Public Finance of the Dutch Republic in Comparative Perspective

This study offers the first complete overview of the remarkable public finances of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces. Wantje Fritschy has analysed the development and structure of its public revenue and expenditure. She argues that a ‘tax revolution’ and the ‘fiscal resilience’ of the provinces together were more important for its surprising performance than Holland’s public debt alone, and the institutional and economic characteristics of its ‘urban system’ were more important than wealth due to foreign trade. Comparisons with the fiscal systems of three more centralized states - the Venetian Republic, Britain and the Ottoman Empire - underline the crucial importance of long-term ‘urbanization trajectories’ in understanding early-modern fiscal performance. It was not because it was federal that the Dutch Republic collapsed.

Wantje Fritschy (Ph.D. Leiden 1988) is retired senior lecturer in Economic and Social History and professor in the History of Early Modern Public Finance at VU University Amsterdam; she has led a large research project on public finance in the Dutch Republic at the Huygens Institute of Netherlands History (Huygens ING) in The Hague.

"The book is one of the most outstanding results of a long sequence of research that has seen the publication of important works and fundamental datasets on the Dutch public finance during the Ancien Regime. [...] The book is a splendid example of the passion of a scholar who has spent many years in researching and thinking". Luciano Pezzolo, in TIJDSCHRIFT SOCIALE & ECON.GESCHIEDENIS 16 (1), 2019.