The period between the late 16th and the early 18th centuries was one of tremendous, and ultimately decisive, shifts in the balance of political, military and economic power in both Europe and the wider world. In these essays Jonathan Israel argues that Spain's efforts to maintain her hegemony continued, for a number of reasons, to be centred on the Low Countries. This had as much to do with her attempts to check the rise of France and manipulate the affairs of Germany as it had with her long war with the Dutch, Spain's overwhelming dominance in the 1580s seemed unassailable, yet by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 its greatness had been eclipsed, leaving supremacy to Britain, France and, in commercial terms, the Dutch.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
The court of Albert and Isabella, 1598-1621; garrisons and empire; Spain's strongholds in north-west Germany, 1589-1659; a Spanish project to defeat the Dutch without fighting; the Rhine-Maas Canal, 1624-9; Olivares, the cardinal-infante and Spain's strategy in the Low Countries; the road to Rocroi, 1635-43; art and diplomacy - Gerard Ter Borch and the Munster Peace negotiations, 1646-8; Spain and Europe from the Peace of Munster, (1648) to the Peace of the Pyrenees, 1648-54; Dutch Sephardi jewry, millenarian politics, and the struggle for Brazil, 1640-54; the diplomatic career of Jeronimo Nunes da Costa - an episode in Dutch-Portuguese relations of the seventeenth century; Lopo Ramirez (David Curiel) and the attempt to establish a Sephardi community in Antwerp, 1653-54; the Jews of Spanish Oran and their expulsion in 1669; toleration in seventeenth-century Dutch and English thought; William III and toleration; England's mercantilist response to Dutch world trade primacy, 1647-74; the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the English revolution of 1688; England, the Dutch and the struggle for mastery of world trade in the age of the glorious revolution; Gregorio Leti, 1631-1701 and the Dutch Sephardi elite at the close of the seventeenth century; the Dutch republic and the jews during the conflict over the Spanish succession, 1699-1715.
