War, Capital, and the Dutch State (1588–1795). Pepijn Brandon. Historical Materialism 101. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xiii + 448 pp. $175.
ditionalist” analysis of the origins of nations in opposition to those of the modernists; and Hadfield rightly argues that the existence of a public sphere in Europe ought not to be confined to the period after the French Revolution. Especially stimulating chapters for this reviewer were Kim Middel’s analysis of Iceland, with its focus on Jónsson’s Crymogoea; Gregory Carleton’s argument that the so-called national awakening of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars owed a great deal to the Time of Troubles, two centuries earlier, through an examination of Palitsyn’s account of the siege of the Holy Trinity Monastery; Yolanda Perez’s overview of early seventeenth-century Spanish literature that had Spain as its object; Gijs Rommelse’s nuanced treatment of the salience of a Netherlandish patriotism coexisting with continuing provincial attachments; and László Marácz’s recognition of the continuity of the Hungarian language providing the basis for the existence of a Hungarian nation “well before mass print became operative in Hungary around the mid-sixteenth century” (237). However, all of the chapters of this welcomed volume are worthwhile and crisply written, deserving the attention not only of those who are interested in nations and nationalism, but also those preoccupied with the relation between tradition, continuity, and change.