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April 10, 2026
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"[I]t is the historian's task to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Furthermore his task is a very different one from that of the novelist. Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omniscience which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most secret places of their hearts."
"Wisdom is shot through with a rich humanity... he represents the model towards which we ought to aspire."
"His volume of essays is the most important survey of general historical problems that has appeared for many years... Geyl is one of the few living men whose writings make us feel that Western civilisation still exists."
"In October 1944, just as the Netherlands was being liberated from the Nazis, the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl completed one of the most original books of the many tens of thousands about Napoleon which have appeared over the past 215 years. Its originality lay not in Geyl's own view of Napoleon (though the book certainly made plain what he thought of him) but in its recounting of the views of others, and in the way it traced the different phases of Napoleon's reputation between 1815 and his own time."
"History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature."
"The historian no less than the artist is a creator. Through his selection and interpretation he creates our awareness of the past; and through that awareness we attain a sharper consciousness of our own nature and that of the society to which we belong. It is his function, not to create useful myth, but to contribute to that knowledge of the world and of ourselves which is the only genuine guide to judgment and thus to action; not to make us clever for next time, as Burckhardt once said, but to make us wise for ever. It is only by the academic disciplines, by detailed scholarship, hard thinking and meticulous intellectual honesty that this can be done. That is the answer given with such noble clarity by Professor Geyl."
"That it was precisely productive forces that left is not at all unique. It happens in all migrations. If you look at the period between 1500 and 1900, when that Atlantic slave trade took place, many more people left Europe exactly in the same age range, without us in Europe complaining about losing productive forces."
"Incidentally, it was Europeans living in Europe who wanted to abolish the slave trade. They wanted to end it all over the world. So also Ăn Africa and also in the Middle East. It was just important to come up with arguments to justify such an abolition. One of the arguments devised at the time was that our slave trade threatened to deform entire countries. But that argument, as it now turns out, is historically incorrect. If you look at the quantities and the fact that slavery existed long before the Europeans appeared on the coast there, and that it continued even after the Europeans stopped doing it, I see no scientific arguments at present to attribute primary responsibility to the slave trade for Africa's current economic position in the world."
"The problem is that, in our view, the system (Slavery) is so reprehensible that you really shouldn't talk about it. I think you should."
"There is also emotional literature about the occupation period. That war was not cheerful in the Netherlands, but in my school days, everything was so wonderfully exaggerated, especially the role of the resistance. The facts were pushed aside and if that had continued, we would never have come to any new insights. If we had been blinded by Anne Frank, we would never have discovered that the Netherlands did not play a heroic role at all during that time."
"Both are terrible, the Holocaust and slavery. Very superficially, the comparison can also be made: you were transported and segregated. The difference is that during transport it was advantageous for the Germans to let as many Jews die as possible, racist profit I call it in my book. Not so for the slave traders: they caught a lot of money for living slaves, not for dead ones. They had to stay alive during the crossing."
"One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons."
"A give-and-take situation was created between the two sides so that that slavery could continue to exist."
"You also have to realise that they would not have been free either if they had stayed in Africa. They had already been enslaved."
"Professor, you are creating an atmosphere that is quite inopportune at the moment. The Netherlands is no longer white alone, half of all Amsterdammers are black. For those black people, it is high time that slavery is processed. Otherwise, we will not achieve a harmonious society. Now we are finally allowed to place a monument, a breakthrough has been achieved as far as white awareness is concerned, you come with your watering down. You are a missionary in the service of relativisation."
"Mr Emmer, you should not trivialise the problem. How about the social consequences? If you want to understand racism, you have to understand where the racist system comes from. If you know the slavery system, then you know that inferiority had to exist there to do that."
"Slavery is a common thing. We should not be ashamed of that at all. What we should try to explain is why there was no longer slavery in Western Europe after 1450, but there was still slavery elsewhere in the world. I would venture the proposition that with slavery, Western Europe would have become even richer and grown faster economically than without slavery."
"What Emmer calls science is the international code that scientific work must adhere to. This is a tradition that was born in the West but has become international. There are very different stories and they are also scientific, but African or Asian. That does not meet Western codes."
"I think it is important that when water boils at 100 degrees, whether someone is white or black, that someone sees that it boils at 100 degrees."
"My argument in my book is that except for the slave revolt in Haiti, slave revolts did not contribute to slave liberation, but the decision to end it was made in capitals in Europe. Again, I think thinking fundamentally about slavery is really a Western thing. And slave revolts did not contribute to that."
"But surely you cannot deny that the person Emmer, a white, male scientist in his 50s, born in the Netherlands, does not also factor in. Of course that matters, especially on a subject like this. Let's agree: there is no such thing as a hard truth here.'"
"I continue to marvel at this. We got incredibly angry when the city of Palmyra, Syria, was destroyed by IS because the city was reminiscent of pre-Muslim times, shall we say. And I see this as an extension of that. It is nonsense to think that you can erase a past that you don't like."
"In conclusion we may say that there is evidence for the existence of five Visnu temples in Ayodhya in the twelfth century: 1) Harismrti (Guptahari) at the Gopratara ghat, 2) Visnuhari at the Cakratirtha, 3) Candrahari on the west side of the Svargadvara ghats, 4) Dharmahari on the east side of the Svargadvara ghats, 5) a Visnu temple on the Janmabhumi. Three of these temples have been replaced by mosques and one was swept away by the Sarayu. The fate of the fifth is unknown but the site is occupied today by a new Guptahari/Cakrahari temple."
"About 250 m to the south-east of the Svargadvara mosque is [the] ruin of another masjid very similar to the former. The two mosques stand symmetrically on both sides of the main bathing ghats, which are collectively called Svargadvara. The eastern mosque, built at the same time as the other one, replaces an old Visnu temple built by the last Gahadavala king Jayacandra in AD 1184. An inscription found in the ruins of the mosque testifies to the construction of this Vaisnava temple."
"âNotwithstanding all the difficulties discussed above, the original location of the Janma-sthĂŁna is comparatively certain since it seems to be attested by the location of the mosque built by Babur in the building of which materials of a previous Hindu temple were used and are still visible. The mosque is believed by general consensus to occupy the site of the Janmasthana. After the destruction of the original temple a new Janmasthana temple was built on the north side of the mosque separated from it by a street."
"âThe oldest pieces of archaeological evidence are the black columns which remain from the old (Visnu) temple that was situated on the holy spot where Rama descended to earth (Janma-bhumi). This temple was destroyed by the first Mogul prince Babur in AD 1528 and replaced by a mosque which still exists. The following specimens of these pillars are known to exist: fourteen pillars were utilized by the builder Mir Baqi in the construction of the mosque and are still partly visible within it; two pillars were placed besides the grave of the Muslim saint Fazl Abbas alias Musa Ashikhan, who, according to oral tradition, incited Babur to demolish the Hindu temple. The grave and these two pillars (driven upside-down into the ground) are still shown in Ayodhya, a little south of the Kubertila. A seventeenth specimen is found in the new Janmasthana temple of the north of the Babur mosque. It is rather a door-jamb than a column.â"
"âIn conclusion we may say that there is evidence for the existence of five Vishnu temples in Ayodhya in the twelfth century. Harismriti (Guptahari) at the Gopratara ghat, (2) Vishnu-hari at the ChakratĂrtha ghat, (3) Chandrahari on the west side of the SvargadvĂŁra ghats, (4) Dharmahari on east side of the SvargadvĂŁra ghats, (5) a Visnu temple on the janmabhĂšmi. Three of these temples have been replaced by mosques and one was swept away by the SarayĂš. The fate of the fifth is unknown but the site is occupied today by a new Guptahari Chakrahari temple.â (p. 54)"
"The original birthplace temple dated from the 10th or 11th century. Before its destruction the temple must have been one of the main pilgrimage centres of Ayodhya, _ especially on the occasion of Ramanwami .... The destruction of the temple would not have implied the end of all forms of worship in and around the holy site. Just as they do today,.. pilgrims may have assembled near the mosque to have darsan of the tihrtha, and in order to perform the puja special _ provisions may have been made ... .... The ritual of Ramanavami described in OA 22 (a recension of the Ayodhya Mahatmya), which is said to be carried out in the Janmasthan (OA 22.22), does not require a temple or the like and could therefore have been performed somewhere near the original holy spot in the 16th and following centuries. Such perseverance and flexibility of Hinduism under Muslim repression, which was demonstrated throughout the history of North India, could have provided an objective reason for the compiler of the OA recension not to delete or minimize his description of the Janamsthan despite its occupation by a mosque ..."
"âNow until the end of Great Moghul rule, that is to say till the beginning of the eighteenth century, Ayodhya was the capital of one of the provinces of the Muslim empire in North India. In consequence, Hindu sects had few rights to defend in the city. Pilgrimage was tolerated, but the cream of the profits from it was taken by the Muslim rulers in the form of a tax on pilgrims. It was forbidden to build temples or monasteries of more than a certain dimension in the city, and the existing temples fell into decay and disappeared or were replaced by mosques. The latter took place with the temple on the supposed spot of Ramaâs birth, dating from the early eleventh century. This small temple was replaced by a mosque, the Babri Masjid, in AD 1528, during the reign of the first Moghul emperor, Babur, a deed which was to have far-reaching consequences.â"
"Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Todayâs tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway."
"No, wealth isnât created at the top. It is merely devoured there."
"There are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our âhuman capitalâ in economic terms) to create something new, whether thatâs a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.But there is also a second way to make money. Thatâs the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at othersâ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit."
"Hooykaas (1972, p. 100) writes that especially commercial and industrial cities were intellectually dynamic, far more so than sleepy university towns. These cities also tended to be more tolerant of different religions and multilingual. Modern research has found that especially cities involved in Atlantic trade were institutionally dynamic."
"As Hooykaas (1972, p. 101) argued, the pervasiveness of religion meant that for any idea to become socially acceptable, it made a huge difference whether it was resisted, tolerated, or sponsored by prevalent religious beliefs."
"The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day... they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions."
"In the first chapter of Genesis it is made evident that absolutely nothing, except God, has any claim to divinity; even the sun and the moon, supreme gods of the neighbouring peoples, are set in their places between the herbs and the animals and are brought into the service of mankind."
"Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same Antiquity."
"In... "The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science", Prof. Hooykaas supported the thesis "That the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in the empirical, natural-historic method". ...Prof. Hooykaas analyzed the meaning of "natural science" in Antquity and the Middle Ages... characterized by too great a confidence in human reason and a sacred respect for what the authorities in the ancient world had written. ...In 1956, Prof. Hooykaas had already affirmed that "the discovery of the New World caused many difficulties to naturalists and historians..." âŚbotanical species of medical interest warned that Dioscorides and Galen had not known everything; ...Portuguese seamen had clarified many doubts and shown the existence of the antipodes etc.."
"The clash between reason and Portuguese experience. Hooykaas' starting point is the intellectual challenge which, from the early 15th century onward, was posed by the discoveries of the Portuguese mariners... There follows an array of fascinating accounts of, and quotations from, works by contemporary authors who were compelled to face as facts numerous phenomena the ancients had been quite sure could not possibly be observed because they were bound not to exist. Examples are Aristotle's denial that the tropics could be inhabited; Ptolemy's mathematically derived conviction that all dry land is confined to part of the Northern Hemisphere, and so on. ...In Hooykaas' view we are witnessing here a birth of 'natural history' in the domain of the hard and given fact... The narrow world of sense-data to which the ancient natural philosophers had confined their all-too-rational speculations was now being blown to pieces. And this was not being done by fellow natural philosophers, but rather at the urging of scarcely literate sailors!"
"Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method."
"Pascal scornfully said that simple workmen had been able to convince of error those great men that are called 'philosophers'. It was, then, these unlearned men... who were most ready to believe 'what they saw with their eyes and touched with their hands'."
"Knowledge may have been sought for its own sake or with a view to achieving certain practical improvements."
"Whether the medieval episode is being regarded as itself revolutionary or as an indispensable run-up to the Scientific Revolution or not even that, just about every historian of science keeps treating it as the immediate predecessor to whatever revolutionary things happened in the 17th century."
"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story."
"Dijksterhuis distinguished five crucial years in the 16th and first half of the 17th century when modern science was born (Dijksterhuis 1950, p. 431):"
"The dangers inherent in the twentieth-century classifications of the âmechanisticâ are best illustrated by two important works from the early 1960s. Dijksterhuisâ classic work, The Mechanization of the World Picture, traces the history of the emergence of a concept by looking for antecedents of a modern notion of the âmechanisticâ in antiquity. His work illustrates the ways in which focus on the different senses of the term âmechanicalâ affects the questions that are considered. Taking as a given that atomism is a âmechanisticâ theory, Dijksterhuis traces the prehistory, in antiquity, of ideas contributing to what came to be called a âmechanicalâ world-view â the development of mathematical physics and corpuscular materialism â and scarcely considers the contributions made by the discipline of mechanics.6 Tellingly, he downplays the contribution of the machine analogy to the history he is writing, because of its incompatibility with atomism."
"In the course of the fifteenth century, the sexagesimal division of the radius, in terms of which cords and goniometrical line-segments were expressed, was generally superseded, though not immediately replaced, by a decimal system of positional notation. Instead, mathematicians sought to avoid fractions by taking the Radius equal to a number of units of length of the form {\displaystyle 10^{n}} {\displaystyle 10^{n}}...The first to apply this method was the German astronomer Regiomontanus... the second half of the sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth century... observed of a gradual development of this method of Regiomontanus into a complete system of decimal positional fractions. Yet none of the steps taken by... writers is comparable in importance and scope with the progress achieved by Stevin in his De Thiende."
"It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated."
"In opposition to Mach and his fellow positivists, Dijksterhuis felt it to be his historian's duty to regard the advance of science as an essentially continuous affair, whereas his equally firmly held conviction that the mathematical treatment of natural phenomena constitutes the essence of scientific method almost forced him to conceive of the origins of early modern science as a decisive break with the past. The inner tension that resulted from this unresolved dilemma is palpable in Dijksterhuis' pioneering Val en worp. Yet in his magisterial The Mechanization of the World Picture, written a quarter- century later, it is present in no lesser degree, although hidden much more deeply under the surface."