Origins Matter: World Histories in the Dutch Enlightenment, c. 1720–1810

The genre of world history changed fundamentally during the Enlightenment. The ‘philosophical’ wish to transcend a purely factual and chronological account of historical events led to a focus on the historical development of human society. Instead of striving for chronological and geographical completeness, authors of world histories now shifted their attention to the laws and dynamics underlying historical change. While Protestant historians in the Dutch Enlightenment embraced this broadened historical approach, they worried that it undermined the authority of Genesis and the Biblical timeline. This paper will analyze how four Dutch historians used the genre of world history to tackle this issue and discuss the different strategies that they used to protect Biblical authority. Whereas the mid eighteenth-century works of Geerlof Suikers and Johannes Martinet still attempted to integrate philosophical history into traditional Biblical chronology, the late eighteenth-century works of Martinus Stuart and Hermannus Muntinghe used a different approach to resolve the same issue. In the works of the latter, the traditional argument was turned upside-down. Rather than trying to fit conflicting information into the Biblical framework, they used the history of mankind to prove that the Bible was authoritative.