In the last decade, the field of Atlantic history has been belatedly challenged to move away from narrowly focused national or imperial approaches to embrace more inclusive global and ‘entangled’ histories that reach beyond the Atlantic and scrutinize interactions across imperial, national, linguistic, and ethnic lines.Footnote ¹ Informed by the search for ‘trans-imperial dynamics’ and privileging processes of ‘entanglement, connections, and interaction’, the ultimate aim of this edited volume is to reposition the Dutch in the Atlantic.Footnote ² It does so through a critical reconsideration and re-evaluation of why and how, even in the ‘seemingly inglorious period’ from 1680–1800, the Dutch still mattered in the Atlantic and the Atlantic mattered for the Dutch, against the backdrop of geographic contraction, economic stagnation, and dwindling naval power (3).

Compelled by self-imposed ‘chronological boundaries’ and ‘related methodological and definitional rationales’, the volume editors have opted for a ‘narrowly defined Atlantic’ consisting, by and large, of an overwhelmingly Euro-American ‘econoscape’ bounded by territories under the political and institutional control of representatives of the Dutch Republic during the ‘long eighteenth century’ (4). This Dutch Atlantic writ small displayed ‘four broad and overarching features’: an exceptional economic heterogeneity and openness, a remarkable variety of institutional arrangements dealing with trade and governance, a diverse composition of populations and concomitant convoluted processes of identity formation, and considerable variation in slavery regimes and forms of slave resistance (7).

To their credit, the editors themselves readily acknowledge the implicit limitations of their approach and are to be lauded for their courageous decision to include some critical concluding remarks by Alison Games. Although the individual, unfailingly high-quality threads covered by the contributors consistently emphasize trans-imperial and regional interactions and connections, the combined product is a truncated Dutch Atlantic web lacking critical chronological, geographical, ethnic, and historiographical extensions.

Chronologically, the ‘glory days’ of the ‘Dutch moment in Atlantic history’ (1600–80) are conspicuously absent (3, 357). As Games rightly notes, this seventeenth-century history served as more than a simple backdrop; it was formative to many of the characteristics of the Dutch Atlantic that had matured by 1680.

Although the volume does include contributions on the persistent Dutch relevance in the re-export trade of colonial goods from Bordeaux (Silvia Marzagalli), and the semi-legal trade by the ‘Flemish nation’ in silver at Cádiz (Ana Crespo Solana), other geographic extensions of the Dutch ‘extra-Atlantic’ are not considered. In addition, there are several omissions of the Dutch Atlantic proper.Footnote ³ The volume does not cover post-1664 ‘Dutch New York’, Elmina and the other Dutch West African littoral possessions, or Dutch North Atlantic whaling operations and fisheries. The editors also suggest that, unlike the Spanish bullion trade, the Dutch East India Company's Asian-Atlantic trade in ‘certain Asian luxury goods’ re-exported by Dutch merchants from the Dutch Republic to Atlantic markets was of ‘little economic importance’ and did not produce ‘significant integration’ of these various markets (6). This bold statement is at odds with a substantive body of scholarship recognizing the rapidly thickening web of worldwide entanglements as part of the process of ‘first’ or ‘early modern globalization’ in general and the ‘consumer revolution’ of the ‘long eighteenth century’ in particular, most notably the insatiable demand for Indian textiles (including ‘Guinea’ or so-called ‘Negro cloth’), Arabian and Javanese coffee, and Chinese tea and porcelain, and the resulting ‘de-industrialization’ and ‘drain’ of silver from the Atlantic economies.Footnote ⁴

Ethnically, as Games points out as well, the volume's narrative, mainly driven by the deus ex machina of political economy, privileges Euro-Americans and Euro-American activity in the Atlantic world at the expense of other actors, most notably Africans and African-descended populations, both free and enslaved, and Amerindians, who, with the notable exception of Wim Klooster's contribution, are only mentioned in passing. Not surprisingly, then, there is little or no critical historiographical engagement with African studies, the ‘New Indian History’, global studies, or scholarship that treats extra-Atlantic ‘parallel Mediterranean’ worlds, to name only a few relevant fields.

In the end, this volume deepens the non-specialist's understanding of different, mostly politico-economic, aspects of Atlantic history and, more specifically, of the Dutch ‘White Atlantic’. By providing valuable insights into the Dutch contribution to the shaping of the Atlantic and the ways the Atlantic world shaped the Dutch, this collection of essays may prod Atlantic colleague historians to seriously rethink some of the basic analytical frameworks deployed in their approaches to Atlantic history. Nevertheless, if this volume is indicative of the state of the art in the writing of Atlantic history today as the editors claim, one can only wish for a more comprehensive paradigmatic turn, one that will rise to the challenge of producing truly global and entangled histories of the Atlantic world.