In the introduction to this book, we proposed to interpret the Netherlands from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries as the site of the “first modern economy.” Now, at the end of our labors, we wish to take a few final pages to reflect on the implications of our thesis – implications for the interpretation of Dutch and European history, but also implications for the concepts of modernization, the Industrial Revolution, and modern economic growth.

Our claims for the economic history of the Netherlands stand in tension with a formidable bulwark of historical periodization and social scientific convention: the French (political) and (English) Industrial Revolutions that together establish the dividing line between the traditional and modern, the agrarian-commercial and the industrial worlds. The coupling of a social and political

“modernization” with an economic and technological “industrialization” implied by these contemporary revolutions has led many students to the view that the two – modernization and industrialization – were so inextricably intertwined as to be synonymous.

No extended discussion is needed to demonstrate how poorly served was Dutch history by this concept. The Netherlands' early economic advance had to be set aside as a curiosity of another epoch, while the late advent of its factorybased industrialization cast doubt on any claims that its earlier development had, in fact, established a modern society.