Paperback. Cream cover with blue title and Dutch painting on the front board.

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This is the book that made Simon Schama’s reputation when first published in 1987. A historical masterpiece, it is an epic account of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen. In this brilliant work that moves far beyond the conventions of social or cultural history, Simon Schama investigates the astonishing case of a people’s self-invention.He shows how, in the 17th-century, a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, without a shared language, religion or government, transformed themselves into a formidable world empire – the Dutch republic.

Reviews:

• ‘Simon Schama writes with grace and wit, and his enthusiasm is contagious.’ Anita Brookner

• ‘Schama is one of the few historians writing today who can recreate the mentalité of another culture.’ Jonathan Miller

• ‘One reads it all with mounting enjoyment and at the end one’s sense of Dutch civilization in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen is not just salted and enriched – but remade.’ Robert Hughes

• ‘This is history on the grand scale, and like all generously conceived historical works leaves us reflecting about the present as well as the past.’ John Gross, New York Times

• ‘Seldom has a people who have opened its doors so wide. A performance on an epic scale.’ Independent

• This is the book that made Simon Schama’s reputation when first published in 1987. A historical masterpiece, it is an epic account of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen. In this brilliant work that moves far beyond the conventions of social or cultural history, Simon Schama investigates the astonishing case of a people’s self-invention. He shows how, in the 17th-century, a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, without a shared language, religion or government, transformed themselves into a formidable world empire – the Dutch republic.

About the Author: Simon Schama was born in London in 1945 and educated at Cambridge University, where from 1966 to 1976 he was a Fellow of Christ’s College. He is now Old Dominion Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and one of the most celebrated historians now at work anywhere in the world.