Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  [T]he Dutch rebels have raised their head and increased their power, the Jews assisting them in their wars, conquests, negotiations and other pretensions and becoming in the lands of Your Majesty, spies of the said rebels, penetrating the centres of trade, administration of the armadas, convoy and revenues of Your Majesty…sucking out the core of wealth (from Spain and Portugal).17

  But important as Jews were to the Dutch economic boom, their overall numbers were small and their contributions paled by comparison to those of another group. In the late sixteenth century, a massive influx of Protestant merchants, skilled workers, and industrialists played an even greater role in bringing what Max Weber famously called “the spirit of capitalism” to the Netherlands.

  During the Middle Ages, the cities of Ghent and Bruges in the south Netherlands—with their long traditions of spinning, dyeing, and weaving—were flourishing producers of fine textiles. By 1500 nearby Antwerp was Europe's textile marketplace and a major industrial center. Although part of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges were hotbeds of Calvinism, particularly among the working and merchant classes. As anti-Protestant persecution mounted under Philip II, these cities suffered a catastrophic exodus of Protestant skill and capital. Between 1560 and 1589, the population of Antwerp plunged from 85,000 to 42,000. Over roughly the same period, Ghent and Bruges each lost about half their inhabitants.

  Most of these emigres moved to the north Netherlands, typically settling in Amsterdam, Leiden, or Haarlem, where they could practice their religions freely. Many were highly skilled textile workers with sophisticated specialties. (Vermeer's father, for example, specialized in patterned satins, and Jacob van Ruisdael's father designed cartoons for tapestries.) These immigrants brought with them not just skill and experience but the most advanced techniques and technology for processing raw materials. By the 1590s, most of Antwerp's wealthiest Protestant merchants and industrialists had also resettled in Holland, attracted by the Dutch Republic's new pools of skilled labor, exploding commercialism, and the unrivaled economic and social opportunities open to individuals of all religions.18

  Almost overnight—and largely because of the infusion of immigrant skill—the Dutch Republic surged to dominance in an astonishing range of industries, from sugar refining to armament manufacture to chemical production. Most crucially, Holland replaced Antwerp as Europe's leader in textile finishing and refining. With talent and technology taken straight from Antwerp, “Haarlem became the centre where coarse linens from Germany were bleached and finished…Amsterdam dyed and dressed semifinished cloths imported ‘in the white’ from England. Leyden…[was revitalized] by Southern Netherlands’ immigrants to become the largest manufacturing centre of the so-called ‘New Draperies’ of seventeenth-century Europe.”

  Soon Holland had completely cornered Europe's “rich trades,” which had formerly been dominated by the Hanseatic League (an alliance of northern European trading guilds), the English, and in earlier times the Venetians. Fleets of ships laden with fine linens, velvets, camlets, satins, and damask sailed from Holland to the great ports of Spain and Portugal. There, the Dutch sold their fine textiles for Spanish silver, with which they bought raw materials and luxury goods from the East Indies and the New World: pepper, sugar, spices, metals, coffee, tea, coral, cotton, silk, wool, and mohair. With their supply of silver, their more efficient ships, and their unmatched trading networks in the Baltics and northern Europe, the Dutch quickly became, in Daniel Defoe's words, “the Carryers of the World, the middle Persons in Trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe.”19

  Indeed, the Dutch accumulated such sensational wealth from the rich trades that in 1598 Spain placed an embargo on all Dutch ships, barring them from Iberian ports, thus hoping to cut off Dutch access to colonial products. This proved a fatal error. With their fortunes threatened, and with more capital to invest than ever, the elite merchants of Holland decided to bypass Spain and Portugal completely and send their own ships directly to the East Indies and the Americas. Thus was born the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and later the West India Company (Westindische Compagnie), and with them the rise of the Dutch Republic as a world colonial power.20

  EMPIRE: “GOLD IS YOUR GOD”

  By 1601, there were eight private Dutch companies, with a total of sixty-five ships, frantically vying with one another to buy up commodities in the East Indies. Initially reaping immense returns, the Dutch merchants quickly found that competition among them was driving up prices and threatening their profits. At the same time, Dutch vessels were subject to raids by pirates, enemy warships, and privateers. Moreover, unlike Spain and Portugal, the Dutch had no collective, sovereign armed presence in Asia, Africa, or the New World. In the East and West Indies, Spain and Portugal had conquered peoples and colonized lands, a convenient means of extracting raw materials for commerce. The Dutch merchants saw these advantages and took a lesson from them.

  In 1602, a collaboration of Dutch merchants, burghers, and ministers established the East India Company, a joint-stock trading monopoly armed with sovereign powers. The East India Company could conduct diplomacy, sign treaties, form alliances, maintain troops, install viceroys, and make war. All of its agents, whether naval commanders or expatriate governors-general, had to swear double oaths of alliance to the company and to the States General of the United Provinces.

  The composition of the founding investors of the East India Company was striking. In the most important Amsterdam chamber, there were more than a thousand initial investors, eighty-one of whom provided about half the total capital. Of these eighty-one “chief investors,” roughly half were wealthy Protestant refugees who had fled Spanish persecution, and roughly half were native Hollanders. The former group, which contributed significantly more capital, included famous Antwerp merchant-banking families such as the Bartolottis, Coymans, De Scots, and De Vogelaers. The native Hollanders, who were less wealthy (at least initially) but more politically influential, included Gerrit Bicker, son of a brewer, Reinier Pauw, son of a grain trader, and Gerrit Reynst, son of a soap boiler. All these men made immense fortunes in long-distance commerce. There were also three chief investors who were immigrants from Germany, including the magnate Jan Poppen, whose family by 1631 was the single wealthiest in all Amsterdam, followed by the Bartolotti and Coymans families. Although Holland's towns were typically ten to twenty percent Catholic, all the chief investors of the East India Company were Protestant.21

  Nevertheless, Dutch overseas expansion was not driven by religious zeal. In contrast to the Spanish and Portuguese, very few Dutch missionaries went over to the East Indies or the Americas to “save heathens.” Certainly there were some ardent Calvinists among the Dutch empire builders, including the God-fearing admiral Piet Heyn and the governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen. But men like Heyn and Coen complained constantly about the lack of religious piety among their fellow Dutch expatriates in Asia. One reverend grumbled, “Dutch sailors knew as little of the Bible as they did of the Koran.” Dutch imperialism was fueled not by Calvinism but by profit seeking. As West African tribesmen said to Dutch traders in the early seventeenth century, “Gold is your god.” Sweden's Charles X made the same point a few years later: When a Dutch envoy made a comment about freedom of religion, the king pulled a coin from his pocket and declared, “Voilà votre religion! “22

  The early 1600s saw a burst of Dutch commercial and colonial expansion all over the globe. In 1605 the Dutch seized the Indonesian Spice Islands from the Portuguese. In 1610 the East India Company installed its first governor-general in Java, as well as trading posts on the neighboring islands of Ternate, Tidore, Am-boina, and Banda. In 1619, the Dutch captured Jakarta and, renaming it Batavia, made it the company's new headquarters. Over the same period, the Dutch replaced the Portuguese as the dominant power on the West African coast, taking over the region's gold and ivory trade. Even more dramatically, between 1599 and 1605 the Dutch sent 768 vessels to the Caribbean and
the shores of northern South America—formerly Spain's stranglehold—successfully procuring large quantities of salt, tobacco, hides, sugar, and silver bullion.

  Meanwhile, back in Europe, the long Dutch struggle for independence from Spain (lasting from 1568 to 1648 and known as the Dutch Revolt or the Eighty Years’ War) stretched on, with increasing victories for the Dutch. Fueled by the economic explosion, the Dutch adopted a series of military reforms soon copied all over Europe. Troops were paid regularly. More powerful weaponry was introduced and ammunition standardized. Battlefield training and techniques were revolutionized; soldiers, for example, were drilled to load and fire in synchronized fashion, allowing continuous volleys by successive lines of infantry. Dutch battlefield superiority grew so pronounced that in the Battle of Turnhout in 1597 an estimated 2,250 Spanish soldiers were killed, while the Dutch may have lost as few as four men—or, at the highest estimate, one hundred.

  In 1607, Dutch warships crushed the Spanish in the Bay of Gibraltar, their own backyard. In 1609, Spain signed the Twelve Years Truce with “the Dutch rebels,” allowing Dutch ships once again to enter the ports of Spain, Portugal, and Flanders and to ply international waters without fear of attack by Spanish warships or privateers. Dutch freight and shipping insurance charges immediately plunged. Dutch profits soared to new heights, and the republic's commercial ascendancy over the Baltic, Mediterranean, and northern European trade reached its zenith. When the truce expired, Spain did not renew its terms. In 1621, war resumed and Spain reimposed its embargo. The same year, the Dutch West Indies Company was officially created, and Dutch colonization in the New World took off.

  By the 1630s, the Dutch had wrested from Portugal almost the entire sugar trade between Brazil and northern Europe. In 1634 the Dutch captured Curagao from Spain and established a permanent base in the Caribbean. By 1648 the Dutch flag flew over Aruba, Bonaire, half of St. Martin, and the other islands collectively known today as the Netherlands Antilles. Meanwhile, back in 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman hired and provisioned by the Dutch, had claimed much of New York State on behalf of his new employer. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch, from bases in New Amsterdam (now Manhattan) and Fort Orange (now Albany), controlled North America's lucrative fur trade.23

  Like the East India Company, the Dutch West India Company was founded in large part by immigrants who fled to the Dutch Republic because of its relative religious tolerance. Again, these included many wealthy Protestant refugees—indeed, the West India Company was far more belligerently Calvinist than its East India counterpart. On the other hand, whereas Jews played a relatively small role in the East India Company, they figured much more prominently in the activities of the West India Company.

  With their fluency in both Dutch and the Iberian languages, as well as their long-standing expertise in trading sugar and other tropical raw materials, Holland's Sephardic Jews were particularly well suited to serve as Dutch colonists in the West Indies. By 1644, Dutch Jews represented approximately one-third of all the white civilians in Netherlands Brazil.

  Dutch Jews also helped colonize Guyana, Barbados, Martinique, and Jamaica, as well as smaller islands like Nevis, Grenada, and Tobago. The largest and most important Jewish colony in the New World was Curagao, followed by the five-hundred-person Sephardic community in Suriname, which by 1694 owned forty sugar plantations and nine thousand slaves.24

  By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was “indisputably the greatest trading nation in the world, with commercial outposts and fortified ‘factories’ scattered from Archangel to Recife and from New Amsterdam to Nagasaki.” Incalculable quantities of luxury goods flowed into and through Holland. On June 27, 1634, the following immense bounty was unloaded in the port of Amsterdam:

  326,73372 Amsterdam pounds of Malacca pepper; 297,446 lb. of cloves; 292,623 lb. of saltpetre; 141,278 lb. of indigo; 483,082 lb. of sappan wood; 219,027 pieces of blue Ming ware; 52 further chests of Korean and Japanese porcelain; 75 large vases and pots containing preserved confections, much of it spiced ginger; 660 lb. of Japanese copper; 241 pieces of fine Japanese lacquer work; 3,989 rough diamonds of large carat; 93 boxes of pearls and rubies (misc. carats); 603 bales of dressed Persian silks and grosgreins; 1,155 lb. of raw Chinese silk; 199,800 lb. of unrefined Kandy [i.e., Ceylon] sugar.25

  THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

  The Dutch have long had a reputation for thrift. Owen Felltham accused the Dutch of being “frugal to the saving of an egg-shell.” Even Sir William Temple, the English ambassador to The Hague in 1668-70 and generally an admirer of the United Provinces, expressed irritation that the Dutch had gotten so wealthy through “Parsimony”:

  For never any Countrey traded so much and consumed so little: They are the great Masters of the Indian Spices and of the Persian Silks; but wear plain Woollen, and feed upon their own Fish and Roots. Nay they sell the finest of their own Cloath to France, and buy coarse out of England for their own wear. In short, they furnish infinite Luxury, which they never practise, and traffique in Pleasures which they never taste.

  While some in the republic may have worn “plain Woollen” and fed upon “Roots,” others did not. As Simon Schama has shown in The Embarrassment of Riches, many Dutch, from blue bloods to artisans, had no problem reconciling the strictures of Calvinism with lives of superabundance—prodigious meals, extravagant festivals, and lavish consumerism.

  Like the United States for much of its history, the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century golden age was known throughout Europe as a land of opportunity: a New Jerusalem flowing with milk and honey. There was also plenty of poverty and inequality: The thousands of immigrants who poured into the republic between 1500 and 1700 included not just financiers and magnates but also child vagrants, prostitutes, and penniless seamen from Norway and Sweden. Nevertheless, the Dutch Republic was the richest country in Europe by a long shot, with even its unskilled workers enjoying higher standards of living and better diets than most people in the world.26

  Just as Americans today are the world's overeaters, so too the Dutch were famous for stuffing themselves. The seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray was revolted by the sight of Dutch men and women, most of them “big-boned and gross-bodied,” “almost always eating.” And it wasn't just the rich who ate well. Aristocrats and commoners ate surprisingly similar breakfasts, typically including bread, butter, cheese, fish, pastries, buttermilk, and beer—the latter being “the most generally recommended” breakfast drink for both adults and children.

  Midday and evening meals were hearty too. A bill from April 24, 1664, shows approximately twelve professors from Groningen ordering the following fairly standard supper: “a turkey, a jugged hare, a Westphalian ham, a bolt of mutton, veal on the spit, anchovies, bread, butter, mustard and cheese, lemons and twelve tankards of wine.” In 1703, at most seven churchmen from Arn-hem reportedly consumed, in one sitting, “fourteen pounds of beef, eight pounds of veal, six fowl, stuffed cabbages, apples, pears, bread, pretzels, assorted nuts, twenty bottles of red wine, twelve bottles of white wine and coffee.” Even meals in the poorhouse usually included vegetable soup, meat stew, bread and butter, the occasional fowl, and fresh fruit and red wine for the sick.

  The Dutch ate even more on special occasions. In addition to major holidays like Christmas, Martinmas, and Fat Tuesday (which required eating waffles, pancakes, sausages, and ham pies), the Dutch had feasts for births, baptisms, swaddlings, betrothals, funerals, school openings, lottery inaugurations, new apprenticeships, organ installations, ship arrivals, even “feasts of inversion,” at which master and mistress exchanged roles with their servants. Guests at these feasts might be served as many as a hundred dishes. One deceased innkeeper, otherwise unmemorable, received what Simon Schama calls “a bumper send-off,” with townspeople at his wake consuming

  20 oxheads of French and Rhenish wine

  70 half casks of ale

  1,100 pounds of meat “roasted on the Koningsplein”

&n
bsp; 550 pounds of sirloin

  28 breasts of veal

  12 whole sheep

  18 great venison in white pastry

  200 pounds of “fricadelle” (mincemeat)

  topped off as always with bread, butter, and cheese.

  But food, even in gluttonous quantities, raised no serious religious difficulties. Bread, after all, had been broken at the Last Supper, and “ [e]ven for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.” The problem was that the Dutch were also notorious drinkers and smokers. “Men drink at the slightest excuse,” deplored one pastor, “at the sound of a bell or the turning of a mill…the Devil himself has turned brewer.” In 1613, there were said to be 518 alehouses in Amsterdam alone. Around the same time, it was estimated that 12,000 liters of beer were consumed daily in Haarlem, two-thirds of it at home. Meanwhile, tobacco smoking and even tobacco chewing were practically national addictions, among both sexes and at every level of society. “The smell of the Dutch Republic,” writes Schama, “was the smell of tobacco.” Foreign visitors found especially repulsive the tar-blackened teeth of Dutch women, and even locals liked to comment that “a Hollander without a pipe is a national impossibility.”27

  All this vice and excess caused deep distress among the sternest Calvinists. In 1655 in Amsterdam, a pious burgomaster pushed through a law prohibiting extravagant wedding feasts. At another point, the city of Delft banned gingerbread men. Clergymen from a number of towns tried to prohibit the consumption of alcohol on the Sabbath.