When we planned the two conferences on which this book is based, we expected that the United Kingdom would remain in the European Union, with some adjustments. Historians, it turns out, are no better than economists in anticipating the likely course of events. Whatever the final outcome, the ‘leave’ result produced by the referendum, it now appears, forms part of a wider series of symptoms of a deep malaise afflicting European societies, including the resurgence of nationalism, xenophobia and rejection of multiculturalism, alongside growing demands for protectionism in some quarters. Growing disparities of wealth and income since the 1980s, widespread corporate tax evasion and the imposition of austerity programmes following in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 have helped trigger these discontents. The root causes of that crisis, in turn, can be seen to lie in the deregulation of financial markets across the western world which began in 1971, when the United States of America withdrew dollar convertibility and effectively ended the Bretton Woods system. Most commentators agree that globalisation has been seriously mismanaged over the past forty years, but disagreement reigns amongst those promoting policy prescriptions for its reform, as well as those who envisage a new post-capitalist world rising from the ashes of financial catastrophe. Some, indeed, have argued that we are moving into an era of ‘disorganised capitalism’, a form of systemic chaos, where regulation by national governments is no longer possible.

Interest in historical commemoration is closely bound up with the Durkheimian paradigm of collective memory and national identity. In nineteenth-century Europe, state-making invariably gave rise to narratives of national history, which entered cultural life through many channels including the visual and performing arts, literature, school curricula, and the invention of historic anniversaries. The pace quickened during the decades immediately preceding the Great War, by which time the ‘cult of the centenary’ had become well established across the Western world. The centennial celebration served as ‘a barometer of contemporary esteem and reflected popular and elite attitudes to both the past and the present’. Pierre Nora, reacting to the contradictions produced by the bicentennial of the French Revolution, commented that by the late twentieth century, ‘commemorative bulimia has all but consumed our efforts to control it’. But it was from the domain of Anglo-Dutch history in the seventeenth century that the first centennial events in Britain emerged: the 1788 celebration of the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

The stuff of ‘round’ anniversaries of political events is frequently found in national victories or defeats, with heroes and villains cast in leading roles: Drake and the Spanish Armada, Nelson and Trafalgar, the Medway Raid and De Ruyter. The Revolution of 1688 forms an unusual case in which both parties, the Dutch and the English, could be portrayed as winners. In what was to become the classic Whig paradigm, 1688 brought deliverance from Catholic absolutism, provided a temporary halt to French expansionism, and prevented the outbreak of another civil war. But William’s invasion also marked the conclusion of a longer Anglo-Dutch moment from c. 1648 to 1689, which saw three Anglo-Dutch wars followed by the consolidation of Orangist leadership. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia brought Spanish recognition of Dutch independence, and ended the Thirty Years’ War, leaving the Protestant maritime powers to settle their differences, and confront the rise of French military and naval strength. The context of Anglo-Dutch relations during this period was clearly one of profound transformation, in a Europe which was itself undergoing a shift towards decentralised sovereign states, Catholic and Protestant, of varying size and influence. Commemoration of these events therefore involved much more than bilateral victory celebrations to encompass a wider review of European politics, religion, and cultural exchange.

The essays which follow sprang from two conferences, Dutch and British, arranged to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Dutch raid on the Medway of June 1667. The first was arranged jointly in Amsterdam by the Dutch historical association, De Vrienden van De Witt, and the British Naval Dockyards Society. The second conference, one week later, took place at the Historic Dockyard, Chatham, arranged by the University of Kent at Medway.

The 1667 raid is conventionally seen in Dutch historiography as a great victory marking the high water mark of Dutch naval power. For many, the exploits of the De Witt brothers and Admiral De Ruyter compare with those of Nelson at Trafalgar, as Remmelt Daalder explains below. In Britain, on the other hand, the episode is remembered, if at all, as an embarrassment for Charles II and his circle rather than a moment of national humiliation. Nevertheless, the initiative for commemoration sprang as much from the British as the Dutch, through a shared passion for naval and maritime history. For the former, it is fair to say that enthusiasm for local history and heritage compensated for the lack of any sense of national pride, or indeed shame. As they gazed across the Medway towards Upnor Castle, participants attending the Chatham conference were acutely conscious of the benefits of doing ‘history where it happened’. The position of the dockyard defences, the narrowness of the fairway, and the long winding course of the river beyond added new dimensions of understanding: the enterprise was indeed een tocht, a hazardous amphibious expedition rather than een strijd or a conventional battle.

Leaving aside differences embedded in language and popular preconceptions, one of our challenges was to select and reshape a series of varied conference contributions within a wider perspective, that of Anglo-Dutch conflict running from the outbreak of war in 1652 to its resolution in 1689. Our starting point, set out by Gijs Rommelse and Roger Downing, is to emphasise the European context as distinct from the traditional bilateral treatment of the three Anglo-Dutch Wars. Our aim has been to produce not another survey of the course of these wars but rather to explore the broader dimensions of conflict, of which war and armed struggle were only one, albeit the most significant, aspect.