David Onnekink is Associate Professor of the history of international relations. He is interested in the global history of Protestant mission (1520-2020), in particular in relation to ecology. For more information, see www.bluebelts.nl.

He studied at the Universities of Utrecht, York and London (UCL), and finished his PhD-thesis on the 1st Earl of Portland at the Universiteit Utrecht in 2004. He was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh (2004) and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles (2005). In 2004 he was awarded a postdoctoral VENI-grant (-2008) by NWO. Between 2007 and 2010 he was a Lecturer at the University of Leiden. From 2011 to 2014 he worked on a project on the Peace of Utrecht, sponsored by NWO.

He is specialised in international relations in the early modern age and particularly interested in religion; he edited War and Religion after Westphalia 1648-1713 (Ashgate Publishing, 2009). He is the co-founder of an international academic network on history of international relations and co-hosts a series of scholarly monographs and volumes of essays in this field with Routledge: Politics and Culture in Europe, 1650–1750. He co-organised several international conferences on the Peace of Utrecht between 2012 and 2014 and co-wrote a monograph with Renger de Bruin on De Vrede van Utrecht 1713. His Reinterpreting the Dutch Forty Years War, 1672-1713 was published with Palgrave in November 2016. He and Gijs Rommelse were Dr. Ernst Crone Fellow at the Scheepvaartmuseum (2016-2017, Amsterdam) and have written The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power (Cambridge UP, 2019). He was fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (Sept.-Dec. 2016).

His teaching focuses primarily on the early modern age, international relations and religion. He taught several terms at non-Dutch universities: Edinburgh (2004), William & Mary College (Virginia 2010), University of California in Los Angeles UCLA (2016) and at the University of Tokyo (2022).

His current interests focus on the global history of Protestant mission. In the summer of 2019 he was an Alumni Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study to work on this subject, and he was awarded a grant by the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome to organize a colloquium on Protestant mission history in September 2019.

He is now working on missionary cartography and the relationship between Protestant mission and ecology (1520-2020).

See his own website: www.bluebelts.nl


The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power (Cambridge University Press 2019)

Reinterpreting the Dutch Forty Years War, 1672–1713 (Palgrave McMillan 2016)

Performances of Peace: Utrecht 1713 (Brill 2015)

De Vrede van Utrecht (1713) (Verloren 2013)

Ideology and foreign policy in early modern Europe (1650-1750) (Ashgate, 2011)

Pamphlets and Politics in the Dutch Republic (Brill 2011)

War and Religion after Westphalia (1648–1713) (Ashgate 2009).

The Anglo-Dutch Favourite The Career of Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709) (Ashgate 2007)

War, religion and service : Huguenot soldiering, 1685–1713 (Aldershot, 2007)

Redefining William III: The Impact of the King-Stadholder in International context (Ashgate 2007)