Elizabeth Hines is the Department's featured student for the Winter 2024 newsletter. While at UChicago, she has conducted work on Early Modern Anglo-Dutch history. She was awarded the American Trust for the British Library Transatlantic Fellowship in 2023 to support her research in addition to other awards from the University of Minnesota, Calvin University, and the New Netherland Institute. In the following interview, she explains the significance of her work, her experience in the archives, and her more esoteric interests and skills.

1. I’ll open with the usual: please tell us a little about your dissertation, “Anglo-Dutch Commerce, Religion, and War, 1634-1652” and describe the contribution it makes to the field.
   
   This dissertation asks why England and the Netherlands went from notable cooperation in the 1630s and 1640s to war in 1652. Dutch merchants loaned money, supplied military materials, and funded imperial ventures in coordination with competing English factions. They planned joint Anglo-Dutch East and West India Companies and worked together on imperial efforts in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Ireland. Analyzing personal papers, notarial documents, treasury books, newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, and company records, I have found that ideological and financial connections between groups crossed denominational boundaries in surprising ways. I argue that these connections between these Dutch and English groups led in the end to widespread Dutch support of and investment in the Stuart government. The English government wanted war with the Netherlands to diminish this support, and Dutch merchants wanted war with England to protect their investment.
   
   My research on Anglo-Dutch imperial collaboration shows that early modern English and Dutch people did not see empire in national terms, and that we need to move away from nationalist histories of empire in order to understand the nature of early modern empire. How the cross-denominational cooperation in the Anglo-Dutch sphere came together shows that, beyond recent scholarship about the power of everyday interactions and accommodations, shared values could unite dissenting religious groups on an ideological level. This connects both to academic debates about toleration and to the question of how groups today can work with those of differing religious belief. 

2. What was the nature of toleration that united the disparate religious groups you are studying?
   
   English and Dutch people who belonged to different religious denominations came together through shared values. In some cases groups shared an emphasis on the role of the Palatinate, the territory in the Holy Roman Empire central to the Thirty Years' War, in the Protestant cause. In other cases groups shared an opposition to religious structures in their states and a desire for increased freedom of conscience. Political, ideological, and economic factors combined in a way that led these groups to emphasize the religious values they shared over those on which they differed.

3. You note that empire wasn’t viewed in national terms. How did people think about it? Was it according to the values you describe? If yes, how so?
   
   There is lots of interesting recent work on early imperial ventures. A big question is whether small ventures led by individuals or groups saw themselves as part of a broader project, especially in the English Atlantic. Putting together all the Anglo-Dutch imperial ventures in the early seventeenth century provides a new angle on the question. Their leaders envisioned them as joint projects, not just English and not just Dutch. I argue that in all cases, they collaborated because their goals were profit and the Protestant cause. The Protestant cause was a concept that could include the fight against the Catholics in Ireland, the restitution of the Palatinate in Germany, and war against Spain all over the world. This shows that ideas of empire changed in several ways over the course of centuries. In order to understand how we ended up with modern conceptions of empire, we need to study their ideological development over time.

4. I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time in the archives. Where have you traveled and what are some of the more interesting items you’ve come across.
   
   I've visited fifteen archives in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands so far. I plan to visit archives in France and Spain as well in the new year. The Dutch notarial archives have provided some of my best materials. That's where I found the evidence that Dutch people were loaning money to all the competing forces in the English Civil Wars. These loans add up to millions of guilders, or hundreds of thousands of pounds.
   
   One of my favorite genres of archival document to show students is records of wagers. I have found dozens in the Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht notarial archives. People would make bets with each other and record them with a local notary to make them official. The topics ranged from horse races and potential marriages to the outcomes of battles and whether Spain and the Netherlands would make peace within a certain number of months. Just like today, people would take opportunities to bet on anything that was uncertain!

5. What noteworthy skills have you developed? How do they tie into your research (or not!)?
   
   I'm grateful to An Castangia at University College London, who taught me seventeenth century Dutch grammar and paleography. I recommend the UCL online Early Modern Dutch course to anyone interested. Someday I hope to find a way to use my less practical language skills. I studied ancient Egyptian in college and got to read the hieroglyphs off the walls of tombs as a research assistant in Egypt. Unfortunately, Europeans hadn't translated ancient Egyptian yet in the years I study. Contemporaries produced crazy interpretations of texts, which can be fascinating to analyze, but knowing the real translations doesn't contribute much to those stories.

6. Finally, during your time at UChicago, what about Hyde Park has caught your attention?
   
   I love the UChicago tagline "where fun goes to die." I was delighted to find that the coffeeshop True North on 57th Street displays a banner reading "where fun goes to dine!"