This book consists of two units. The first unit (parts 1 and 2) traces the development of the Eighty Years’ War, broadly covering the period of Habsburg rule in early sixteenth century to the achievement of the Dutch Republic's independence in 1648. The stadholdership of Frederik Hendrik (1625–47), particularly his military and diplomatic activities, occupies this unit's central focus. The second unit (part 3) attempts a comparative analysis, taking up five further examples of revolts and insurgences from modern history: the French resistance, the Basques, the East Timorese, the Tuaregs in Mali, and the Islamist group Al-Shabaab in the Somalian Peninsula. The axis of comparison entails four factors that the author lists in the introduction as those principally contributing to the success of such struggles for independence: national identity, adequate armed forces, the international dimension, and finance.

Relying on sources mainly, but not exclusively, in the English language, Ridley contextualizes Frederik Hendrik's and his predecessors’ struggle for independence in the nexus of contemporary international politics. The actors studied are not limited to the Spanish court and its agents as the principal target of their war, or England and France as their strategic partners. The author's interest extends to lesser princes like that of Savoy, a small community of European diplomats at Istanbul, and other interesting players. Each battle fought by Maurits, and then by Frederik Hendrik, is chronologically presented as a part of a constantly progressing chess game of international politics throughout Europe before and during the Thirty Years’ War. The book also surveys detailed information regarding tax systems, logistics, and other economic factors that were operative on both sides and influenced the success and failure of the entire war.

The author does not, however, clearly demonstrate how these surveys correspond to the four factors listed in the introduction, and how his investigation of the earlier period informs his understanding of the later, or vice versa. Part 3 analyzes the four factors without explicitly mentioning what was discussed in parts 1 and 2 and the conclusion exclusively discusses Frederik Hendrik without specifying what can be learned from the later struggles. This weakness unfortunately reduces the persuasiveness of the author's ambitious project of comparison, especially when it concerns concepts that are not self-evident and can accommodate a diversity of understanding.

Let's take the example of national identity. His text gives the impression—impression, because the author in parts 1 and 2 does not concretize what he means with that term—that he may perhaps assume that such great leaders as Willem the Silent and his successors, including Frederik Hendrik, embodied a national unity, enabled the inhabitants of the rebelling provinces to regard themselves as Dutch under their leadership, and gave them a clear vison of victory as a national cause. However, the meaning that people in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries attached to their community's leaders can be significantly different from that which, say, the French under German occupation attached to De Gaulle.

When Frederik Hendrik was reluctant to suppress the return of the Remonstrants from exile, an Amsterdam preacher, Adriaan Jorissen Smout, criticized the stadholder alluding to the example of Rehoboam, the biblical king who caused a schism of the divine kingdom. Frederik Hendrik was thought to have deviated from the right path laid by his wise predecessor Maurits—who exemplified Solomon—by rejecting the late king's old advisors, namely the clergy of true faith in the Contra-Remonstrant sense. God's wrath caused the failures of Frederik Hendrik's operation in the Spanish South. Apparently, Smout, as well as the listeners of his sermon, saw their republic in the shadow of the respublica Hebraeorum and understood the cause of war within that paradigm. It is not self-evident whether or not such a republic's citizenship fully included an Episcopius or a Grotius, not to mention the Catholic population in the South.

This is not to deny the possibility for a historian to speak of national identity within the context of the remote past, nor to deny the possibility that an alternative, more secular conceptualization of the nation's unity was emerging. The point is that this study would have benefited from a concretization of what is meant by the key criterions and a clear articulation of what resonances and dissonances exist, with respect to each of those criterions, between Frederik Hendrik's time and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century cases.