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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46 (2014)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46

(2014)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

History beyond the nation. Dutch world histories in the Enlightenment
Eleá de la Porte

In the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic three multi-volume world histories were published. Yet the idea persists that Dutch eighteenth-century historians were solely interested in the national past. By studying the three histories of the world that were published in this period, I argue that Dutch historians also adopted a global perspective which allowed them to study more comprehensive themes. I then proceed to show that the authors of these works gradually transformed the age-old genre of world history from a traditional Christian universal history into an ‘enlightened narrative’ of progress.

Introduction

Eighteenth-century Dutch historians are often portrayed as having been solely preoccupied with the national past.1 The period after 1750 in particular has been characterised as an era of decreasing interest in the rest of the world, not only for the Dutch Republic, but for Europe as a whole.2 However, no fewer than three Dutch contributions to the genre of world history were published during the eighteenth century.3 Two of these were written after 1750 by well-known men of letters in the Dutch Enlightenment, Johannes Martinet and Martinus Stuart, who were both able, each in their own way, to integrate the two key concepts of the historical philosophy of the Enlightenment into the traditional genre of world history: the idea of society as a valid historical research subject and the idea of progress. Thus, these works illustrate that not did only Dutch historians adopt a world perspective, but that in these world histories a narrative of progress was possible as well - despite the common portrayal of the Dutch Enlightenment as being exclusively concerned with the

national past and the problem of national decline.4

While the subject of Enlightenment historical thought has for a long time attracted attention in Enlightenment studies and has recently gained fresh prominence with the works of Karen O'Brien, John Pocock and Dan Edelstein, it is often associated with the affiliated genre of ‘philosophical history’.5 And since Simon Stijl's The Rise and Bloom of the United Provinces (1774) is generally considered the only ‘real’ Dutch exponent of philosophical history, it would appear as if the rest of eighteenth-century Dutch historiography was exclusively concerned with national history in a humanist-protestant tradition.6 It is the purpose of this article to attempt to demonstrate not only that the interest of Dutch historians in the world outside the Dutch Republic continued well into the eighteenth century, but also that multiple elements of Enlightenment historical thought were incorporated into these works.

The genre of world history offers a unique opportunity to study these questions. Although it was a traditional and resilient genre with roots extending all the way back to classical antiquity, its structure and content changed fundamentally during the eighteenth century - albeit gradually and intermittently - and those changes in many ways mimicked the four main characteristics of philosophical history. The first similarity is that world histories acquired a geographical and temporal scope that far exceeded the traditional biblical boundaries. Geographically, whereas the traditional Biblical world view had encompassed Europe, Western Asia and Northern Africa, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards world histories also included the history of the American Indians, the Aztecs and the Chinese. Chronologically, as the authority of the Mosaic account of the origins of mankind was increasingly called into question, the 6,000 years that traditionally covered the whole of Biblical chronology were replaced by a history of the world from the Stone

Age to the rise of commercial Europe in the modern age. The second similarity between philosophical history and the genre of world history in the eighteenth century was that the traditional subject of sacred and political history was broadened to include the historical development of civil society in all respects, from customs and commerce to the history of women. The third similarity was that the authors of world histories increasingly favoured historical explanations over a mere erudite accumulation of detail, and based those explanations on secular rather than theological arguments. The fourth and final similarity is that authors of world histories adopted the idea of progress to breathe new life into historical data that had lost its previous humanist, theological or encyclopaedic framework.7 The genre of world history thus provides an excellent starting point to analyse how the continuing eighteenth-century Dutch interest in the world changed with the appropriation of the ideas of society and progress.

In this article I have chosen to limit my enquiry to world histories written in Dutch by Dutch authors, thus excluding works on specific non-European countries and omitting Latin world histories or Dutch translations of foreign publications.8 This leaves us with three, hitherto unstudied, world histories: Geerlof Suikers and Isaak Verburg's five-volume General Ecclesiastical and Profane Histories of this World (1721-1728), Johannes Martinet's nine-volume History of the World (1780-1788) and Martinus Stuart's six-volume Man, as he Lives in the Known Parts of the World (1802-1807).9 All three authors can be characterised as popularisers, who never left the Netherlands and wrote their world histories based on other people's historical works and accounts from abroad. Although it is a difficult task to ascertain the readership of these works, we may find an indication in Johan van der Zande's analysis of the subscriptions to the Dutch translation of the initially

English and later European-wide enterprise Universal History (1736-1765). The Dutch translation attracted 900 subscribers on its first announcement - a considerable number for that period - and Van der Zande maintains that the cost and size of the work implied a well-to-do reading public.10 While such numbers are unfortunately unknown for the works discussed in this article, I did find information on the reception of these works. All three world histories were well-received in Dutch review journals and Stuart's work was reprinted in 1818 and 1836, and even translated into German.11 Moreover, the simple fact that these authors decided to spend their time and energy on multi-volume world histories shows the importance Dutch historians still attached to the subject in the eighteenth century.

Since little is known about these Dutch world histories, I have decided to treat them in chronological order to try to place their specific contribution in their cultural, social and political contexts, while at the same time tracking changes over time. This choice of a chronological account should not be interpreted as an attempt to write a linear history of the ‘modern’ advancements in Dutch world histories. We should always be wary of writing intellectual history simply in terms of progress, as it obscures the often varying combinations of divergent and even seemingly conflicting ideas in our sources, and can make us overlook the gradual and intermittent way in which changes come about in such a traditional genre as world history.12 Moreover, we should bear in mind that while world history was more or less acknowledged as a specific genre in the early modern period, history had yet to become a ‘discipline’. Therefore, world histories often differed a great deal in content and included subjects from other fields such as ethnography, geology, sociology, philology and political theory. Although I have chosen the perspective of philosophical history to contextualise and interpret the Dutch world histories, throughout my article I will also draw comparisons with eighteenth-century Germany. As the thorough research of Van der Zande and Hedelmut Zedelmaier has shown, the methodological changes in eighteenth-century German contributions to the genre of world history resembled the methodology of philosophical history

as well.13 At times, I will therefore employ Van der Zande's terminology to alternatively frame the changes in the genre in the Dutch Republic as a development from universal history to world history to a history of mankind. As the eighteenth century progressed, the contributions to the genre gradually evolved from the previous humanist history ‘as teaching by example’ into a European history of progress in manners to subsequently grow into a theory of universal progress of mankind and society.

Teaching by example: Geerlof Suikers and Isaak Verburg's universal history (1721-1728)

The well-to-do, erudite lawyer Geerlof Suikers (1669-1717) had enough spare time left from his legal practice to write a universal history, but died unexpectedly before his work could be finished.14 After Suikers's decease, the headmaster of the Latin school in Amsterdam Isaak Verburg, who knew about and admired the manuscript, completed and then published Suikers's world history at R. and J. Wetstein in Amsterdam.15 The resulting General Ecclesiastical and Profane Histories of this World appeared between 1721 and 1728, amounting to over 4,500 pages and consisting of five substantial volumes.16

Suikers's world history fit effortlessly into the clear set of conventions that the genre had already acquired in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.17 It accordingly gave an account of sacred history, which is the history of God's relationship with his people as narrated in the Old and New Testaments and which continued in the history of the church, as well as of profane history, which is the history of worldly events as based on non-Biblical sources.18 Obviously, sacred and profane history overlapped when dealing with the

beginnings of world history - both originated from Genesis. Suikers's sacred and profane histories were predominantly arranged along Biblical spatial and temporal boundaries, encompassing Europe, Northern Africa and Western Asia - he also included America, but only from a European perspective - and spanning nearly 6,000 years, from Creation until the present.19 Suikers structured these 6,000 years according to convention as well with divisions depending mainly on the pivotal moment of the birth of Christ and the type and reliability of the historical sources. His work was therefore not only divided into two eras, before and after Christ, but also into what he called obscure, fabulous or uncertain, and historical periods. These periods were further subdivided - again following convention - into smaller epochs marked by significant historical events, such as the Deluge, the birth of Christ and the founding of the Lombard Kingdom.20

Such strict adherence to convention raises an obvious question: if world histories were all organised in much the same way, why did authors bother to write a world history of their own? A first reason for this was that authors wanted to show that their own country, nation or group was the protagonist of sacred, providential history, which was a dire political and religious need, especially after the Reformation.21 A second reason was that conventions were not as static or unchanging as they may appear at first sight; authors sometimes needed to change the format to include or accommodate new information. This was especially urgent from the fifteenth century onwards because the Biblical and classical world view was increasingly called into question by the discovery of previously unknown parts of the world, such as America, and the influx of new and often challenging information, such as the anomalous chronologies of Chinese history, which seemed to begin before the Flood or even before Creation.22 A third and final reason to write a world history had to do with practical or personal motives of the author, such as the desire to publish an affordable alternative to expensive editions, to propose a new way of arranging the material or to

bring a neglected topic to light.23

Suikers fell mainly into the last category. Besides his desire to be the first author to write a world history in Dutch, he wrote his work in response to two recently published world histories, a Dutch translation of Johann Ludwig Gottfried's Historica Chronica by Simon de Vries and an anonymous French world history. These works had, in his opinion, not only neglected the earliest Greek history, the story of how the European states arose from the ashes of the Western-Roman empire, and the individual lives of educated men and women, but they had also narrated historical events ‘with little attention to their circumstances’, for instance omitting a discussion of the ‘coincidences’ or ‘policy’ determining battle outcomes or neglecting the ‘reasons’ for specific political or military decisions.24 This latter comment on the need to discuss the ‘circumstances’ of historical events has led Henk Roosenboom to characterize Suikers's world history as ‘surprisingly modern’ in his short biography of the author, interpreting Suikers's critique as proof of a contemporary view of causality.25 However, in analysing Suikers's world history we need to be careful not to read into his work what our present mind-set discerns, but to try to approach it from his perspective and to take into account his aims, methods and the actual content of the work.

Suikers's world history was dedicated to a history of men and events in the manner of Thucydides and Tacitus - what Pocock calls ‘narrative’ history’.26 His world history had therefore two goals: to teach and to entertain. Above all, history was the teacher of life - historia magistra vitae - which was also reflected in Suikers's usage of the plural noun ‘histories’ to refer to the plethora of individual stories and examples, and in his exclusive focus on political and military history. His inclusion of a separate section on biographies - a genre that remained highly popular throughout the eighteenth century - suited this goal as well, as did his insertion of direct speeches, a common feature of narrative history.27 It is also from this perspective that Suikers's objective

of ‘explaining’ should be interpreted. His elucidations did not amount to an endless series of causes and effects - the modern way of viewing historcal causality - but were mostly clarifications of individual political and military events or decisions, provided for the reader's education. For example, Suikers explained Mithridates's decision to ask Sertorius for an alliance by pointing to the latter's military courage and their shared desire to resist the Romans.28 Or, illuminating the role of fate in the unfolding of historical events, a victory of the Romans against the Cimbren in 101 BC was attributed to the position of the sun.29 Thus, Suikers provided context in order to elicit a more thorough understanding of history's particular teachings and to allow the reader better to extract these lessons from the past and apply them to the present.

The goal of instructing the reader did not sit well with a continuous narrative of cause and effect. As Pocock states when he characterises the role of explanations in narrative historiography in the third volume of his Barbarism and Religion:

[the ancients] could confront remote with later moments for the rhetorical and instructive value of doing so, and their sense for the relation between them might approach the causal; but ‘a perpetual series of causes and effects’, operating continuously over long periods of time, required a species of narrative hard to combine with the narrative of selected human actions.30

However, Verburg included some advice for the reader on how to combat this lack of a coherent narrative in his own separate introduction to the world history. Here he provides the reader with a reading manual in typically humanist fashion that explicitly specifies that it is up to the reader to extract the lessons himself. Only by carefully perusing the world history, Verburg argues, and by compiling information under personalised, categorized headings, such as the rise and decline of empires or ‘exemplary’ political decisions, could a reader reap the true benefits of the work.31 This method of reading history stemmed directly from customary humanist practices in the centuries before.32

Suikers did provide additional small hints throughout the work to guide the reader in this process. In his Roman histories, for example, the reader

could deduce that he was following a ‘Gracchan explanation’ for the decline and fall of the Roman Republic in AD 27. This well-known narrative of civil wars ran from the brothers Gracchus through Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Caesar, to Antony and Augustus.33 Suikers presented the murder of Tiberius and Cajus Gracchus after their proposal for the renegotiation of landownership as laying the ‘groundwork’ for civil strife which would later grow into the full-blown civil wars that eventually ended Rome's freedom.34 However, other elements were mentioned as well: the decay of Roman virtue because of Asian and Greek influences as exemplified by the long war against the North-African king Jugurtha who on multiple occasions bribed the corrupt Romans; the ambition for high command from individuals and the concentration of power in a single person, as exemplified by Pompey, Caesar and Augustus; and the importance of soldiers, especially their essential role in installing emperors in Rome from the provinces. None of these elements were presented as decisive; it was up to the reader to meaningfully sort these elements and extract the lessons they carried within them. Often, Suikers even provided multiple historiographical perspectives for the reader to choose from, either in the main text itself or in footnotes. For instance, he supplied the reader with several possible reasons for Augustus's departure from Rome in AD 14 and included two different versions of Marcus Brutus's last words.35

This leads to the question of how Suikers managed to give coherence to such a learned, narrative history where multiple perspectives were presented and whose lessons the reader was supposed to work out by himself. For Suikers, this coherence was not so much provided by the content of the work as by the chronology that framed his world history. In this sense, Suikers still stood firmly in the tradition of universal history. Because the genre partially stemmed from and was an elaboration of the medieval and early modern Christian world chronicle, chronology reigned supreme. The ultimate goal had been to place history within the Biblical chronological framework from Creation until the present.36 Along similar lines, Suikers argued that chronology - the temporal framing of the past - was the most important component of his General Histories. Indeed, ‘it was impossible to write a general overview of

all histories before you were certain of the correct time frame’.37 In the next section Suikers not only showed himself aware of the many battles that had been waged in the science of chronology, but he also consciously chose to use the chronology of Seth Calvisius which he deemed the most trustworthy for its concurrence with key events in world history.38 This very precise chronology - 3,948 years had passed between Creation and the birth of Christ - provided the overall framework and was visible on every page of the world history, the years of the historical events under discussion being included in the margins. For both history before and after Christ, Suikers used a conventional double chronology. In the margins one calendar always counted upwards from Creation, while the other calendar counted downward (in years BC) to the birth of Christ - in expectation of the Coming of the Messiah - and upwards (in years AD) from the birth of Christ - in expectation of the Final Judgment.39 The strict and detailed chronological division that Suikers adhered to in his world history - in the overall framework and on each individual page - even determined the ordering of the chapters. For example, the history of Venice is not discussed in a single chapter, but scattered throughout his world history in distinct chronological slots, so that after reading the chapter on Venetian history until AD 312 the reader would have to jump ahead several sections to find the continuation of this account.

In order to underscore the difference between Suikers's narrative history and more philosophical world histories, which will be exemplified in this article by Martinet's work, it may be useful to turn briefly to Suikers's history of Europe. Suikers and Verburg highlighted three main events in European history by discussing them in separate, thematic chapters that would later constitute key components in the histories of European progress: the Crusades, the barbarian invasions and the search for commercial routes to the East and West Indies.40 Although all three events were mainly narrated in

political-military terms, thus befitting the narrative history that Suikers and Verburg aimed to write, one exception can be found. While Suikers discussed the Crusades in his separate chapter on the subject solely in political-military terms, chronologically recounting the battles won and lost, in the chapter on the history of Venice that was written by Verburg, the latter suddenly referred back to the Crusades as having played a crucial role in European commercial growth, stating that: ‘the fall of Rome and the flooding of the Western parts of Europe by Nordic peoples, had ended the commerce between Europe and Asia, until the Crusades, aimed at saving the Holy Land from the infidels, and starting in the eleventh century, had revived the Europeans' desire for Asia's wealth’.41 However, this quote stands alone in a further exclusively narrative history. The history of the Crusades itself and the history of the barbarian kingdoms as the origins of European feudal state structures were both solely meant to provide insight into political-military history. Even in the multiple chapters on the European presence in the East and West Indies no mention is made of progress, civilisation or culture; Verburg only discusses the wars waged with the natives and amongst competing European countries.42 Rather than writing a European history of progress in commerce, culture and manners, Suikers and Verburg's universal history thus remained a fundamentally narrative history, a history that taught by examples.43

Predestined progress: Johannes Martinet's world history (1780-1788)

In contrast to Suikers's relative anonymity, Johannes Florentius Martinet (1729-1796) was a central figure in the Dutch Enlightenment. He obtained his degree from the University of Leiden, where he had studied the natural sciences and researched the respiratory system of insects. He was active as a Mennonite minister, as a writer and researcher, he was a member of various learned societies and keeper of an extensive correspondence network.44 He became known, nationally and internationally, for his Catechism of Nature which was published between 1777 and 1779 and subsequently reprinted until well into the nineteenth century. Immediately after finishing this work,

Martinet published a nine-volume History of the World at Johannes Allart in Amsterdam between 1780 and 1788. This world history had the same objective as his Catechism, and indeed as his entire oeuvre, which was aimed at a rigorous defence of the compatibility of Christian belief and natural science, of reason and revelation.45 In the opening paragraphs of his world history, Martinet also deliberately grouped this work with his previous Catechism of Nature and the Bible: taken together, these works would provide the reader with insight into God's Word, Creation and Deeds.46

The main objective of Martinet's world history was thus to understand God's glorious design for mankind and to place the Dutch Republic and Europe within this providential history. This goal was complemented by a simultaneous attack on deism, mostly through a severe critique of Voltaire, a beloved target in the Dutch Enlightenment, whose work Martinet considered the epitome of deist ‘freethinking’.47 In addition to this defence of Protestant belief against freethinkers, Martinet's world history was also profoundly shaped by its educational purposes. Written as a dialogue between a teacher and a student, it was dedicated to the children of Stadtholder Willem V and functioned simultaneously as a mirror-for-princes, containing many individual exempla. Martinet had moreover no compunction about advocating his personal views, being more favourable towards a political alliance with France than to an alliance with England and using history to prove his point.48

Although six decades separated Martinet's and Suikers's world histories, it is striking how closely their formal structures still resembled one another. For example, Martinet still recounted profane history and sacred history in separate sections, although he restricted his history of the church to an exclusively national account. Geographically, he also placed the emphasis on European history. The chronological organisation was similar as well, although Martinet was less precise; he rounded off his division of periods to full years instead of providing the exact number of years as Suikers did. There was also a marked difference between Martinet's chronology of Old and New history. In the period before Christ Martinet retained the subdivision into smaller epochs marked by significant historical events such as the Deluge and the founding of Rome. However, in the period after Christ he diverged

from Suikers's format by slicing it up into six epochs based on a more neutral division by century, with the last two epochs loosely coinciding with the split between medieval history and Neuzeit around 1500.49 Furthermore, chronology was no longer the determining factor in the organisation of the chapters on profane history; instead, Martinet structured this section geographically, recounting the complete history of a people or a country in one single chapter.50 Overall, Martinet's approach made chronology a less rigid feature of his world history, as he did not engage in debates on chronology, nor include years in the margins.

In addition to Martinet's increasing emphasis on geography as an organising principle for his material, there are also marked differences between the actual content of Martinet's and Suikers's works. Martinet incorporated three new elements into his world history that had been formulated in philosophical history from the 1740s onwards: the idea of progress, the discovery of society as a historical subject, and the focus on historical explanations. We could therefore identify his work as a world history in the sense employed by Van der Zande in his study of eighteenth-century German world histories: as a history in which completeness does not depend on covering the whole of geography or chronology, but on the presentation of a single perspective that was often synonymous with a history of European progress.51 However, at the same time Martinet revived and strengthened the old Christian aspirations of universal history by revealing that Providence was at work in sacred as well as profane history. And what his close scrutiny of God's Design for mankind revealed above all was Europe's remarkable path towards civilisation. Martinet's view of world history can therefore be best described as a combination of progress and providence - or predestined progress.

This focus on European history was not exceptional; on the contrary, the ‘why’ of Europe's progress became the key question in Enlightenment historical thought. It partially stemmed from methodological alterations within the genre, which were formulated as a solution to the criticism aimed at the enormously popular 65-volume Universal History (1736-1765), the European-wide project that surpassed even Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie in

scope and length.52 Because the objective of the contributors to the Universal History had been to write a ‘true’ universal history, including all known nations and peoples in the world, and to incorporate the multiple opinions of learned debates as a way of countering political and religious bias, it had lacked coherence, resulting in a large number of isolated histories which were bound together solely by chronology. This methodological problem was discussed in Germany where Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig Schlözer of Göttingen University both developed methods to achieve coherence in world history, the former in his Vom historischen Plan (1767) and the latter in Vorstellung seiner Universal-historie (1772). Both presented history as a collective singular (Kollektivsingular) with mankind at its centre, but their decision to view world history from a single perspective led to the gradual exclusion of smaller, non-European nations and peoples.53

Rather than viewing it as an intellectual development from within, some contemporary historians of the Enlightenment have based their explanation for this emphasis on European history on a more social, and even psychological, approach. O'Brien, Pocock and Edelstein have traced the construction of a ‘Narrative of Enlightenment’ or ‘enlightened narrative’ in France, Scotland and England as the eighteenth-century intellectuals' response to a key question in the Enlightenment: how had the supposedly ‘enlightened’ present of Europe - as seen in historical and geographical comparison - come about? The resulting enlightened narrative connected European countries in a linear history of the ‘human spirit’ from antiquity, through the barbarous Middle Ages, to the progress of the scientific revolution and finally to the enlightened present in which seventeenth-century knowledge was perceived as increasingly benefiting society as a whole.54 This story was not only clearly set in time, but also in space by comparing European nations to non-European and supposedly less ‘civilised’ nations and peoples. While Edelstein sees this idea of progress as originating in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Michael C. Carhart has contended that the ‘why Europe’ question was intimately connected with the question of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, both of which, he argues, were caused by fear. The decline and fall seemed to hold frightening messages for Europe's future and contemporaries wanted to know whether Europe was part of a linear or cyclical history. Put

another way, were Europeans progressing towards a state of perfection or were they doomed to follow the ancients and inevitably decline and fall?55

Martinet's world history not only ticked most boxes of the enlightened narrative's key components, but also meaningfully connected these elements into one narrative of European history.56 For example, Martinet discussed how the ‘barbaric’ Crusades had paradoxically benefited Europe. They had put Europeans in touch with Italian commerce and ships, with knowledge from Asia and Greece, and with wealth from Constantinople. The invention and proper use of the compass had enabled Europeans to revive international commerce and this commerce had, in turn, civilised their rude manners.57 Because Europeans could only maintain trade with China, Japan or the Indies if they had the proper wares to sell, commerce led to the development of specialised labour and a general blossoming of the arts and sciences. European governments then realised that in order to achieve wealth and power they should encourage such specialised labour and the arts and sciences - which ultimately led to the dissolution of Europe's feudal system because commerce and learning could only flourish in the absence of an arbitrary government.58 As Martinet briefly described the Europe of commerce and manners of his day: ‘Today, commerce is the soul of everything’.59

However, it would be misleading to characterise Martinet's view of history as fundamentally progressive. Providence constituted the essence of his world history, ultimately determining not only his historiographical explanations, but also restricting his narrative of progress to Europe, instead of perceiving it as a universal possibility. If we consider Martinet's explanations we see that in his world history God remained an ever-present force - even more than in the work of his key source William Robertson - actively involved in every small detail.60 Consequently, Martinet consistently reasoned backwards in explaining historical events. Why had something happened? Because God had intended it to happen. All divine action was in addition considered just, whether it entailed the brutal death of a tyrannical ruler or the flourishing

of classical knowledge in Western Europe after the fall of Constantinople.61 Nevertheless, God possessed multiple means to achieve his goals, so Martinet's explanations also included secular, well-known causes, resulting in a sort of ‘double layering’ of explanations: the simultaneous provision of secular as well as providential causes for historical progress and events.

Take for example his explanation for the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Similar to Suikers, Martinet summed up different causes: the Gracchus brothers as the origin of internal discord and civic violence; the imperial overstretch that left the soldiers feeling estranged from their country and instead pledging allegiance to their commanders; the individual ambition for high command; the static laws which were unsuited to the needs of a large empire; external pressures from barbarian invasions; and the decline of virtue.62 However, ultimately the rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire were all dictated by Providence. God had used the Romans to reconnect mankind to prepare a swift spread of the gospel, and as a scourge for sinful mankind. After they had fulfilled their function in God's divine plan and they had declined in virtue themselves, God turned them against each other, and thus to ruin.63 While the rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire were thus part of Providence, the actual fall was the combined result of secular causes such as internal strife, corruption of virtue and external pressures from barbaric invasions.64

Since God determined the rise and fall of nations and empires, it was also He who had enabled European progress. The progress that Martinet discerned in the history of Europe was therefore not a universal possibility for mankind or the realisation of its innate potential, but once again the work of Providence. As he had done in his Catechism of Nature, Martinet sketched a ‘great chain of being’ in which mankind was placed in the order between animals and angels.65 According to this view, mankind was considered a unity, but not equal. In the act of Creation, God had consciously allocated distinct natural resources to the various regions of the world, thus ensuring the need for international contact and commerce and so safeguarding a spread of the gospel.66 Moreover, He had allotted man the mental and physical capacities to employ these resources and make them thrive. However, in this preordained arrangement, countries, nations and individuals had also been differently allotted

in those capacities and resources. And it is this element that ultimately drives Martinet to confine the narrative of progress in his world history to Europe. For example, while Martinet could perceive a general development from ‘rude’ to ‘civilised’ for all individual European nations, he could not conceive of the same possibility being available to the Americans. Indeed, Martinet described their primitive state as only slightly above that of animals, naming reason as the only formal difference and seeing no direct possibility for development.67 For Martinet, progress was not universal, but predestined; not achieved by man, but determined by God. In Martinet's world history the idea of progress therefore crystallized into a Eurocentric view of the world in which non-European, non-Christian parts of the world were mostly regarded with disdain or pity - their potential for progress depending solely on the probability of their being touched by the evangelical light.68 Of course, this also meant that the future progress of Europe was in no way guaranteed; only by staying on the correct path of honouring God could the continent maintain its superior status.

It is vital that we do not overlook the omnipresent political and humanist content of Martinet's world history. Progress was not only achieved by grand processes such as commerce, but also by individuals, often benevolent rulers who fulfil in Martinet's work the double function of executors of God's design and instructive exempla for the Stadtholder's children.69 And while all chapters in his world history end with an overview of a nation's customs, commerce, and arts and sciences, chronological accounts of political and military history constitute by far the lengthiest sections in his chapters. For example, Martinet might state that a ‘dry’ political account was less useful in understanding a nation than an analysis of its culture or a sketch of its character, to subsequently embark on a 109-page roll call of all the counts in Dutch history.70 Still, the concept of civilisation clearly formed an important part of Martinet's philosophy of history. He even underscored the importance of culture and civilisation by including it in his interpretation of the Mosaic account, thus making it the direct product of God's will. After elaborately praising Moses as a historian, Martinet emphasised God's wise decision in choosing Noah to repopulate the world by pointing out Noah's cultural knowledge, thus underlining the justness of Providence by means of a cultural argument: ‘Even more so, he [Noah] needed to have lived in the Old World for a long time, to be able to transfer

the knowledge of the arts and sciences, gained from his own experiences, from the first world to the second. God wanted to save the second world, which was destined to last, from declining into the first world's ignorance and barbarity’.71 That Martinet's religious view of progress and civilisation could never evolve into a conjectural history in which mankind universally developed from hunter-gatherer to members of a commercial society, from rude to civilised, had much to do with his Biblical understanding. Because the Mosaic account constituted the truth for Martinet, he maintained that men in the earliest societies had lived off agriculture and animal husbandry.72 It was only in Stuart's work that Genesis truly became obsolete as a historical source for the origins of mankind and an idea of universal progress could emerge.

Universal progress: Martinus Stuart's history of mankind (1802-1807)

Like Martinet, Stuart (1765-1826) was a well-known figure in the Dutch Republic. He was actively - although in the end unsuccessfully - involved in the attempt to establish a united Protestant church shortly after the Batavian Revolution in 1795 and was beloved for his preaching as a Remonstrant minister. He also achieved fame with his historical writings, especially his 30-volume Roman Histories (1793-1810). In 1815, Stuart was named Historiographer Royal of Willem I's kingdom and it was as such that he wrote the Annals for the Kingdom of the Netherlands (1818-1826). Besides history, Stuart's interests also included ethnography, an interest that he explored in his Man, as he Lives in the Known Parts of the World, which I will consider next.73

Like Martinet's world history, this work was published by Johannes Allart in Amsterdam between 1802 and 1807. Technically it was not a world history, but an ethnographic series. Originally his series was meant to cover the entire world, but the project was never finished because the illustrator Jacques Kuyper passed away in 1808.74 As it is, it covers Australia, New Zealand, America and Africa. Stuart's main sources of information were eighteenth-century travel accounts; his objective was to write a descriptive compilation of all the peoples in the world, not a historical account. The series therefore consisted of geographically structured ‘snapshots’ of peoples, describing their

current state of civilization - their modes of subsistence, customs and religious and political organisation. However, the overall structure of the work still amounted to a temporal view of society's historical development. The static descriptions were intentionally arranged in accordance with civilisation's consecutive stages from ‘rude’ to ‘civilised’. The series started with the lowest stage of civilisation in New Zealand and Australia, then turned to America and Africa, to Asia, and finally to Europe.75

Stuart's series used a well-known expedient of Enlightenment historical thought: the four stages theory, also called conjectural history.76 In his book Social Science and the Ignoble Savage Ronald Meek has masterfully traced the coming about of this fully secularized, socio-economic four stages theory as formulated in the 1750s by Adam Smith and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. This theory saw the mode of subsistence as the determining factor in the development of mankind and man as progressing through four consecutive stages: from hunter-gatherer to pastoral, agricultural and commercial being.77 It was postulated that man ‘not only made himself and his institutions: he and his institutions in an important sense were themselves made by the circumstances in which from time to time and from place to place he happened to find himself’.78 The mode of subsistence had causal primacy; as the mode of subsistence varied, so would society's laws and policy. This narrative of historical development was often accompanied by the belief that mankind had evolved from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’.

Obviously, this four stages theory made the use of chronology, which had been such an essential component of world history, entirely redundant. After Genesis had increasingly lost its authority as a source for the origins of mankind, historians turned to geographical comparisons in their search for the earliest history of man, a period from which practically no written sources had survived.79 American Indians or Australian natives functioned therefore as a geographical counterpoint which allowed one to glimpse the beginnings of a universal historical development. The ‘savage’ nations, as seen from the viewpoint of the supposedly ‘civilised’ Europeans, became synonymous with mankind's origins. Conjectural history was thus founded on geographical comparison, on the perceived differences between Europe and other continents, but it was afterwards also applied to the entire world to measure a nation's progress. Siep Stuurman aptly summarises this circular argument as follows:

‘Logically speaking the argument was based on circular reasoning: why are the American Indians primitive? - because they live like our earliest ancestors. How do we know how our ancestors lived? - by observing the American Indian way of living’.80 Because in every moment different peoples could be living in differing degrees of civilisation, the historical development of society was disconnected from chronology and elevated to a theory of universal progress. This theory could then be used at any time to determine in which stage a people was currently living. Therefore, in Stuart's work geography had become the organising principle; every people was studied separately to determine their current state of civilisation. If we include Van der Zande's classification of German world histories, Stuart's work can therefore be categorised as a history of mankind, that is the development of the genre of world history into a combined comparative and conjectural approach to study the evolving nature of man. Thus, the idea of progress that in Martinet's work had been restricted to a European history of progress in manners grew in Stuart's work into a theory of progress that was universally applicable to mankind and to the entirety of society.81

The goal of Stuart's series was to ‘regard man as he lives, not as he is’ because the latter would require omniscient knowledge of man, which was God's prerogative.82 Stuart's central premise was the unity of mankind despite its many obvious differences and variations. However, Stuart contended that to argue this premise from a Biblical point of view, i.e. to state that mankind descended from one pair of humans, was not sufficient.83 Instead, he united mankind on the basis of the possession of reason, much like Martinet had done. Although differences in civilisation existed, Stuart stated,

everywhere, man, regardless of how rude, ignorant, yes even animalistic he may be, he will rule the animals that surround him [...]; still, the enlightened and civilised man, who measures the distance to the stars, [...], who uses the laws of nature, being his own ruler on earth, to his own benefit, infinitely more surpasses the rude man of nature than the latter surpasses the animals that surround him.84

Contrary to Martinet, however, Stuart held a more positive view of mankind and did not reproduce a version of the chain of being. Because of his reason, every man harboured the potential for progress, which animals did not. Stuart therefore aimed to observe man as he lived around the world, including all the differences in his physical appearance and in his way of life, customs and manners, to achieve a higher goal: to gain knowledge of what man is in his natural predisposition, and what he can become through civilisation - hence, the organisation of the work from ‘rude’ to ‘civilised’ peoples.85 Stuart thus wrote the series mainly in a tradition of moral philosophy; his overview aimed at an advancement of universal, moral knowledge. In that way, the degree of civilisation of every people could be measured according to the same criteria.

Stuart determined a people's progress on the basis of a fixed set of criteria, although these criteria could vary, depending on the content of the travel journals used. However, we do encounter the same parameters in his work: the treatment of women; the presence or absence of cannibalism; mode of subsistence; religious and political customs, such as property, laws and superstition; the level of arts and sciences, like knowledge of metallurgy and complexity of language; or specific character traits: is a people industrious or lazy, curious or indifferent? Overall, European civilisation functioned as the explicit or implicit yardstick for all non-European nations. Stuart treated even the smallest details in terms of the different degrees of civilisation. For example, in his description of Otaheite [Tahiti] Stuart describes their custom of sacrificing humans in the name of their Gods. ‘Horrific’ as this practice is, he says, it is already less ‘savage’ than their previous custom of ‘devouring’ their enemies. Human sacrifice was thus an ‘advancement’ because it was a degree more civilised than the most savage practice of cannibalism.86 It is illuminating in this respect to analyse Stuart's comments on mankind's supposedly original state which - needless to say - could no longer be explained by the Mosaic account. Stuart thus answered this temporal question into mankind's original state on the basis of geographical comparison, analogous to the intertwining of space and time in conjectural theory. Stuart viewed the natives in the recently explored regions of Australia and Tasmania as the prime examples of mankind's most ‘savage’ state. ‘This vast island [Tasmania] [...], is crucial for our objective, in that it will show us a People in whom we, as far as their state of society is concerned, find

Man as he probably must have lived originally and before any degree of civilisation’.87

What constituted mankind's original state? In answering this question, Stuart closely followed conjectural history, contending that the lowest stage in mankind was its existence as hunter-gatherer. After his assertion that the Tasmanians and Australians lived in ‘total nakedness’, he immediately turned to their mode of subsistence. Living as hunter-gatherers, these natives knew no agriculture and subsisted solely on what nature provided them.88 In their nomadic existence, they found shelter in accordance with their natural surroundings as well. The Tasmanians, for example, either hollowed out a tree, created a small shelter from branches or just slept beneath the open skies.89 However, to truly qualify as a four stages theory, the mode of subsistence should also determine the social, political and religious organisation of society. Because Stuart's series aimed at a descriptive inventory, it is difficult to determine whether the mode of subsistence was also seen as the main cause of their societal arrangements. Stuart did consistently differentiate between hunter-gatherers, shepherds and farmers throughout his work, but how all the different societal elements precisely relate to one another is uncertain.

Furthermore, conjectural history does not postulate an a priori explanation for transitions from one stage to another. So how do ‘savage’ peoples evolve into ‘civilised’ nations? Again, Stuart's work is essentially descriptive, but small personal remarks can be found scattered throughout his series. In his discussion of the Tasmanians and Australians, for example, Stuart points out that without external input it took people centuries to progress even to a small degree.90 Moreover, it was implied that the main cause of progress was contact with other nations, which was mostly realised by commercial dealings. Needless to say, such beneficial contact was almost always unilateral with Europeans enriching the way of life of

non-European peoples by providing expert knowledge and manufactured products. Thus, Stuart could only explain the use of iron by the natives of the southern Sandwich Islands by assuming some earlier, unknown contact with Europeans.91 However, the opposite was possible as well. Sometimes a people regressed because of contact with Europe. The ‘Houzouanas’ in Southern Africa were set back from husbandry to a hunter-gatherer existence because of their distorted relationship with European planters.92 Like Martinet's world history, progress was in Stuart's work never an inevitable, linear development; history had shown its cyclical course and regression was always a possibility.93

Stuart also mentioned several necessary conditions to enable and safeguard progress, most of all the significance of political freedom. The despotic rule in Egypt and Morocco served as examples of how political ‘slavery’ could obstruct progress. The Egyptians, for example, lived in a society that had reached a high degree of civilisation, but their arts and sciences had not due to their laziness. Stuart explained this state of mind from the oppression of Egypt's government. The apathy of the Egyptians, he argues, could be lifted when a more stimulating government would rule; then, people could devote their time to developing their natural, predisposed talents, which would lead to a general blooming of the arts and sciences.94 Conversely, the ‘Kaffers’, a people who lived in southern Africa, were still rude in many ways - as Stuart demonstrated by pointing to the disproportionate amount of work done by women and their meagre achievements in the arts and sciences. However, they still surpassed other rude nations because their political organisation ensured the freedom of the natives, who could therefore fully develop their innate potential.95 The absence of war and of an arbitrary government were thus necessary preconditions for progress. Seen from this perspective, although Stuart adopted multiple elements of conjectural history, he limited the socio-economic viewpoint by drawing attention to the importance of civic government in the historical development of society. Moreover, unlike Martinet who consistently underlined European exceptionalism, Stuart's universal notion of progress also presupposed a more bleak view of civilisation. In his discussion of the Tasmanian people he stated that ‘[our Brother's] simpleness keeps him infinitely closer to a state

of pure innocence than civility and luxury will ever allow their children to return to’.96

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to place the three eighteenth-century Dutch world histories into a broader European perspective and analyse how the contributions to the genre changed throughout the Enlightenment period. While there are various ways to do this, I have chosen to do so mainly by comparing them to philosophical history. While this approach has been helpful to identify and analyse changes in our world histories - such as the development of historical explanations, the idea of progress and the broadening of the historical subject to include civilisation, commerce and manners - it also conceals certain aspects. For example, the historiography of philosophical history is usually accompanied by secularist claims, which would leave no room for Martinet's world history. A more thorough comparison with key publications in ‘philosophical history’, such as Robertson's History of America and Voltaire's Essai sur les Moeurs, could help in better placing Martinet's world history and his idea of predestined progress. In addition, I have compared the Dutch case to similar developments in the genre in Germany where methodological changes also closely followed ‘philosophical’ methods. In the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic the genre of world history seems to have roughly followed the development that Van der Zande has observed in German world histories: from universal history to world history to a history of mankind. We should always remember, however, that history had yet to become a discipline and that in the genre of world history the most disparate projects could be realised, to such an extent that their only common denominator would be their global perspective.

Another more pragmatic way of framing the historiographical development epitomised by Suikers's, Martinet's and Stuart's world histories - and certainly one closer to the sources themselves - would be to consider them in terms of a shift from chronology to geography. In Suikers's world history, chronology still reigned supreme: it not only provided the framework for the history, but also functioned as the sole thread that brought all separate histories together. This chronological framework nicely fitted Suiker's narrative history of political and military events, subjects that were relatively easy to arrange

according to precise chronology, unlike the history of commerce and manners. While Martinet kept the formal Biblical 6,000-year chronology, his focus had shifted to geography as the organising principle of his material. Although the history before Christ was still arranged according to the Mosaic account and structured around important historical events, he arranged the history after Christ in a more neutral division into centuries and divided the chapters geographically. Providence had replaced chronology as the key feature of the work and regained its traditional role as the principal guide of world history, although this providential history ultimately told an ‘enlightened’ narrative of progress. Martinet thus reconciled philosophical history with his religious convictions by ‘double layering’ his explanations, providing both secular and providential causes for historical events. In Stuart's work chronology had completely disappeared; it was now geography that structured the content, although geography as Stuart used it was - as we have seen - still shaped by time and evolution.

My enquiry in this article has been only a first step in giving more context to the persistent historiographical claim of an exclusive nationalist focus in eighteenth-century Dutch historiography. The current analysis could be enriched by including Dutch translations of foreign world histories - as Van der Zande has done so well for the Dutch translation of the Universal History - historical works on individual non-European nations and Latin world histories. Although my enquiry is restricted to these three Dutch world histories, it shows that a world perspective was still considered valid in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Moreover, the eighteenth-century Dutch men of letters Martinet and Stuart structured their works around the idea of progress - a finding that may enrich our understanding of the Dutch Enlightenment as well.

About the author:

Eleá de la Porte studies the historiography and historical thought of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. She is currently working on her PhD project Enlightenment and History. Changing Views of the Past in the Dutch Republic, 1715-1795 at the University of Amsterdam. Email: e.j.delaporte@uva.nl.

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