On 20 August 1731, the first issue appeared of Justus van Effen's De Hollandsche Spectator. Emulating Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's groundbreaking English-language periodical, as Van Effen readily acknowledged, it represented a departure in Dutch learning. Van Effen had previously been involved in a number of French journals and his decision to publish De Hollandsche Spectator in Dutch arguably exemplified the conclusion of the role the United Provinces had played in the virtual community of Protestant European scholars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, known to contemporaries as the Republic of Letters, for some fifty years. By choosing Dutch over French, the language of international learning, he sided with those who rejected cosmopolitanism in favour of a Dutch language communicatie-gemeenschap (intercommunication). It cemented Van Effen's reputation as a representative of a rather staid period in Dutch history, marked by economic, political and, by extension, intellectual decline. For a long time, the Dutch Enlightenment was considered in stark contrast to the cultural achievements of the Golden Age of the seventeenth century and the intellectual heights of the Republic of Letters. Recent historiography has been kinder, in part as a result of a redrawing of the chronological and geographical boundaries of the early Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and others.

The current historiographical debates regarding the Dutch Enlightenment have tended to focus on its philosophical and scientific achievements. Less attention has been paid to its transmissions and impact abroad. Indeed, one might argue that the historiography of the Republic of Letters, with its innate attention to international exchanges, sits somewhat awkwardly alongside it, without much integration or even awareness. This is certainly the case for the relationship between the British Isles and the United Provinces, where the Republic of Letters has normally been considered in isolation rather than as part of the wider or early Enlightenment. Chronologically predating the Enlightenment, the Republic of Letters was both its predecessor in the framework it provided for learned exchange through personal contacts and by proxy, via the rise in learned journals, as well as in intellectual terms, as its discussions focused on scholarly practice and scientific truth.