France frequently appears in the narrative, as one would expect, but it does not appear to have occurred to Jardine to compare the English or Dutch experience with each other with their ties with France. One also wonders whether the relationship she describes between English and Dutch elites is atypical of the relationship between elites of other neighboring countries. Little emerges from the art of Dutch (or English) culture, and in this regard the book compares very poorly to Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches (a high bar, true). She does some of this when she gets to gardening and science, but not enough. So Dutch art found its way to England - that is interesting enough as a window into the trans-national culture of elites at the time, but it would be far more interesting to take a long look at what Dutch artists were doing and to examine whether their ideas and techniques were influential. Often she uses period paintings merely as pictures of individuals named in the text, and when she does discuss art as such, it is as a commodity for conspicuous consumption by elites, nothing more.
Even in the paperback edition, the book is larded with color illustrations of 17th-century art, and I'm impressed with the publisher's commitment to the project (and/or Jardine's ability to get the publisher to go along with this), but Jardine really doesn't do much with this material. The subject matter of this book was quite interesting to me, but as an example of historical writing I was disappointed.
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