Seldom have two hundred pages displayed such ambitious goals and achieved them with such a remarkable fluency. Julia Adams examines state formation and familial institutions in three early modern European countries: the Netherlands, France, and England. In so doing, she restores the Dutch experience to the centrality that it commanded in the seventeenth century. The book also suggests to national historians and historical sociologists that a narrow focus just cannot answer the big questions posed by the very histories so ubiquitously practiced by the current generation of one-nation historians. Comfortable being both genuinely comparative and firmly grounded in her own field, historical sociology, Adams further argues that the old categories deployed by historical analysis—state structures, class, religion, and patronage—cannot address the complexity of power without also addressing gender—more precisely, patrimony—as a force of immense historical significance.... This is a book that should now become required reading in every graduate seminar in early modern European history. It challenges us all to think outside the box that is the history of the nation, and it rewards such thinking with fresh insight into issues of gender, class, and state formation. It is a triumph.
Margaret C. Jacob
Journal of Modern History