INTRODUCTION

Though England first declared war on the States General of the United Provinces on 27 March 1672, the ensuing hostilities were largely French inspired. Louis XIV had been waging economic and political warfare against the Dutch with extraordinary tenacity during the previous four years. Employing high tariffs and secret diplomacy, the King of France had sought to reduce Dutch power and influence everywhere it appeared, including in the Americas. No monocausal explanation such as the king's desire for revenge or Colbert's dream to crush the Dutch economy accounts for the war. Detailed analysis of the war's diplomacy stresses the importance of contingent factors: the personalities of the French leaders, short-term considerations, ministerial ambitions, and political expediency as important causes of the war.

The war eventually resulted in a French victory, albeit an equivocal one, but Louis XIV failed to achieve his aims largely owing to his own inability to articulate a policy and his ministers' and generals' failure to execute the neatly planned strategy of 1672. Colonial historians have virtually ignored the war. English historians tend to confuse it with the Third Anglo-Dutch War that was a brief two-year struggle fought entirely at sea; its origins were wholly political and lay in the secret Anglo-French Treaty of Dover signed by Charles II in June of 1670. It was, according to the latest historian to write on the subject, “a bogus affair from its aggressive start to its whimpering end”.