It is now many years ago that the two of us, sitting in Ad van der Woude's back yard on a pleasant summer evening, decided that the time was ripe to write a new economic history of the Dutch Republic. A compact survey of this dramatic history was what we professed to have in mind – an accessible interpretation of the Republic's economic rise and decline, useful to scholars, students, and lay persons alike.

What we now present to the reading public is a book that aspires to much more. In the course of preparing a survey of Dutch economic history, we came to realize more clearly than before that what is really needed is an interpretation – a study that synthesizes the accumulated mass of detailed research, provides a comprehensive account of this complex economy, and situates it firmly in its European historical context and in an economic theoretical framework. And only in the process of struggling with these challenges did we come to appreciate fully the modernity of the Dutch economy – that is, the necessity of interpreting its successes and failures in terms normally reserved for economies of today and the recent past. Researching and writing this book, then, has been a voyage of discovery – a longer voyage, but also a far more rewarding one than either of us expected at the time of embarkation.

Much of this book was written during our joint stays at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, and at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California.