News from the Republick of Letters

?Scotland, the Netherlands, migration, universities, book trade, Republic of Letters, Enlightenment

Esther Mijers, Ph.D. (2002) in Scottish History, University of St. Andrews, is lecturer in British History at the University of Reading. She is the author of numerous articles and edited collections on Scotland and the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century.

IntroductionOn the second of January 1733, following his arrival at the University of Groningen, the Scottish student Robert Duncan (1699-1729) wrote to Charles Mackie (1688-1770), professor of history at the University of Edinburgh: 'As for news from the Republick of letters you cannot expect much from me yet'. Duncan needed time to settle into the University, a recent favorite of Scottish students, but soon the letters began flooding in with details of the latest publications, ideas and learned discussions, and information and gossip about fellow students and professors at Groningen and elsewhere in the United Provinces. Duncan's letters were among the vast number written by Scottish students attending Dutch universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. That Scots in the later early modern period were educated in large numbers in the United Provinces is well-known to scholars of Scotland's intellectual and educational history. The Dutch universities had a reputation for excellence and Protestant yet relatively latitudinarian views, which appealed to Scottish students who wanted to continue their education abroad for a variety of reasons. While studying on the Continent had been part of the academic pilgrimage since medieval times, by the middle of the seventeenth century the popularity of the Dutch universities had taken off exponentially, instigating a century of virtual monopoly of the United Provinces on the further education of young Scottish men of aristocratic, professional and merchant backgrounds. Although certainly not the only European universities frequented by Scots, they became the starting point for their academic overseas education, often followed by a Grand Tour, and the universities where Scots would spend most of their time. For these students, the United Provinces became the center of the world of learning, or the 'Republic of Letters', as well as the gateway to Europe, although the latter was not a new continent, intellectually or otherwise.Before we come to the story of Scottish students in the United Provinces, the wider historical context needs to be addressed. Scotland, like most poor areas in Europe, had a long tradition of looking abroad for employment and improvement. From the Middle Ages onwards, trade with Europe or, closer to home, with England and Ireland, provided opportunities for the inhabitants of this poor but enterprising nation. Although England and especially Ireland were favorite destinations for Scottish migrants throughout the early modern period, many more left for the Continent which provided economic, intellectual and religious alternatives to England. T.C. Smout has estimated that during the period 1600-1650, migration accounted for the loss of 85,000-115,000 Scots, mainly to Scandinavia, Poland and Ulster. In the next fifty years, he estimates these numbers to have been somewhere between 78,000 and 127,000, but after 1700 the numbers dropped to some 90,000. These figures and destinations have been recently put into question in a new overview of Scotland's migrant destinations during the period 1500-1700; still, it remains undisputed that, while Scotland's migration conformed to wider European patterns, her 'level of out-migration [was] much higher than for the rest of north-west Europe.' Although small, with a population of 1-1.2 million in the seventeenth century, Scotland was a particularly outward-looking place, characterized by a 'culture of migration'. During the Middle Ages and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the entire North Sea region, including Scandinavia, the Baltic and Poland, were popular destinations for Scottish migrants motivated by military, economic, religious and educational considerations. Many also went south to Flanders, France, Spain and Italy. They served both Catholics and Protestants and could be found in the armies of central Europe, on ships and ashore in the western ports of France and the Low Countries, trading in Scandinavia, the Baltic and Poland and teaching at universities and Scots colleges throughout Europe. Scottish migrants divided into permanent and temporary settlers and both groups ensured that Scotland had extended and extensive mercantile, social and intellectual networks across the Continent throughout the early modern period. As a result, it was very much part of a wider European world, both culturally and economically. Indeed, early modern Scotland's outlook was more international than her size and economy would suggest.Out of those wider European connections, a special relationship developed between Scotland and the United Provinces over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the British Isles, the Reformation and the ensuing Wars of Religion ended with the Scots becoming Calvinists in a Presbyterian Church while the English Church changed less radically and remained Episcopal. On the Continent, parts of the Catholic south and center were becoming closed off due to warfare and the Counter-reformation. For many Scots, these developments added to the appeal of northern Europe, especially the United Provinces where there existed institutions most like those in Scotland. The two countries already had long-standing trade links and now religion strengthened those ties.In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this renewed Scottish-Dutch relationship was formalized by the founding of three Dutch-based Scottish institutions, which maintained close connections with the mother country. These were the Scottish merchants' Staple in Veere (Campveere) in Zeeland, the Scottish Church in Rotterdam in Holland and the Scots Brigade, a military unit of one or more regiments which was usually stationed along the southern Dutch borders. These bodies provided an institutional underpinning for the Scottish-Dutch relationship as it progressed through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and ensured the existence of infrastructure necessary for a lively exchange in goods, people and ideas. These formal links, combined with their geographic proximity, made Scotland's relations with the United Provinces different from those it upheld with many other countries on the Continent. It ensured that Scots could easily travel back and forth across the North Sea, and as a result the growing Scottish community in the Dutch provinces was less integrated and more focused on Scotland than those in other communities where Scottish migrants tended to move and settle. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Scottish community in the United Provinces was diverse and extensive, consisting of a small core of economic migrants supplemented with passers-by and visitors; Scottish students were among the latter.By now the United Provinces had not only become attractive as an alternative to other places within easy reach and with ready-made infrastructures, they had also become a hub of intellectual activity. The country was a marvel of exotic wealth and, compared to the rest of Europe at least, political and religious freedom, while adhering to its admirable Protestant past and beliefs. Visitors from all nations, Scots included, praised the country for offering much to see and do in a small geographic area. Having only recently emerged as a new state following their revolt against their Spanish overlord (1568-1648), the Dutch provinces were not formally recognized by the Catholic and some parts of Lutheran Europe until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Nevertheless, they had experienced an economic boom based on the Scandinavian and Baltic timber trades, the profitable fishing industry and the import-export functions which were the result of the country's geographic location at the mouth of the Rhine and other rivers. Intellectually and artistically, they benefited from this economic prosperity both from their mercantile activit