Over the last 25 years, financial history has travelled the familiar road towards specialisation. Rondo Cameron's twin path-breaking volumes used finance and banking to focus on details about the origins of modern economic growth (Cameron 1967, 1972). Since then, the focus seems to have turned, as financial history became more introspective. Monographs, and journals on as well as associations of financial history proliferated, but the subject itself fragmented further into specialisms with the broader questions of economic and political development receding into the background. As a result, the main topics of banking, public finance, and currency have become isolated from each other, each confined to separate textbooks or at best separate chapters, such as in Kindleberger's classic and courageous attempt at a synthesis (Kindleberger 1984).

In this book, we have attempted to bridge some of these faults by exploring the relationship between banking, currency and public finance in The Netherlands over a period of nearly five centuries. Our main aim was to show how since the mid sixteenth century the gradual evolution of very different regions into a single national state with a firmly integrated economy largely depended on progress in the financial sphere. The preceding chapters all demonstrate the importance of the links between the three ostensibly separate fields of banking, currency and public finance, bottlenecks in any one of them slowing down progress in all. Once a particular obstacle is out of the way, banking, currency and public finance mesh to produce a new phase of growth, only to be halted again by economic, political or technical constraints cropping up elsewhere.