State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age

Abstract

This monograph describes the political communication practices of the authorities in the Dutch Golden Age. It is an in-depth study of early modern ‘state communication’: the manner in which government sought to inform its citizens, publicise its laws and engage publicly in quarrels with its political opponents. These communication strategies, including proclamations, the use of town criers, and the printing and affixing of hundreds of thousands of edicts, underpinned the political stability of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The oligarchic regents who ruled the country always understated the extent to which they relied on the consent of their citizens. The regents shared a republican ideal which dismissed popular agency; yet far from withholding political information, the authorities were finely attuned to the benefit of involving their citizens in the affairs of state. Based on systematic research in thirty-two Dutch archives, this book demonstrates for the first time how the wealthiest, most literate and politically participatory state of early modern Europe was shaped by political information. It makes a decisive case for the importance of communication to the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the extent to which early modern authorities relied on their subjects to legitimise their government.