For decades, historians held to the proposition that the new forms of warfare that developed during the early modern period required a shift from broker-financed militaries to strong centralized state military bureaucracies to function. This idea became embedded in the historical literature, particularly as the works of scholars like Charles Tilly drove the narrative. Pepijn Brandon points out that the Dutch Republic presents a significant exception to this rule, something historians have long recognized but have had a hard time explaining by the essentially teleological explanations of capitalist state development that have been put forward up to now.

This book’s core question asks how the Dutch Republic, which did not follow the centralizing tendencies of other early modern states, was able to be so important in the early modern state system, and how its extensive military involvement did not ultimately change the way Dutch state financed warfare. In other words, what solutions to financing warfare did the Dutch Republic find that allowed it to take a path that was so different from other early modern states? For Brandon, the key to answering this question rests in understanding what he refers to as the Dutch federal-brokerage model of the state. The term is meant to convey the importance of a matrix of relationships that included the involvement of the capitalist elite in funding military actions, the strategies of the state in raising funds, and the state’s reliance on the market in military and navel procurement. The result was not the failure of the Dutch state to centralize; rather, it was the outcome of successful relationships between the emerging state and its capitalist society, and the particularist nature of Dutch politics.

Brandon presents what he has identified as the three primary ways, or types of brokerage arrangements, in which capitalists and the state interacted to fund military activities as they developed over the more than two centuries between the Dutch Revolt and the end of the republic in 1795. Some of these brokerage types are well known to historians. The great merchant-warrior companies, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (WIC), formed one kind of brokerage type, to name one of the more obvious examples. In the case of the merchant companies, capitalists and the state’s admiralty boards cooperated directly in order to advance their joint naval interests. Brandon shows that the balance of influence over naval policy shifted between merchants and the admiralty boards, but he stresses that the decline of Dutch naval power at the end of the eighteenth century was the result of commercial choices made by the powerful merchant elites rather than their loss of control over policy, as has often been suggested.

The second type of brokerage that Brandon presents concerns merchants acting as naval and military administrators and the effects of this relationship on Dutch economic development at home due to the massive operation of naval shipyards. By investigating topics such as supply chain activities and the organization of production, Brandon shows that capitalists were directly involved in managing significant aspects of the early modern Dutch state. The state did not restrict capitalists only to managing naval warfare, supply, and production. The third type of brokerage, military soliciting, extended capitalist-state relationships to financing the Dutch army as well. Among other activities, military solicitors were most important as intermediaries in troop payments.

Through his examination of the various aspects of the Dutch federal-brokerage state, Brandon challenges the prevailing narrative that suggests that early modern warfare favored the development of a centralized nation-state. The Dutch case shows that brokerage forms of organization were effective in employing the vast wealth of the Dutch Republic in support of naval and military power. Brandon’s study is not only well researched, it is highly convincing and will undoubtedly lead to a reconsideration of the forces at play in the development of the early modern state.