Capitalism is a system of free, voluntary interaction. It is only as good and effective as its practitioners. It is people who have become more decadent and their governments who have perverted capitalism.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
An enjoyable read. and I comment as one who lived in Amsterdam for some years and who still visits regularly for work and various other reasons. Funnily enough I read a book about William the Silent and the revolt against the Spanish just last year, a book that i started to read, appropriately enough, at the train station in Orange in southern France.
Personally I think the Netherlands continues to be the most civilised country in Europe, all things considered. The left made a pretty good attempt to destroy it all in the 1970s, but the country came to its senses and it’s been onwards and upwards ever since. Friends tell me that all the bars and restaurants are open (and full), everyone is playing sports again, and nobody is wearing a face mask, except on public transport.
The left made a pretty good attempt to destroy it all in the 1970s
Is that similar to what neoliberalism has done globally for 4+ decades. Unchecked corporate power, the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism an exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself.
It has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured.
Not wearing a mask is not a sign of virtue when there are, as of this writing, nearly 3/4 of million dead globally of a virus that can be destroyed by the simple hygiene of washing with hot water and soap and whose spread has consistently been shown to be stopped by wearing said masks.
Yes but aren’t the Dutch quite far behind the UK, the US on Covid vaccination?
Ross Towes
3 years ago
Thank you for this piece, enjoyably written and with some interesting points. I’m not sure the title does it any favours, though; to make the case that the Dutch Revolt alone made the modern world, you would have to address where the ideas behind the Dutch Republic sprang from. It was not the first minor state to exist on the margins of major continental powers and yet achieve great power status through commerce, sea-power and inclusive politics. Venice was the inspiration – possibly even Carthage and Athens before that. Also, noting why the Dutch Republic faded away could be salutary. The project – freedom funded by finance and commerce protected by a massively expensive navy – was controversial, only truly embraced by the coastal provinces with the major ports, merchants and financiers. The more numerous landward provinces, with their landholders and Orangist politics, thought of land, fortresses and armies. The Republic was never culturally and politically united.
As we’re talking about the ideas the Dutch Republic was founded on we should probably name check the Old Swiss Confederacy too; which achieved de facto independence from the Hapsburg Empire before the Reformation. We’re name-checking philosophers so, let’s not forget Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), exiled from Holland after 1621, and Descartes (1596-1650); who lived there from 1629-1649. Grotius was a a Protestant with Catholic friends and his ideas on religious toleration are central to the foundation of international law and saw practical fruition in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 which ended the 30 years war.
Mark – certainly Grotius was important in this. His ‘free seas’ doctrine was essential to maritime commerce and of course the Dutch went to war with England over that principle. His work was strongly embraced by the three coastal provinces, but didn’t interest the other four, concerned as they were with land invasions, fortresses and armies. But I agree, Grotius provided the intellectual basis for the True Freedom vision of the Republic, and triumphed for a while.
A good point, what was the source of such inspiration?
I would have thought Portugal was perhaps the greatest inspiration to the nascent Dutch Republic.
On the periphery of Europe, it also established an astonishing maritime Empire in the early to mid 16th century. An Empire the Dutch would subsequently plunder on a grand scale in the 17th.
Additionally a brief mention of savagery involved in the brutal murders of the de Witt brothers in 1672, (beautifully painted by Jan de Baen) would also have made this a more balanced essay, rather than the eulogy it is.
I’m not so sure, Mark. Portugal was profoundly different to the Dutch Republic. The only similarity, I think, was the possession of short-lived global maritime empire; but whilst for a brief period the Republic was dominated by a cultural identity based on that and which sustained it, Portugal never was. It was never anything but a continental power with a profoundly continental outlook and a church-and-monarchy controlled command economy. It lost its eastern empire to the VoC, a joint stock company backed by the Amsterdam financial markets, too inflexible and culturally indifferent to defend it. No one but the monarchy really had an interest in it. The virtues of the Dutch Republic extolled in this piece will not be found there! The Venetian Republic is by far the clearest predecessor, I think.
I stand corrected. ‘Dazzled’ by the maritime aspect, I completely overlooked your vital point “inclusive politics “.
Portugal, as you rightly say, was just another top-down monarchial church ridden, ‘command and control’ economy. No wonder they threw it all away with Sebastian’s lunatic crusade in 1578. Thus encouraging the VoC to ‘hoover up’ most of their Far Eastern Empire.
I supposed along with Venice, you could include Genoa, tiny little Pisa and Amalfi, and going back to the beginning, Tyre and Sidon, as possible sources of inspiration. Although Dutch art seems to celebrate their somewhat violent ancestors, the at Batavians.
It is called a Thalassocracy – a sea power, Athens being a good example. C NorthCote Parkinson , The Naval Historian states seapowers promote leaders based upon competence. Captains of ships cause them to sink. The sea is the greatest force man has to manage and therefore a captain of a ship, especailly a sailing one, is the greatest test of ledership.
The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Friesans had a concept of electing kings and them consulting the tribe to achieve consent going back to at least 500 AD. There is no concept of Divine Right of Kings which was adopted by the Franks and supported by the RC after the fall of Rome. There is meant to be a code of laws from Frisia dating from 500 AD, something to do with Freya. When Christianity was adopted tribal custom was mixed with ideas from The Bible to create codes of Law.
Consequently, England, The Netherlands and Denmark developed different legal and kingship traditions from the Franks and Holy Roman Empire. This is the fault line which still exists.
Sweden? Norway? Iceland? Switzerland? “electing” kings – as you say – was also widespread among the rest of the German tribes. The Frankish culture was the marriage of Germanic tribal culture with institutional culture and sophistication of Rome. Other Germanic people (Swiss) didn’t bother with kings at all.
Tom Hawk
3 years ago
There is one aspect of Dutchness that is not covered by this very good article. That of the effect on the psychology of a people when they live in an artificial environment. An environment where the sea can overwhelm the sea defences and drown everryone. You have one choice. Build the dykes properly or die. By way of example sea level at Schippol Airport is half way up the tail fin of a 747.
The one characteristic of the Dutch is they don’t muck about with half measures. (One needs only look at our governments response to C19 for a comparison). They do everything properly so it works and keeps them safe.
Their do it right approach to life Seems to pervade every aspect of their lives. Building a political and economic system based on models that are shown to work is probably one of their greatest achievements.
Yes nature shapes people. Look at design (fashion in general), weather/light and Italy+France.
David Barnett
3 years ago
When Cromwell invited Jews to return to England (they had been expelled in1290), it was so the Dutch Jewish bankers could provide cheap credit for English commerce. So you could say that the Netherlands helped to seed their rivals.
It is also notable that political refugees (such as Locke) often chose to flee to the low countries.
baarsbj
3 years ago
As I understand it, the legal basis of investor-share corporation first appeared in the Netherlands, perhaps at the same time in Antwerp, and was then adopted by Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1699, which established the rights of British citizens (male and all that, but generallly heads of families); and it was those rights that the US founders fought for when they still considered themselves colonial citizens of the Crown. The founders also read Blackstone on the Common Law, the legal source that Lincoln found (accidentally) as a young man in Springfield, IL, and which he read and understood as he entered politics. Today the word “capitalism” also means the expansion of money as a symbolic system based on a fairly good bet of being exchangeable for some concrete good or service. This all created powerful leverage, and made it possible to send ships on dangerous voyages on the bet that it would likely survive and return with more stuff. It should be said that the term “capitalism” is now used as a kind of term of abuse, even though the Soviet Union used banking, and Putin’s Russia is a “crony capitalist” regime, though much better than the USSR. At this moment “capitalism” is mostly misused, and the key is to ask the user for a definition. No definition, no conversation.
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
Don’t forget the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch invaded Britain and started the British Empire with the help of a National Debt created using the Dutch invention of central banking. The Second Hundred Years War ended in 1815 with the reduction of France and a UK National Debt of 250 percent of GDP.
Alexander Hamilton was the guy that brought Dutch finance to the US, with a refinancing of Revolutionary War debt, and the creditworthiness to do the Louisiana Purchase.
The Dutch were asked in. Mary was James 2 daughter. The defeat of the Armada and English financing of the Dutch helped them survive.Many Protestants fought for them from mid 1550s.
English rights go back to Aethelbert of Kent in about 650 AD. The Bill of Rights codifies practices to prevent their loss. The Stuarts had introduced The Divine Right of Kings which went against English and Welsh traditions. William was somewhat irked by the Bill of Rights and Parliament as it limited his powers.
The Dutch system worked well until Napoleon and then Hitler came along.
The Dutch system worked well until Napoleon and then Hitler came along.
Between Napoleon (1815) and WW2 (1940) how bad did Holland do? How badly has Holland done since 1945?
hcfaber
3 years ago
Good article! Read it with great interest. Wrote some time ago this post about (partly) the origin of the free trade and capitalism of the Dutch Republic: https://www.frisiacoasttrai…
Rasmus Fogh
3 years ago
Retracted
Jim le Messurier
3 years ago
Brilliant and fascinating article.
Lex Pagani
3 years ago
Very interesting, thanks for the history lesson.
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Yes, but hardly a thing to congratulate, …the comprehensive reification & commodification of presencing in a marketplace cosmos. Neither, its metaphysician. All which is resolving into its logical eschaton, ecocide.
“capitalism is now senile and decadent “
Capitalism is a system of free, voluntary interaction. It is only as good and effective as its practitioners. It is people who have become more decadent and their governments who have perverted capitalism.
An enjoyable read. and I comment as one who lived in Amsterdam for some years and who still visits regularly for work and various other reasons. Funnily enough I read a book about William the Silent and the revolt against the Spanish just last year, a book that i started to read, appropriately enough, at the train station in Orange in southern France.
Personally I think the Netherlands continues to be the most civilised country in Europe, all things considered. The left made a pretty good attempt to destroy it all in the 1970s, but the country came to its senses and it’s been onwards and upwards ever since. Friends tell me that all the bars and restaurants are open (and full), everyone is playing sports again, and nobody is wearing a face mask, except on public transport.
The left made a pretty good attempt to destroy it all in the 1970s
Is that similar to what neoliberalism has done globally for 4+ decades. Unchecked corporate power, the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism an exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself.
It has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured.
Not wearing a mask is not a sign of virtue when there are, as of this writing, nearly 3/4 of million dead globally of a virus that can be destroyed by the simple hygiene of washing with hot water and soap and whose spread has consistently been shown to be stopped by wearing said masks.
What has your remark to do with this article? You just want a platform for your biased view, don’t you.
Yes but aren’t the Dutch quite far behind the UK, the US on Covid vaccination?
Thank you for this piece, enjoyably written and with some interesting points. I’m not sure the title does it any favours, though; to make the case that the Dutch Revolt alone made the modern world, you would have to address where the ideas behind the Dutch Republic sprang from. It was not the first minor state to exist on the margins of major continental powers and yet achieve great power status through commerce, sea-power and inclusive politics. Venice was the inspiration – possibly even Carthage and Athens before that. Also, noting why the Dutch Republic faded away could be salutary. The project – freedom funded by finance and commerce protected by a massively expensive navy – was controversial, only truly embraced by the coastal provinces with the major ports, merchants and financiers. The more numerous landward provinces, with their landholders and Orangist politics, thought of land, fortresses and armies. The Republic was never culturally and politically united.
As we’re talking about the ideas the Dutch Republic was founded on we should probably name check the Old Swiss Confederacy too; which achieved de facto independence from the Hapsburg Empire before the Reformation. We’re name-checking philosophers so, let’s not forget Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), exiled from Holland after 1621, and Descartes (1596-1650); who lived there from 1629-1649. Grotius was a a Protestant with Catholic friends and his ideas on religious toleration are central to the foundation of international law and saw practical fruition in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 which ended the 30 years war.
Mark – certainly Grotius was important in this. His ‘free seas’ doctrine was essential to maritime commerce and of course the Dutch went to war with England over that principle. His work was strongly embraced by the three coastal provinces, but didn’t interest the other four, concerned as they were with land invasions, fortresses and armies. But I agree, Grotius provided the intellectual basis for the True Freedom vision of the Republic, and triumphed for a while.
A good point, what was the source of such inspiration?
I would have thought Portugal was perhaps the greatest inspiration to the nascent Dutch Republic.
On the periphery of Europe, it also established an astonishing maritime Empire in the early to mid 16th century. An Empire the Dutch would subsequently plunder on a grand scale in the 17th.
Additionally a brief mention of savagery involved in the brutal murders of the de Witt brothers in 1672, (beautifully painted by Jan de Baen) would also have made this a more balanced essay, rather than the eulogy it is.
I’m not so sure, Mark. Portugal was profoundly different to the Dutch Republic. The only similarity, I think, was the possession of short-lived global maritime empire; but whilst for a brief period the Republic was dominated by a cultural identity based on that and which sustained it, Portugal never was. It was never anything but a continental power with a profoundly continental outlook and a church-and-monarchy controlled command economy. It lost its eastern empire to the VoC, a joint stock company backed by the Amsterdam financial markets, too inflexible and culturally indifferent to defend it. No one but the monarchy really had an interest in it. The virtues of the Dutch Republic extolled in this piece will not be found there! The Venetian Republic is by far the clearest predecessor, I think.
I stand corrected. ‘Dazzled’ by the maritime aspect, I completely overlooked your vital point “inclusive politics “.
Portugal, as you rightly say, was just another top-down monarchial church ridden, ‘command and control’ economy.
No wonder they threw it all away with Sebastian’s lunatic crusade in 1578. Thus encouraging the VoC to ‘hoover up’ most of their Far Eastern Empire.
I supposed along with Venice, you could include Genoa, tiny little Pisa and Amalfi, and going back to the beginning, Tyre and Sidon, as possible sources of inspiration. Although Dutch art seems to celebrate their somewhat violent ancestors, the at Batavians.
It is called a Thalassocracy – a sea power, Athens being a good example. C NorthCote Parkinson , The Naval Historian states seapowers promote leaders based upon competence. Captains of ships cause them to sink. The sea is the greatest force man has to manage and therefore a captain of a ship, especailly a sailing one, is the greatest test of ledership.
Rome (land power) vs. Carthage (sea power)?
Who was more competent?
The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Friesans had a concept of electing kings and them consulting the tribe to achieve consent going back to at least 500 AD. There is no concept of Divine Right of Kings which was adopted by the Franks and supported by the RC after the fall of Rome. There is meant to be a code of laws from Frisia dating from 500 AD, something to do with Freya. When Christianity was adopted tribal custom was mixed with ideas from The Bible to create codes of Law.
Consequently, England, The Netherlands and Denmark developed different legal and kingship traditions from the Franks and Holy Roman Empire. This is the fault line which still exists.
Sweden? Norway? Iceland? Switzerland?
“electing” kings – as you say – was also widespread among the rest of the German tribes. The Frankish culture was the marriage of Germanic tribal culture with institutional culture and sophistication of Rome.
Other Germanic people (Swiss) didn’t bother with kings at all.
There is one aspect of Dutchness that is not covered by this very good article. That of the effect on the psychology of a people when they live in an artificial environment. An environment where the sea can overwhelm the sea defences and drown everryone. You have one choice. Build the dykes properly or die. By way of example sea level at Schippol Airport is half way up the tail fin of a 747.
The one characteristic of the Dutch is they don’t muck about with half measures. (One needs only look at our governments response to C19 for a comparison). They do everything properly so it works and keeps them safe.
Their do it right approach to life Seems to pervade every aspect of their lives. Building a political and economic system based on models that are shown to work is probably one of their greatest achievements.
Yes nature shapes people.
Look at design (fashion in general), weather/light and Italy+France.
When Cromwell invited Jews to return to England (they had been expelled in1290), it was so the Dutch Jewish bankers could provide cheap credit for English commerce. So you could say that the Netherlands helped to seed their rivals.
It is also notable that political refugees (such as Locke) often chose to flee to the low countries.
As I understand it, the legal basis of investor-share corporation first appeared in the Netherlands, perhaps at the same time in Antwerp, and was then adopted by Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1699, which established the rights of British citizens (male and all that, but generallly heads of families); and it was those rights that the US founders fought for when they still considered themselves colonial citizens of the Crown. The founders also read Blackstone on the Common Law, the legal source that Lincoln found (accidentally) as a young man in Springfield, IL, and which he read and understood as he entered politics. Today the word “capitalism” also means the expansion of money as a symbolic system based on a fairly good bet of being exchangeable for some concrete good or service. This all created powerful leverage, and made it possible to send ships on dangerous voyages on the bet that it would likely survive and return with more stuff. It should be said that the term “capitalism” is now used as a kind of term of abuse, even though the Soviet Union used banking, and Putin’s Russia is a “crony capitalist” regime, though much better than the USSR. At this moment “capitalism” is mostly misused, and the key is to ask the user for a definition. No definition, no conversation.
Don’t forget the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch invaded Britain and started the British Empire with the help of a National Debt created using the Dutch invention of central banking. The Second Hundred Years War ended in 1815 with the reduction of France and a UK National Debt of 250 percent of GDP.
Alexander Hamilton was the guy that brought Dutch finance to the US, with a refinancing of Revolutionary War debt, and the creditworthiness to do the Louisiana Purchase.
The Dutch were asked in. Mary was James 2 daughter. The defeat of the Armada and English financing of the Dutch helped them survive.Many Protestants fought for them from mid 1550s.
English rights go back to Aethelbert of Kent in about 650 AD. The Bill of Rights codifies practices to prevent their loss. The Stuarts had introduced The Divine Right of Kings which went against English and Welsh traditions. William was somewhat irked by the Bill of Rights and Parliament as it limited his powers.
The Dutch system worked well until Napoleon and then Hitler came along.
Between Napoleon (1815) and WW2 (1940) how bad did Holland do?
How badly has Holland done since 1945?
Good article! Read it with great interest. Wrote some time ago this post about (partly) the origin of the free trade and capitalism of the Dutch Republic: https://www.frisiacoasttrai…
Retracted
Brilliant and fascinating article.
Very interesting, thanks for the history lesson.
Yes, but hardly a thing to congratulate, …the comprehensive reification & commodification of presencing in a marketplace cosmos. Neither, its metaphysician.
All which is resolving into its logical eschaton, ecocide.