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AbstractStarting from an incident in the colonial port city of Paramaribo in the autumn of 1750 in which, according to the Dutch governor Mauricius, many of the proper barriers separating rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, white citizens and black slaves were crossed, this article traces some of the complexities of everyday social control in colonial Suriname. As gateways for the trade in commodities and the movement of people, meeting points for free and unfree labourers, and administrative centres for emerging colonial settlements, early modern port cities became focal points for policing interaction across racial and social boundaries. Much of the literature on the relationship between slavery and race focuses on the plantation as "race-making institution" and the planter class as the immediate progenitors of "racial capitalism". Studies of urban slavery, on the other hand, have emphasized the greater possibilities of social contact between blacks,mestizos, and whites of various social status in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic. This article attempts to understand practices of racialization and control in the port city of Paramaribo not by contrasting the city with its plantation environment, but by underlining the connections between the two social settings that together shaped colonial geography. The article focuses on everyday activities in Paramaribo (dancing, working, drinking, arguing) that reveal the extent of contact between slaves and non-slaves. The imposition of racialized forms of repression that set one group against the other, frequently understood primarily as a means to justify the apparent stasis of the plantation system with its rigid internal divisions, in practice often functioned precisely to fight the pernicious effects of mobility in mixed social contexts.

The literature on the financial revolution and the rise of the English fiscal-military state frequently gives the impression that a singular set of reforms emanating from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 changed the entire landscape of English army finances, allowing a fundamental shift from patchwork solutions based on short-term credit and managed through a system of wholesale venality to a solid system of long-term funded loans raised on an impersonal market. This article focuses on the crucial role that merchant networks and the personal connections of financial intermediaries continued to play in international troop payments arranged by the English state through the Dutch Republic. Even when the English or Dutch treasuries could find the necessary money to pay and provision the troops in time, getting the money to the military commanders in the field or to their distant suppliers often depended on long and complex credit lines. Short-term loans acquired in making military expenditure - consisting of unpaid bills to suppliers, payments advanced by officials and officers, and temporary loans contracted by financial intermediaries - as well as the widespread reliance on commercial credit in the form of bills of exchange as a way to transfer funds effectively formed the life thread of army finance. The ability to finance the military in times of exploding costs and permanent emergencies without defaulting rested not only on the capacity to draw on financial resources at home, but also on the strength of commercial and financial networks abroad. In doing so, closeness to the centres of emerging international financial capitalism seems to have been of greater importance than a specific set of institutional innovations.

Geert Wilders's Party for Freedom did worse than expected on Wednesday. But there's not much else to cheer in Dutch politics.

Henk te Velde, Donald Haks (eds.), Oranje onder. Populair orangisme van Willem van Oranje tot nu (Amsterdam: Prometheus, Bert Bakker, 2014, 303 pp., ISBN 978 90 351 4125 4).

In this review article, Pepijn Brandon discusses Petra Groen (ed.), De Tachtigjarige Oorlog. Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog 1568-1648 (The Eighty Years War: From Revolt to All-Out War 1568-1648). The main strength of this work lies in its outspoken endorsement of a 'War and Society' approach to the Dutch Revolt, freeing military history from its old-fashioned, often nationalist and militarist streak, and focusing attention on the interaction between the military struggle and society at large. However the possibilities for reinterpretation offered by this approach are not fully grasped, and the gaps in our knowledge of the Revolt that become apparent from this synthesis frequently remain under-explored. Why do we still know so little about the motivations of 'ordinary soldiers' in the rebel army? Were military factors the main determinant in the eventual separation between North and South? In what ways did war influence the character of the new state? A more consistent application of a 'War and Society' approach would help to integrate these old questions in a new interpretative framework.In dit recensie-artikel bespreekt Pepijn Brandon het onder redactie van Petra Groen verschenen De Tachtigjarige Oorlog. Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog 1568-1648. De kracht van deze overzichtsstudie ligt in de toepassing van een uitgesproken 'War and Society'-benadering, die de militaire geschiedenis ontdoet van haar ouderwetse, vaak nationalistische en militaristische insteek en de aandacht richt op de samenhang tussen oorlog en maatschappij. Maar de mogelijkheden voor herinterpretatie die deze benadering van de Opstand biedt, worden niet volledig benut, en de lacunes in onze kennis die deze studie blootlegt, blijven vaak onbenoemd. Waarom weten we nog zo weinig over de motieven van 'de gewone soldaat' in het rebellenleger? Hoe doorslaggevend waren militaire factoren in de uiteindelijke scheiding tussen Noord en Zuid? En op welke manieren beïnvloedde de oorlog het karakter van de nieuwe staat? Een consequente toepassing van de 'War and Society'-benadering maakt het mogelijk deze oude vragen in te passen in een nieuw betoog.