American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1941-1959

This book tells the story of American influence within the Netherlands after the Second World War. David J. Snyder reveals that, while American power in the Netherlands grew to touch nearly every aspect of Dutch life, that power was solicited, shaped, and sometimes resisted by the Dutch themselves.

American Power in the Postwar Netherlands provides for the first time an account of the scale and scope of the US presence, and of the Dutch response to the new American fact of life. The book advances two intertwined stories: the recreation and modernization of Dutch politics, international relations, and socio-economy after the Second World War, and the role of American power in facilitating and advancing that Dutch modernization.

David J. Snyder is an independent writer, editor and historian based in the USA. He is the co-editor of Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (2013) and The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology (2019). His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and other anthologies. He is a Fulbright Fellow and was a Residential Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo in 2015.