The study of the financial and monetary history of The Netherlands shows a vacuum between about 1965 and 1985. Silence ruled for almost 20 years after J.G. van Dillen, the most important historian of the financial history of the Dutch Republic, laid his pen aside and A.M. de Jong completed his history of the Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch central bank). M.G. Buist's history of the banking house of Hope & Co. proved for long the only exception among Dutch scholarship. The field was left to British and American historians who conducted pioneering research into government finance in Holland in the sixteenth century (J.D. Tracy) and the Amsterdam capital market in the eighteenth century (A.C. Carter and J.C. Riley). However, new outlooks of Dutch origin arose in the slipstream of an international boom in monetary and financial history. W. Fritschy (1988), M. 't Hart (1989a), E.H.M. Dormans (1991), J. Barendregt (1993) and R. van der Voort (1994) obtained their doctorate on studies of government finance in the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The first volume of Joh. de Vries' history of the Nederlandsche Bank in the period 1914–48 appeared in 1989. In the meantime the discussion about monetary policy in the 1930s was revived by contributions of Den Bakker and Bochove 1988, Van Zanden 1988c and J.W. Drukker 1990. Finally, this period witnessed the start of research into the Bank of Amsterdam (P. Dehing in progress) and into Amsterdam banking during the nineteenth century (J. Jonker 1996b). The work in progress shows that these studies have provided important new insights into Dutch financial history. In short, in the range of a couple of years time a moribund specialism revived.