A specialist in the history of the Netherlands, maritime history, and the history of the European Expansion, Sicking (history, U. of Leiden) points out that in a country like the Netherlands, whose very territory was to some extent reclaimed from the sea, maritime history cannot be considered a specialty separate from general history. He focuses therefore on the maritime aspects of the process of state formation in the country in order to connect the political, institutional, and economic history with maritime history and to analyze the interactions between them. By starting not with the Dutch Republic in the Golden Age but with the preceding Habsburg Netherlands, he hopes to avoid the conventions of national history that have emerged. Distributed by Aspen.