As a foreigner to the Netherlands and an expert on the history of sixteenth-century Dutch refugees, I observe debates about migration in the Dutch public sphere with a rare mix of unfamiliarity and expertise. David de Boer and Geert Janssen, historians at the University of Amsterdam, have not published this volume for someone like me, but for non-academic Dutch readers looking for historical perspectives on migration in the Netherlands. That audience will understand better than me discussions about the coa’s (the government’s central agency for the reception of asylum seekers) azcs (asylum centres), but may be less familiar with the Netherlands’ complex centuries-long history with migration and refugees. This book offers thoughtful historical reflections that force readers to challenge a ‘nationale amnesia’ (9) that either imagines some kind of primeval Dutch culture that migrants endanger or that idealizes Dutch culture as fundamentally tolerant and hospitable. Instead, these essays show that the Netherlands has centuries of experiences of both producing and hosting refugees. Refugee movements have helped generate parts of Dutch heritage that later came be celebrated (like oliebollen) and others (like maroon communities in Suriname) which have sometimes been suppressed from Dutch historical memory.

De Boer and Janssen asked scholars to write short engaging essays for non-specialists. There are few scholarly citations and almost no references to historiographical debates, but there are colorful vignettes, engaging images, and useful suggestions for further reading. Most of these thirteen essays, stretching from the sixteenth century to the present day, are written by experts who have already published scholarly books or are completing PhD projects on the topics covered. Readers of these articles will gain long-term insights into the diverse and complex ways that Dutch society and culture has been touched by refugees fleeing war, religious persecution, ethnic violence, and/or political repression. Sometimes massive migrations have largely disappeared from public consciousness, like the moving example of the monument outside Amersfoort commemorating the country’s role hosting Belgian refugees during World War i described by Paul Moeyes. Other times, relatively insignificant migrations were heralded as dramatic symbolic victories, like when economic migrants fleeing across the Iron Curtain were lauded as refugees from communist tyranny, in examples provided by Tycho Walaardt.

Most essays in this collection bring an impressive degree of nuance and complexity to their subjects while also providing a broad and comprehensive overview for non-specialists. Joost Rosendaal shows how the revolutionary Patriots fleeing Orangist aristocratic control in the Netherlands in the 1780s left for France, first cozying up to Louis xiv, later mostly surviving the Reign of Terror, and finally emerging as martyred heroes of the Batavian Republic. Els Witte rejects the common characterization of the 1830 Belgian Revolution as bloodless. In fact, Orangists fled widespread violence committed by revolutionaries, finding protection in the Netherlands from King Willem i, who plotted to restore his monarchy in Belgium until 1841. Marieke Oprel challenges a simplified self-image of Dutch people as protectors of Jewish Germans like Anne Frank. The government’s respect for long-standing agreements with Germany meant that so-called Ost-Juden did not receive the protection German citizens did. Further, once the Nazi government stopped recognizing the citizenship of its Jewish residents, Dutch policy toward Jewish Germans also became more restrictive. And eventually, after the war some Jewish refugees from the Nazi regime, like Lore Zuckerberg, had their property confiscated precisely because they had been categorized as German citizens when they arrived in 1933, and thus remained listed as enemies of the Dutch state.

One especially valuable contribution of this collection is its inclusion of people not commonly categorized as refugees whose experiences deserve treatment alongside those that are. Discussions of Sephardic Jews from Iberia by Hans Wallage, and of Huguenots from France by Lotte van Hasselt, fit within a conventional narrative of Dutch history, even if these authors expertly challenge simplistic accounts that once dominated. But a discussion of African maroon refugees from enslavement by Viola Müller also allows us to see early modern Dutch people not just as welcoming hosts, but also as perpetrators of intense cruelty. Further, as Janssen and Wallage point out, some Protestant and Jewish refugees to the Republic later became slave owners and traders themselves, and thus proved plenty capable of inhumanity after their own sufferings were over. Eveline Buchheim’s essay similarly encourages readers to see ‘repatriates’ from the recently decolonized Indonesia after 1949 alongside other refugees in Dutch history. Müller and Buchheim’s essays ensure that we recognize the important place of events in the colonies within Dutch history.

The final essays covering the last thirty years may prove personal to those readers who have been directly or indirectly affected by recent refugee movements. Marlou Schrover mostly focuses on the exodus of refugees fleeing genocidal violence and warfare in the former Yugoslavia, but also notes a shift through the 1990s to a more diverse array of refugees (increasingly called ‘asylum seekers’), heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric, and ever longer waiting times in the azc’s for asylum petitions to be processed. Jeroen Doomernik follows the story into the 2010s. The processing of asylum claims grew more efficient and less dehumanizing, especially in those cities experimenting with programs to support the integration of newcomers. Yet, anti-immigrant rhetoric from right-wing populists grew ever more radical and racist. And despite the media hype about a so-called refugee crisis, flows of refugees to the Netherlands were actually down from the 1990s. The collection ends with a masterfully written reflection by Leo Lucassen, who urges readers to see beyond legalistic categories and racist double standards that limit popular understandings of refugees. He demands that we be attuned to the dangers of uncritically accentuating the victimhood of some migrants while unfairly distrusting other migrants’ worthiness to receive help. He ends by cautioning about how the Schengen Agreement, lauded by many as a triumph of free movement within Europe, threatens to reify the idea of Fortress Europe, and even to roll back Europeans’ commitment to the Geneva Convention of 1951, which was signed in the wake of Europeans’ and Americans’ weak-willed and ultimately inhumane decisions to shut their borders to Jewish refugees from the Third Reich in 1938.

I applaud these historians’ engagement with the complex politics of our day. As these essays show, across time and in different ways, Dutch people have produced refugees, welcomed refugees, turned refugees away, celebrated refugees, ignored refugees, learned from refugees, blamed refugees, and befriended refugees. By surveying these diverse stories, these essays also collectively show that fears that migrants pose an existential threat to Dutch culture misunderstand what culture is. Dutch culture (like any) is not, and has never been static. In fact, its ability to change over time gives it its richness and complexity. And it also gave us oliebollen.