Technological leadership is an important topic in economic history and the history of technology. This book addresses the issue of technological leadership by means of an in-depth study on the Dutch Republic, once described as ‘the first modern economy’. Drawing on extensive research in archives in Europe and a vast amount of printed sources and secondary literature, it provides a wide-ranging overview of Dutch technological leadership in the early modern Europe, it explains whence this leadership came about and why it ended and it explores to what extent the Dutch case illuminates the evolution of technological leadership in general. This book is thus relevant for the study of technological leadership, the development of technology in the early modern period as well as the history of the economic expansion of the Dutch Republic.