Erica Heinsen-Roach - Böcker

Analyzes how negotiations between Dutch consuls and North African rulers over the liberation of Dutch sailors helped create a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean.This work offers a new perspective on the history of diplomacy in the western Mediterranean, examining how piracy and captivity at sea forced Protestant states from northwest Europe to develop complex relationships with Islamic North Africa. Tracing how Dutch diplomats and North African officials negotiated the liberation of Dutch sailors enslaved in the Maghrib, author Erica Heinsen-Roach argues that captivity and redemption helped shape (rather than undermine) a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean. Making use of extensive archival research, Consuls and Captives shows how encounters with North African society led the Protestant North to adjust to the norms and practices of the western Mediterranean. Dutch consuls became state representatives, tasked with claiming the unconditional release of captives from the Netherlands. But caught between these directives and the realities of Maghribi politics, the diplomats consented to pay ransom, participated in what they considered lavish gift-giving practices, and began to pay tribute -- all practices that were departures from the norms the Dutch States General upheld in "doing" diplomacy. In analyzing these adjustments, Heinsen-Roach brings into question earlier interpretations of diplomacy as a progressively evolving institution anchored in the western modern tradition. Consuls and Captives shows instead that early modern diplomacy in the western Mediterranean developed in uneven ways as a product of cultural encounters. With its compelling argument and wide-ranging evidence, this book will have a strong appeal to scholars of early modern diplomacy, slavery, and Mediterranean history, as well as to specialists on the Dutch Republic.Erica Heinsen-Roach is visiting assistant professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Professor Mary Lindemann inspired several generations of historical researchers in early modern history and culture. She has served as president of the German Studies Association and the American Historical Association and is the author of pathbreaking scholarly work in the history of medicine, urban space, diplomacy, and of women. In honor of her scholarship, service, and dedication, Healing and Harm gathers a group of leading scholars that includes her students, contemporaries, and those who have been inspired by her work to continue Lindemann’s prolific arguments and observations on early modern, central European and German history and culture.

This book explores the entanglements among Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century from a global perspective. It offers a compelling analysis of how Ibero-Dutch relations shifted from violence and conflict—during the Iberian Union (1580–1640) and the Dutch quest for independence (1579–1648)—into collaboration and coexistence in the century’s second half. The encounters between the Iberians and the Dutch in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Mediterranean regions highlight their centrality in geopolitical shifts around the globe. Challenging the paradigm of decline, the contributions gathered here demonstrate that instead, each polity embraced strategic trade-offs and reshaped imperial pursuits that ultimately allowed them to thrive as empires during the entire seventeenth century.