of the Dutch in Northern European commerce was in the process of being overtaken by the English. At the time of these novels’ publication, the geo-physical, political and cultural achievements of the United Provinces were still remarked upon as extraordinary, while so many people had travelled between the two countries that Dutch communities in England and English communities in the United Provinces were unremarkable. Defoe’s personal, professional and political interests lay parallel and very close to stereotypically Dutch affairs, such as tolerance of dissenting Christianity, the promotion of trade as the source of a country’s wealth, and Court Whig (specifically Williamite) interests. In spite of this, the many Dutch elements in his novels are not always evident, and the body of his fiction has not previously been examined from this perspective. Defoe and the Dutch: Places, Things, People explores what English readers of seventeenth and early eighteenth century English fiction and non-fiction knew about the Dutch, what images of the Dutch they were exposed to, and what significance these images may have had. Against that background, it investigates how Dutch elements are used or referred to in nine novels attributed to Daniel Defoe. From the ubiquity of Dutch ships and the Dutch bill of exchange to the disallowing of Dutch martial heroism and the exchange of gifts in Dutch weddings, images and associations of Dutch places, things and people in Defoe’s novels are woven into the fabric of the narratives. The novels’ uses of these and many other Dutch motifs or images are shown to avoid crude or negative stereotypes, and to be complex, subtle, and sensitive to the real-life events and contexts of the fictions, while also participating in a mode of representation that is overridingly emblematic.

In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids offers a new perspective on technological change in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution. This book makes an innovative contribution to current debates on the origins of the 'Great Divergence' between China and Europe and the ' Little Divergence' within Europe by analysing the relationship between the evolution of technical knowledge and religious contexts. It deals with the question to what extent disparities in the evolution of technical knowledge can be explained by differences in religious environment. It takes a comparative look at the relation between technology and religion in China and Europe between c.700 and 1800 from four angles: visions on the uses of nature, the formation of human capital , the circulation of technical knowledge and technical innovation.

Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience brings together twenty scholars of Modern Jewish history and thought. The essays provide a fresh perspective on several central questions in Jewish intellectual, social, and religious history from the eighteenth century to the present in the contexts of Russia, Western and Central Europe, and the Americas.