Dutch historiography entered the post-Napoleonic period from an 18th-century background of bitter polarization between the country’s Orangists and Patriot-Republican factions. The latter had made common cause with the French Revolution, and although many leading Patriots were called to public office under the restored Orange monarch, William I, their historiographical tradition was marginalized in favour of a stronger emphasis on the role of the Orange dynasty as defenders of the country’s liberties. For the conservatives, this role was closely bound up with the memories of the Calvinist reformation and the Protestant religion: for Dutch historians like Groen van Prinsterer the triad of Protestantism, the Fatherland and the Orange dynasty summarized the exceptional destiny of Holland in European history. The Reformation as a driving force – especially in its heroic suffering under the Spanish Inquisition, and the miraculous success of the long-protracted Revolt (the “Eighty Years’ War”) against the overwhelming power and cruelty of the Spanish Crown forces under Alva – was vividly and indeed Romantically summarized in the widely and lastingly popular Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856) by the American John Lothrop Motley.

Holland’s rise to prosperity as a naval power and a colonial merchant republic in the 17th century – the “Golden Age”, marked also by the flourishing of the arts associated with Rembrandt and Vondel – had already been evoked by 18th-century historians, who had bitterly reflected on the country’s subsequent decline. The recall of the Golden Age was more inspirational in the climate of Romantic historicism. Public memory culture overwhelmingly thematized the great names of the Golden Age (painters, writers, admirals and exploring seafarers, and members of the Orange dynasty) in media ranging from narrative verse, public monuments, street names and school textbooks to a popular song repertoire that was produced from the 1830s onwards. These self-celebrations also served as a national reassurance in the light of crises such as the secession of Belgium, the 1834 split in the Dutch-Reformed Church and, as the house of Orange-Nassau lost heirs and popularity while Prussia grew in power and size after 1866, an fear of German annexationism.

Neither history-writing nor the historical novel, which briefly flourished in the 1840s, participated in the national celebration of historical greatness and hero-worship – although the latter would gravitate that way as it receded towards the register of adventure romance for juvenile readers in the later part of the century. By that time the unflattering comparison between a great past and a banal present was also coming to the fore in the cultural criticism of men like Conrad Busken Huet.

Memory culture from the 1860s was increasingly overshadowed by the confessionalization of politics: the key events of the “Eighty Years’ War”, which successively reached commemorative anniversaries in the later part of the century, evoked different associations for the country’s Calvinists, Liberals and Catholics. The incipient civic emancipation of the latter group involved a historiographical challenge (by scholars like W.J.F. Nuyens, 1823–1894) to at least the first element in the “Protestantism, Fatherland and Orange” triad. The confessionalization of politics also affected historiography because the three denominations established different school systems, each of which required history textbooks suited to their own outlook.

The first university chair in “national history” was established in Leiden in 1860 as a split-off from the older rhetoric and belles-lettres chair, which under Matthias de Vries was becoming increasingly philological. The first incumbent, Robert Fruin (1829–1884), came from a liberal tradition. His outlook was deeply influenced by the statesman J.R. Thorbecke, a trained historian (and, as such, the counterpart of the Calvinist-conservative historian-politician Groen van Prinsterer). Thorbecke, who had studied in Göttingen, had there developed a view of history as an organic succession of separate temporal paradigms, each forming a step in the march of progress. Fruin developed a national history on such a basis, locating the eventual success of the “Eighty Years’ War” not in the Reformists’ reliance on divine protection as instrumentalized in the house of Orange, but in the collaboration between Republican intellectuals and Orangist military skill. This made the Golden Age a prefiguration of the middle-class constitutional monarchy that the Netherlands was now becoming (following the introduction of Thorbecke’s constitution in 1848), and also transcended the old Patriot-Orangist divide. Accordingly, the task of the academic historian became one of impartial arbitration between the country’s different communities and world views, subsuming these into a common national narrative. The calling of impartiality, the role of national arbitrator and narrator of the nation’s story, was also manifested by Fruin’s later successor, Petrus Johannes Blok (1855–1929), who attested to his historiographical calling to nourish his readers’ national consciousness both in his “History of the Dutch nation” (Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche volk, 8 vols, 1892-1908) and in his voluminous popularizing journalism.

A consolidation of archival sources and source editions was brought about during the career of Herman Theodoor Colenbrander, also a Fruin adept and Blok’s successor on the Leiden chair of national history in 1925. Colenbrander established a new archive-based historiography on themes like the Republican Patriots and the Dutch East India Company’s colonial trade, and undertook prolegomena towards a general history of the Netherlands (10 vols, 1905-22) which remained a benchmark work throughout the 20th century.

Most historians in this tradition saw the present-day Netherlandic state as the natural outcome of the historical destiny of the Dutch nation, of which the Southern Netherlands had ceased to form part from the late 16th centuy on. A “Great Netherlandic” challenge to this so called “Little-Dutch” approach developed in the early 20th century as a result of a broader Greater-Netherlandic movement. Its foremost historiographical representative was Pieter Geijl (1887–1966), a former student of Blok, and successively professor at University College London and the University of Utrecht.