Eight months into its maiden voyage to the Indies, the Dutch East India Company’s Batavia sank on June 4, 1629 on Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the western coast of Australia. Wendy van Duivenvoorde’s five-year study was aimed at reconstructing the hull of Batavia, the only excavated remains of an early seventeenth-century Indiaman to have been raised and conserved in a way that permits detailed examination, using data retrieved from the archaeological remains, interpreted in the light of company archives, ship journals, and Dutch texts on shipbuilding of this period. Over two hundred tables, charts, drawings, and photographs are included.

This book presents tables which give a virtually complete survey of the direct ship ping between the Netherlands and Asia between 1595-1795. This period contains, first, the voyages of the so-called Voorcompagnieen and, then, those for and under control of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). The survey ends in 1795. That year saw an end of the regular sailings of the VOC between the Netherlands and Asia, since, following the Batavian revolution in January, the Netherlands be came involved in war with England. The last outward voyage left on 26 December 1794. After news of the changed situation in the Netherlands was received in Asia, the last homeward voyage took place in the spring of 1795. The VOC itself was dis banded in 1798. In total 66 voyages of the voorcompagnieen are listed, one more than the tradition ally accepted number. The reconnaissance ship, POSTILJON, from the fleet ofMahu and De Cordes, that was collected en route is given its own number (0022). Since the attempt of the Australische Compagnie to circumvent the monopoly of the VOC can be considered as a continuation of the voorcompagnieen the voyage of Schouten and Le Maire is also listed (0196-0197). For the rest, exclusively the outward and homeward voyages of the VOC are men tioned in the tables. Of those there were in total 4722 outward and 3359 homeward.

Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally counterintuitive manifestations of climate change from global to local scales, Degroot finds that the Little Ice Age presented not only challenges for Dutch citizens but also opportunities that they aggressively exploited in conducting commerce, waging war, and creating culture. The overall success of their Republic in coping with climate change offers lessons that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of global warming.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic emerged as one of Europe's leading maritime powers. The political and military leadership of this small country was based on large-scale borrowing from an increasingly wealthy middle class of merchants, manufacturers and regents This volume presents the first comprehensive account of the political economy of the Dutch republic from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Building on earlier scholarship and extensive new evidence it tackles two main issues: the effect of political revolution on property rights and public finance, and the ability of the nation to renegotiate issues of taxation and government borrowing in changing political circumstances. The essays in this volume chart the Republic's rise during the seventeenth century, and its subsequent decline as other European nations adopted the Dutch financial model and warfare bankrupted the state in the eighteenth century. By following the United Provinces's financial ability to respond to the changing national and international circumstances across a three-hundred year period, much can be learned not only about the Dutch experience, but the wider European implications as well.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive index. 168 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.