Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  These [pages] I hope are sufficient to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present King William; to make good his title, in the consent of the people, which being the only one of all lawful governments, he has more fully and clearly, than any prince in Christendom; and to justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved the nation when it was on the very brink of slavery and ruin.

  William’s Dutch invasion of England—which would be spectacularly rechristened as the Glorious Revolution—would go down as one of history’s more consequential events. Among its legacies would be the financial modernization of Great Britain and the expansion of the British East India Company (during his complex reign, Willem/William would preside over not only rival nations but competing East India Companies). But historians say that its greatest legacy was the end of absolute monarchy in Britain and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy, with a steadily stronger Parliament. This is what Willem more or less promised in his Declaration, and, whether or not he actually wanted it, it’s what England got.

  It would be wrong to suggest that this vast transformation came about all because of the Dutch roots of the new English king. But it’s fair to say that in 1688 Dutchness, in some degree, formally blended itself into Englishness, and the impossible-to-pin-down but sprawling legacy of Amsterdam achieved a foothold across the Channel. It was a process that had been taking place for some time: all through the seventeenth century features of the liberalism the city helped to spawn—fragments of things we collectively call capitalism, religious tolerance, secularism, pragmatic popular rule—were carried as ephemeral cargo on stout wooden ships that moved from the Dutch coast to the English and penetrated English consciousness. And especially after the Dutch leader became the King of England, the English set about employing those fragments, those ideas, those tools, as they constructed their own empire. And through the British empire they spread just about everywhere.

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE TWO LIBERALISMS

  I began this book by describing how I start some of my days in Amsterdam. I leave my apartment in the Old South section of the city, bring my son to his Moroccan day care provider, then stop in for an interview session with Frieda Menco, who has lived all her life in Amsterdam except for two years in hiding from the Nazis in a nearby village and the two years she endured in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. I didn’t mention my ultimate destination: my office. I am the director of an American culture center that is located in the West India House, a small and stylish mansion near the historic harbor that in the seventeenth century was the headquarters of the West India Company. A long, high-ceilinged room on the opposite side of the courtyard from my office was where the company’s directors met. Here they organized their North American colony. This was, in effect, the place where New York City was conceived.

  At some point while working on this book it occurred to me that as I move through this morning routine I am traveling backward through the stages of Amsterdam’s liberal heritage. Chatting with Iman Mreqqi, my son’s caretaker, I am in the city of the present, the city that not long ago was dubbed the most ethnically diverse in the world, with 178 different nationalities represented and all of the issues, questions, problems, and potential that that staggering diversity entails. As I sit down to coffee with Frieda Menco I rewind to wartime Amsterdam: the city under Nazi thrall, a city of oppression and resistance and heroism and perfidy. And as I walk through the archway of the West India House and encounter the statue of Petrus Stuyvesant in the courtyard, I’m in the shadow of the Amsterdam that ruled the world, the city that helped to invent so many of the constituent parts of liberalism and that broadcast its heritage like pollen on the wind.

  The liberal heritage remained part of the city’s DNA, though it was not always apparent in the years that followed the golden age. As the eighteenth century progressed, the United Provinces of the Netherlands fell steadily behind neighboring countries. The VOC suffered a string of losses in its global chess match against the rising British empire. Amsterdam slipped steeply from its height: poverty grew; disease became rampant; the canals reeked. Corruption became the hallmark of the city government. An example: one official gave an important and highly paid position to his son—who was fourteen. Taxes on food and fuel skyrocketed, and people knew that tax officials profited personally from money they collected.

  One climax to this era came on June 25, 1748, when people gathered in a broad public square, rimmed by gabled buildings, in the city center. They were angry—angry enough that soldiers showed up to keep the peace. The square, where a century later a huge statue of Rembrandt would be unveiled and that since that time has been known as Rembrandtplein, was then called the Butter Market, because that was where dairy farmers from outside Amsterdam set up booths to sell tubs of the yellow essence of Dutch cuisine. It was also where tax officers showed up periodically to ensure that excise tax was being collected on the sale of goods, and it was these men who were the objects of the people’s ire. The crowd began to throw trash at the tax men and the soldiers. The soldiers pushed back. Whereupon, in the words of an eyewitness, “A rude female several times hitched up her skirts, smacked her bare buttocks and told the militia that this was for them.” A soldier fired—and hit the offered target. The place went wild. Four days of rioting ensued, with people raging through the city, storming into the houses of wealthy merchants, and tossing expensive furniture into the canals.

  Despite the downturn, Amsterdam still had its pockets of wealth and luxury; intellectuals still gathered in the city, and its inhabitants, troubled as they were, considered themselves very much a part of the wider world. One feature of the era was a tendency for elements of the liberalism that the city had sent abroad to come ricocheting back to reanimate it. In 1776, news from across the ocean caught the attention of intellectuals and shopkeepers alike. Copies of a British pamphlet that had been translated into Dutch smacked down onto café tables and were eagerly opened and pored over. In his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, a Welsh minister named Richard Price pondered the sudden outbreak of war in America from a philosophical perspective. He analyzed the various meanings of the word liberty, focused his attention on the concept of civil liberty, spoke of self-determination as a right, and argued not only that the American colonies were in the right but that a moral right such as theirs was an unstoppable force, one that would continue to change history. What jumped out at the Amsterdam readers of Price’s pamphlet was a bit of background he gave:

  The United Provinces of Holland were once subject to the Spanish monarchy; but, provoked by the violation of their charters; by levies of money, without their consent; by the introduction of Spanish troops among them; by innovations in their antient modes of government; and the rejection of their petitions, they were driven to that resistance which we and all the world have ever since admired; and which has given birth to one of the greatest and happiest Republics that ever existed.

  Amsterdammers who read Price’s glowing words knew full well that the greatness and happiness were things of the past. But the example of the American Revolution awakened something in them. What was the root cause of their own misfortune: of the economic collapse, the corruption of government officials, the degradation of life? Over the next handful of years Amsterdammers formed dozens of “reading societies”—in essence, revolutionary cells—that met regularly to trade political tracts and ideas. The big idea on people’s minds suddenly was the accumulation of power at the top and the evils that flowed from it. As before, political battle lines were drawn between Orangists who supported the stadholder (currently, Willem V) and the house of Orange, along with their orthodox Calvinist allies, and the patriots, who wanted power to be held by the people. But this latter group was pushing something more than what those of Johan de Witt’s time had championed a
century before. The Dutch Republic had always been imperfect, as far as democracy went. It was an oligarchy, a rule by the merchant elites. Now, following the American example, the Dutch patriots were calling for actual popular representation.

  The immediate influence was from America, but the Amsterdam patriots knew their history. The political upheaval roiling America and Europe had its roots, as Richard Price had pointed out, in their own soil. Homegrown pamphlets proclaimed that the setup to the events unfolding in America was the Dutch rebellion led by William the Silent against Spain—against Charles V and his son Philip II and the dreaded Duke of Alba. But while the Eighty Years’ War had given the Dutch their own nation, it hadn’t resulted in true liberty. And, as irony would have it, their new tyrant was the descendant of their founding father. “Our dear Orange princes,” went one pamphlet, which seemed to copy the antimonarchic language of the American patriot press, “are princes just like others in the world. They are raised in the same perverted kind of courtly education; from their youth they suck up the same sentiments, the same arrogance, pride, ambition.” Referencing the ongoing power struggle between the stadholder and the city of Amsterdam, the pamphlet noted that Willem “would like to see Amsterdam’s trade flourishing, which is now perishing, if only that city would open its gates for the Prince’s garrison and would leave the appointment of its governors to him.” Patriot leaders even referred to Willem as the “new Alba.”

  Meanwhile, the Dutch state ensnared itself in the British-American war by shipping supplies to the American colonists, which led Britain to declare war on the Dutch: the fourth trade war between the two nations, and one that would truly end Dutch dominance in world affairs. The British captured hundreds of Dutch ships, took West India Company slaving forts in West Africa, and began dismantling the VOC infrastructure in India and Asia.

  Amsterdam won its independence, so to speak, from the stadholder when, in 1787, following huge popular demonstrations on Dam Square, the members of the city council who had stayed loyal to the prince’s party capitulated. A democratic revolution seemed to be unfolding. But Willem countered by engaging a Prussian army of twenty-six thousand troops. Faced with the threat of invasion, Amsterdam and other cities caved in. The stadholder regained control. He outlawed the reading clubs, forbade talk of democracy, and otherwise began to consolidate his power.

  Then came the French Revolution. Dutch patriots got excited all over again as French aristos lost their heads. Once again, for the Dutch, what was happening in a distant land was the outcome of ideas and actions in their own struggle against Spain and over the course of the rise of the Dutch Republic. The French, like the Americans, were bringing liberalism to its logical conclusion: democracy. For Dutch patriots, the French Revolution was equally their own.

  And, conveniently, it came right to their doorstep. As Europe’s monarchs became alarmed by what was taking place in France, they took steps to snuff it out. The result was a messy sprawl of mayhem that is collectively known to history as the French Revolutionary Wars. As French armies did battle with those of neighboring countries, in what amounted to a struggle over the idea of monarchic supremacy, they trudged northward into the Dutch provinces, where Prussian forces were reinforcing the stadholder’s men. Patriots in Amsterdam papered the city with posters and pamphlets informing their fellow citizens that the French army was on their side; they even decked out the canals with tricolored flags. When French troops arrived, Dutch patriots were in command of the situation, so that instead of an invasion there was a merger of two revolutionary forces. Amsterdam willingly let itself be swallowed up by the French Revolution. Parades filled the streets. Democracy—a radical new system in which each male citizen was entitled to vote—was put into effect. Willem V fled to England. A new government—the Batavian Republic, so called after the Latin term for the tribe that inhabited the area in Roman times—came into being.

  But it too was short-lived. The emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte brought the liberalization—this round of it, anyway—to an end. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s reorganization of the Dutch provinces resulted in several legacies, some worthwhile, that are still part of the Dutch system. French and Dutch cultures contrast fairly sharply: the French favor top-down systems, where Dutch society has always functioned more as a collective of smaller power centers. Napoleon brought the metric system and a national governmental bureaucracy. In Amsterdam, it was the French who established the picture collection—with Rembrandt’s Night Watch as its centerpiece—that eventually became the Rijksmuseum, the national art and history museum. And Amsterdam’s City Hall, built in the height of the golden age as a testament to the city’s liberal glory, was transformed into a palace that would be home to Louis Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, who installed him as King of Holland in 1806.

  But Louis didn’t last long either. In the wake of devastating military losses incurred in their invasion of Russia (read all about it in War and Peace), the French abandoned the Low Countries. In 1813, in what was perhaps the final result of French rule and surely the greatest irony for a supposedly democratic transformation, Willem V’s son (also a Willem) stepped into the French monarch’s shoes, became the first Dutch king, and took up residence in the palace. Thus, late in the day, after royal rule had effectively been drained of its meaning thanks to the liberalism that the people of Amsterdam had helped to usher in, they found themselves strolling, in their daily routine, past the palace of their very own king. There is no way of saying whether William the Silent would have shaken his head at the fact that the popular revolt he led would eventually result in his own family’s being installed as the hereditary rulers of the Dutch nation. In common with other blue bloods who became patriot leaders (George Washington comes to mind), he had a pretty strong personal aristocratic sensibility, so perhaps he would have found it pleasing. The Dutch monarchy persists to this day, ceremonially speaking, and the building on Dam Square remains the Royal Palace. The current king, Willem Alexander, represents the eleventh generation from the era of William the Silent.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, tried once again to invade the Low Countries. It was on this campaign, on June 18, 1815, that “meeting one’s Waterloo” entered the lexicon, as he was defeated by the Duke of Wellington in the village of that name near Brussels and forced into exile.

  The building is practically a dollhouse: a few tiny rooms stacked on top of one another, connected by a corkscrew staircase. It looks out onto a narrow street of similar toylike homes. It’s called the Multatuli House, and my guess is that if you are not Dutch the unusual name probably means nothing to you. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was known in Europe and America, and in 2002 the Society for Dutch Literature declared Eduard Douwes Dekker, who wrote under the pen name Multatuli, to be the most important Dutch writer of all time. Dekker was born in this modest little structure in 1820, the fourth of six children. His father was a ship’s captain; the house is just a few minutes’ walk from the harbor. It is also just steps from the aforementioned West India House, where my office is, which makes me feel that this most quixotic of writers, whose work ignited international upheaval that echoes to our own time, is something of a neighbor.

  The parents of young Eduard sent their boy to a Latin school in the neighborhood with the idea that, bookish and clever fellow that he was, he would become a minister. But he struggled against the church. He seems to have been a hothead and something of a neighborhood scamp. When he was eighteen his father got a commission to skipper a vessel bound for the Dutch possessions in the East Indies, which roughly correspond with the modern state of Indonesia. The parents decided that Eduard would sign aboard and see if he could make something of himself in the colonies.

  Dekker’s experience in the East serves as a bookend to another historic voyage from Amsterdam to the East Indies that was equally momentous: that of Cornelis de Houtman 243 years earlier. If De Houtman’s was the first step in the formation of the Dutch East India Company, and the launching of an age
, Dekker’s would mark the beginning of the end of this phase of history.

  In 1799, after the VOC’s losses to the British, the Dutch government had taken over its East Indies possessions, thus turning a corporate empire into a colonial empire. As the Dutch economy faltered, King Willem I became desperate to squeeze income out of the distant possessions in order to finance his budget deficit. He commissioned a dashing general named Johannes van den Bosch, who had had long service in the region, to craft a system that would make money. Thus began the so-called culture system—culture meant in the sense of cultivation. Under it, beginning in 1830, East Indies peasants had to devote 20 percent of the land they cultivated to growing crops that the Dutch could ship to the European market. Van den Bosch, as governor-general of the East Indies, sat at the top of a vast pyramid of Dutch officials and island noblemen. The system depended on the almost religious fealty that local peasants felt they owed to their nobility; the Dutch tapped into this by paying off the nobles, who in turn enforced it. It was coercive, corrupt, and brutal. Peasants, for example, were forbidden from leaving their home districts, so that in times of famine or war they were trapped. At different times thousands died of starvation. But as a moneymaking venture, the system was breathtaking. Within three years it turned a profit; eventually, hundreds of millions of guilders’ worth of goods came flooding into the Netherlands. Amsterdam sea captains, such as Eduard Douwes Dekker’s father, got work shipping sugar, indigo, and tea. As profits filtered through the economy, the little uptick in fortunes was reflected in the Amsterdam skyline. Some of the canal houses that had been built in the glory days of the seventeenth century and topped with the pretty little step gables and bell gables that were then in fashion, got a face-lift: those old-fashioned gables were removed and replaced with sober modern cornices. Walking along any block of the canal district will give this sense of the different eras of Amsterdam’s financial dependence on the East Indies.