'Merchants on the Defensive. National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century', in: Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan (eds.), The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, New York 2008, p.99-122. The way in which nations picture themselves is in large measure the upshot of a subtle play of challenge and response between outsiders and insiders who form their images neither autonomously nor in complete dependence of each other. To better understand this dynamic and imaginative process, this article brings together two well-known patriotic economic engravings and a thus far unrelated 'drama pamphlet' that was printed in 1780 on the eve of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War as a comment on the economic and political situation of the Republic at the time. Connected to contemporaneous debates about the causes of Dutch 'decline', the narrative developing in the engravings and drama pamphlet reveals how caring Dutch citizens perceived and represented the effects of capitalism on their country in direct or indirect response to the assessment of Dutch capitalists in texts abroad. The public was first introduced to the youngest generation of Dutch merchant’s sons, spoiled by prosperity and too easily influenced by luxury items and standards from abroad, then to a parade of scheming foreign financiers who were after the hard-earned Dutch money, and finally to a prudent yet bold Dutch entrepreneur who had no difficulties in resisting the advances of untrustworthy foreigners, acknowledging the country’s need to invest his capital in innovative Dutch ventures. Dissecting the ambivalence and anxieties about the national self as expressed in these and other Dutch texts and pictures of the late eighteenth century, the analysis in this article primarily focuses on two elements. First, the role of gender as a crucial signifier in the assessment of economic acts, and second, the common strategy of transferring disagreeable parts of one’s (economic) reputation to others. Dutch patriotic discourse of the time divided Dutch capitalists into two categories, using a gendered frame of reference centering around two competing class-biased standards of male honor. The most disturbing category, the rentier who emulated an aristocratic code of honor and failed his country in the choices he made, was eliminated as a native capitalist model. The true Dutch capitalist was conceived by contrast as a veritably honorable, patriotic, and socially responsible entrepreneur, following in the idealized footsteps of the bold bourgeois merchant of the Golden Age. Yet the constellation of the late eighteenth century required one difference: the new Dutch capitalist had to invest in other economic undertakings than international commerce.