The essays which comprise this book have been written to honour Charles Wilson, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, by friends, colleagues and former students. Their range, both in period and in theme, reflects the breadth of the academic friendships (only a small proportion of which can find representation here) inspired by him, in the course of an active career, and they mirror the range of his own historical studies which has steadily expanded since he began research in 1936. Even by that time, however, his academic and intellectual horizons were wider than most in his position. Having come up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate with a scholarship from De Aston Grammar School – in Market Rasen, a small Lincolnshire market town – he had taken a First both in the Historical Tripos and in the English Tripos; he subsequently became a Fellow of the college in 1938. Jesus College had vigorous, independent intellectual roots, somewhat outside the mainstream of Cambridge history (as, indeed, was the location of the college, seemingly in ample rural isolation from the town), so that he owed more to Bernard Manning of his own college and to Edward Walbourne of Emmanuel (also, as it happened, from the same grammar school in an earlier generation) than to more acclaimed luminaries in colleges closer to the banks of the Cam.

Charles Wilson's first research project, which resulted in the publication in 1941 of Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance in the Eighteenth Century, had taken him to the Netherlands and Germany in 1937–8. From this beginning there started a connection with the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark which has never been lost or become inactive.