Acta Helvetico-Neerlandica
Introduction
The Swiss and Dutch Republics have a long history in common. Swiss soldiers were indispensable in the many wars the Dutch Republic had to fight until far into the eighteenth century. On the other hand Dutch commerce was invaluable for developing the Swiss economy. When in the seventeenth century the Swiss were looking for the expertise and the finances to venture on the daring project of digging a canal from the Rhine to the Rhone, they found backers as well as technology in the Dutch Republic. However, the number of historical studies devoted to that relationship is very limited indeed. Though a thorough bibliographical survey is not yet available, it is hardly to be expected that the past two centuries have produced more than a few dozen solid studies each. If one consults the present holdings of Dutch libraries only material on trains, cheese, skiing and mountaineering abounds.
Recently, it would seem, the climate has started to change. The first steps were taken, I think, by the Werkgroep 18e Eeuw. In 1997 Ernestine van der Wall and I took the initiative in organizing a joint panel with the Swiss Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at the 1999 ISECS conference in Dublin, an example that has borne fruit. The Rotterdam-based project Egodocuments, self reflection and cultural change, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the European Context, 1600-1900, led by Rudolf Dekker and Arianne Baggerman together with Kaspar von Greyerz (Historisches Seminar, Universität Basel), soon followed suit. The project will produce its first results in the next few years. Last spring, organized by Maarten Prak (Utrecht) and André Holenstein (Bern), an exploratory conference on Swiss-Dutch relations in the early modern period took place at the University of Berne, the results of which will be published by Amsterdam University Press soon.
As a follow-up to the Dublin event Daniel Tröhler, the director of the Pestalozzi Research Institute for the History of Education at the University of Zürich, and I decided to set up an extensive program of collaboration that is planned to start in the fall of 2005 and to continue for several years. In the framework of several small-scale conferences, researchers from both countries will address the issue of commonalities and differences between the two republics in the 17th and 18th centuries. The objective is to examine as many elements of cultural history as possible, and to supplement a comparative approach, as far as possible, by questions of direct, mutual influence. The topics, among others, are political rhetoric in the context of economic developments, the reception of philosophies from abroad, perceptions of the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, the education of tradesmen, the concepts of family and community, the cultivation of friendship and social life, communication systems and (national and international) publicity, the mercenary system, and the development of the school system.
In order to put the program on a firm footing we decided to start right away and in the fall of 2004 the first exchanges took place. Daniel Tröhler gave a paper at the Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History of the University of Utrecht on 3 December, preceded by a paper of mine at the Pestalozzianum in Zurich on 19 November. These lec-
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