No serious study of early modern Europe can ignore the role played by the Dutch Republic throughout the seventeenth century as one of the leading world powers economically, politically, culturally and militarily. An important factor in this success was the navy of the United Provinces. This force insured the safe passage of European seaborne trade against the fleets of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, England and France from the 1590s until the alliance with England after 1689. And even as a relatively minor force during the eighteenth century, the Dutch navy managed to hold its own until the eve of the French revolutionary conquest.

Dutch historians initiated studies of the navy of the Republic in the early nineteenth century. Their main interests, of course, were centred in the navy's heyday and focussed on several specific episodes. Only three authors have written general surveys. J.C. de Jonge published the first and most extensive survey during the years 1833 to 1848. The enlarged second edition of Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen (History of the Dutch Marine Affairs), published in five volumes from 1858 through 1862, is still our most important source of factual information. Indeed, it is irreplaceable because of a disastrous fire in the Department of the Navy in 1844 which destroyed the archives of the former admiralties of the Republic. De Jonge had consulted them just in time. Collections of documents, privately kept by former naval administrators, later only partly filled the gaps in the badly decimated admiralty records. The two other surveys, published by J.J. Backer Dirks from 1865 to 1876, and J.C. Mollema from 1939 to 1942, were mainly based on De Jonge's work, although they do deal, respectively, with the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The contemporary four-volume Maritieme geschiedenis van de Nederlanden (Maritime History of the Low Countries) - published from 1976 to 1978, and edited and compiled by G. Asaert, Ph.M. Bosscher, W.J. van Hoboken and J.R. Bruijn - is an analytical survey of the maritime as well as the naval history of both the Netherlands and Belgium from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century.

Just as the study of history in general must always encompass new evidence and new ideas, so too must naval history. Unlike the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury historiographical focus on expeditions, battles and ships, current historical scholarship reflects the influence of the social sciences.