The seventeenth century was called the Dutch Golden Age. Over the course of eighty years, the tiny United Provinces of the Netherlands overthrew Spanish rule and became Europe's dominant power. Eventually, though, Dutch hegemony collapsed as quickly as it had risen. In The Familial State, Julia Adams explores the role that Holland's great families played in this dramatic history. She charts how family patriarchs who were at the time both state-builders and merchant capitalists shaped the first great wave of European colonialism, which in turn influenced European political development in...