PRINTA five-week seminar for sixteen school teachers comparing the development of modern economic systems in the Dutch Republic and Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Experienced project director Gerard Koot (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth) leads a seminar comparing and contrasting social and economic developments in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century with developments in Great Britain a century later. The program is held in London (week one) and in Leiden (weeks two through five). Core texts include Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806; Mariet Westerman, A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1718; and Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cooperative study groups rotate leading the participant discussions. In addition to thrice-weekly reading and discussion sessions, participants explore historical sites related to the seminar's theme. In London and environs, they visit the Docklands Museum, the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital, the Royal Observatory, the original Bank of England, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the Low Country cities of Amsterdam, Leiden, the Hague, Haarlem, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and the Zuiderzee ports of Hoorn and Enkhuizen, the teachers visit museums, palaces, churches, merchant houses, warehouses, canals, and other maritime sites associated with the topic at hand.