by Amy Chua
But in the end, such measures failed miserably. It was not just that they were unpopular. (An attempt to ban cookies on the feast of St. Nicholas triggered a furious revolt of eleven-year-olds.) The forces of capitalism also worked ruthlessly against them. Beer and tobacco were two of the Dutch Republic's most important commercial products. Roughly half the labor force of Gouda was employed in pipe making. Even the West India Company—famous for its hardline Calvinist core—made immense profits from its colonial tobacco trade. These economic interests easily triumphed over church-led suppression efforts. In Rotterdam, for example, a law banning Sunday drinking was immediately reversed by the town's powerful breweries. Neither was the church itself unconnected to the “vice” trades. It was perfectly common for local preachers to sneak a quick smoke between sermons, and Amersfoort's great tobacco magnate, Brant van Slichtenhorst, was himself a deacon of the Reformed Church.28
By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was famous throughout Europe for being excessively liberal—socially, morally, politically, and intellectually. Foreign visitors were constantly shocked by the disrespect shown to masters, husbands, and nobles by servants, wives, and commoners. The German Heinrich Benthem, visiting the republic in the 1690s, scoffed that Dutch servant girls dressed and acted so much like their mistresses that he could not tell them apart. He noted too that whereas German husbands walked to church together, with their wives behind them minding the children, it was just the opposite in Holland: “Here the hen crows and the cock merely cackles,” he said. More generally, women in the Dutch Republic—young and old, of all classes— were famously independent, “free to come and go, unaccompanied and unchaperoned, to work, conduct business, and engage in conversation almost like men.”
Worse still, there were no limits on who could get rich in the Dutch Republic—or so it seemed to European contemporaries used to a far more rigid social hierarchy. Upstart traders and sons of cheese makers lived in sumptuous palaces “with splendid marble and alabaster columns” and “floors inlaid with gold.” They dressed luxuriously and bedecked their wives in Spanish taffeta, Brazilian emeralds, and East Indian sapphires. Even “base-born” shopkeepers and cobblers owned costly linens and wore velvet and damask. “Mr. Everyman thinks he is entitled to wear what he likes so long as he can pay for it,” sputtered one indignant critic. “Can you bear it when you see that a tailor has a room or a parlour hung with gold leather or tapestry? Or here and there, a mercer or an artisan who decorates his house as if it was a gentleman's or a burgomaster's?”
The republic's religious tolerance and high wages attracted skilled and highly talented individuals from all over Europe, including Germans, French, English, Scots, and even Turks and Armenians. The Huguenots who arrived after France's 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were particularly successful in Holland's silk, dressmaking, hatmaking, wig-making, and watchmaking industries. Holland's major towns and universities became the most cosmopolitan in Europe. In 1700, an estimated one-third of the University of Leiden's students were British; thousands of Scottish and English scholars flocked to Groningen and Utrecht as well. By 1685, immigrants or descendants of immigrants formed a majority of Holland's population.29
Like Tang China in its golden age, the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century saw a burst of extraordinary cultural, artistic, and intellectual creativity. The Dutch painters of this era—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Jacob van Ruisdael—are among the most famous artists of all time. Eschewing the sacred figures of traditional art, the Dutch Masters painted in a new, intensely realistic style, giving an unprecedented luminosity to domestic and middle-class subjects previously forbidden in great painting. (Rembrandt chose to live in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter.) Dutchmen of this period also flourished in other areas of cultural and intellectual achievement: The polymath and humanist Hugo de Groot, known today as Grotius, laid down the foundations of modem international law in the 1600s, while he was still in his twenties.
Finally, some of the most brilliant thinkers of the Enlightenment wrote or lived in Holland, attracted by the republic's intellectual liberty. Among these were René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, “the three great luminaries of seventeenth-century thought.” Descartes was a French Catholic squire who found tran-quility in Holland and wrote his most famous work there. (He also wrote, of commerce-obsessed Amsterdam: “In this great town, where apart from myself there dwells no one who is not engaged in trade, everyone is so much out for his own advantage that I should be able to live my whole life here without ever meeting a mortal being.”) Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher whose family came to the Netherlands in the 1620s; his radically modern ideas on reason and individualism eventually got him banished from his own Sephardic community. John Locke was an Englishman ejected by James II; his greatest writings—on government and toleration— were heavily influenced by his years of exile in Holland. Other great minds, for example the Italian Gregorio Leti and France's Pierre Bayle, settled in the Dutch Republic as well, and Holland became known as “a haven for philosophers.”30
WAS THE DUTCH REPUBLIC A HYPERPOWER?
With its unsurpassed maritime and commercial supremacy, a fair case can be made that in its heyday, between roughly 1625 and 1675, the Dutch Republic was a world-dominant power. The obvious objection is that the Dutch army was not the largest in Europe—although it was one of the largest, best equipped, and most professional. Even during its seventeenth-century decline, Spain had more troops, and it is most doubtful that the Netherlands could have invaded and conquered the Hapsburg territories. Can it really be said then that the Dutch Republic was a hyperpower?
To focus on the size of its standing army is to misunderstand how the Dutch Republic triumphed over its rivals. The Dutch never sought to conquer the European continent. While Spain, France, and England exhausted themselves in wars of aggression against one another, the Dutch Republic built a standing army sufficient to win independence from the Hapsburgs and to defend its borders—as it did in 1672 when, to the surprise of all Europe, it defeated a simultaneous English and French invasion. Far more important, like Venice of the early Middle Ages, the Dutch Empire was an ocean-borne empire, driven by a hunger for commercial expansion, not territorial expansion.31
By the seventeenth century, naval might had become the royal road to world dominance, and the Dutch Republic took control of the seas. The extent of Dutch maritime domination is astonishing. In 1639, in the Battle of Downs, Dutch warships humiliated Spain's once formidable navy, crushing a Spanish armada of nearly one hundred ships and twenty thousand troops, and “rais[ing] the naval reputation of Holland as high as it could well be carried.” In 1667, the Dutch dealt the English perhaps the worst naval defeat in British history, adding insult to injury by towing away the Royal Charles, the flagship of the British navy. On the commercial side, Dutch maritime dominance was even more pronounced. According to one estimate, of the 20,000 ships involved in the world's carrying trade in the mid-seventeenth century, 15,000-16,000 were Dutch. By 1670, the Dutch owned more shipping tonnage than England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Prussia put together. At its peak, the Dutch navy was in size the rough equal of the French and English naval forces combined—all the more remarkable given that France was in population ten to twenty times larger than the Dutch Republic.32
The Dutch figured out before anyone else that there was a new way to achieve global dominance in the dawning modern age. Every previous hyperpower in history had begun by conquering its neighbors, expanding ever outward with the march of marauding armies, growing huge in population as it incorporated more and more peoples, and through strategic tolerance inducing these conquered peoples to contribute their strengths and talents to its Imperium.
Dutch tolerance played a different role. Largely because of brutal religious persecution throughout Europe, the years 1492 to 1715 saw the greatest migration of skilled people in history.33 As the United States would do two centuries later, the Dutch used tole
rance to attract the talented and persecuted outcasts of Europe. This turned out to be the winning strategy, pulling some of the world's most economically dynamic groups—along with invaluable trade networks, cutting-edge industrial technology, and vast sums of capital—into tiny Holland, creating an economic boom that catapulted the Dutch Republic far beyond its continental rivals in wealth. The Dutch then used this wealth to globalize.
Technological advances and the rise of capitalism had vastly enlarged the parts of the globe now up for grabs and altered the objectives of power. Territorial expansion over neighboring countries had become much less important. Gold and silver in the far-away Americas, the pepper and spice trades of the Indies, Caribbean sugar, and other “rich trades”—in coffee, tea, cocoa, textiles, tobacco, jewelry, and other luxuries—from the Baltics to the Mediterranean to Africa were the new, exponentially more lucrative prizes. The Dutch would let future would-be conquerors— Napoleon and Hitler, for example—renew the misguided dream of subjugating all Europe, with the unthinkable destruction and self-destruction that dream has brought with it.
The new, modern strategy of world domination was not conquest as such but capitalism backed by military force. Although the Dutch had significant colonial holdings in Indonesia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, much of the Dutch “empire” was essentially a network of trading outposts administered by the semiprivate West and East India companies, with warships protecting the companies’ effective monopoly over the world's most lucrative trade routes. Given its clear “productive, commercial and financial superiority,” as well as its technological preeminence and overwhelmingly dominant naval power, it is no wonder that Immanuel Wallerstein concludes that the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic attained the “rare condition” of global “hegemony.”34
THE DUTCH “CONQUEST” OF ENGLAND
In 1688, a massive Dutch fleet invaded England, Dutch troops occupied London, and the stadtholder of the Netherlands, William III of Orange, became king of Britain, ruling jointly with his wife, Mary. Dutch supremacy might have seemed at its pinnacle, and Holland's commercial and military expansion unstoppable. In fact, William's ascendance to the throne marked the transfer of the mantle of world dominance from the Netherlands to Britain.35
The Glorious Revolution, or “Bloodless Revolution,” of 1688 had been engineered in part by the British parliament. Ten years earlier, Holland's ambitious William had married his first cousin Mary Stuart, daughter of King James II and heir to the English throne. Unlike William and Mary, who were Protestant, James II was Catholic, making him highly unpopular with his English subjects.
Even with Parliament's acquiescence, William's bid to wrest the English throne from his uncle (and father-in-law) was a high-risk venture. Especially because James II was allied with France's Louis XLV, it was essential for William to mobilize and move troops across the channel quickly. The Dutch naval force that William landed in England in 1688—arriving in an armada of nearly five hundred vessels—was equipped and financed in significant part by a small group of Dutch Jews. After becoming king of England, William promptly brought over his Sephardic financiers to continue provisioning his forces, which now included the English army and navy as well. They would soon be followed by many of Holland's skilled textile workers, scientists, and even Dutch portrait artists, painters, and engravers. Thus began a massive outflow of capital, human and financial, from the Dutch Republic to England.36
As an ironic result, it was England that would overwhelmingly benefit from the amalgamation of Dutch and English power. Basically, the Dutch Republic exported its tolerance, its most enterprising financiers, and its entire “business model” to England, which then replaced the Dutch Republic as Europe's preeminent land of freedom and opportunity for immigrants and religious minorities. Soon, England would also replace the Netherlands as the world's supreme maritime power, presiding over a global commercial and colonial empire of unprecedented magnitude. In doing so, England inherited a problem that the Dutch never solved.
Tolerance for the Dutch was principally an internal policy. The remarkable religious tolerance embraced by the Netherlands within its own borders never translated into ethnic or racial tolerance in its colonial outposts overseas. From Suriname to Java to South Africa, the Dutch treated their indigenous subjects as their racial and cultural inferiors, engaging in the familiar colonial practices of slavery, apartheid, and cultural destruction. There was thus a contradiction between Dutch tolerance at home and its colonial intolerance abroad—a contradiction that would become even more marked for the British.
To put it mildly, the Dutch never succeeded in turning Indonesians or Ceylonese into loyal subjects of a great Dutch empire. Indeed, the Dutch never pursued an empire of that kind. It fell to England to try to fit together the unlikely combination of Enlightenment principles, European ethnocentrism, and a Roman strategy of empire building, creating a world of British subjects who filled the ranks of Britain's armies, administered Britain's territories, emulated Britain's manners, and contributed more or less willingly to Britain's imperial fortunes.
SEVEN
The Ottoman, Ming, and
Mughal Empires
Before turning to the Dutch Republic's successor, Great Britain, let us take a brief look outside the West. This chapter offers a snapshot of three non-Western societies— the Ottoman, Ming, and Mughal empires—that rose to impressive heights of power in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries but never came close to achieving world dominance. In all three cases, the empire reached its pinnacle of power and prosperity during its most tolerant era. Conversely, intolerance in every case acted as a cancer, limiting the empire's success and precipitating its decline.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The astonishing meteoric rise of Islam beginning in the seventh century was accompanied almost from the beginning by inter-Muslim fragmentation and warfare. Like Christianity, on which it was based, Islam could be at once remarkably ethnically and racially tolerant—open to anyone of any skin color or walk of life—and fundamentally intolerant when it came to religion. There was only one God and one Truth.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was occupied by intense internal schisms—including the split between Shiites and Sunnis, which would prove as bloody as the war between Catholics and Protestants, as well as rivaling dynasties, caliphates, and sects vying for control of the Muslim world. In 750 in Damascus, every member of the ruling Umayyad family except one prince was massacred by the rival Abbasids. Despite this internecine strife, powerful regional empires rose and fell in the Muslim world. Of these great Islamic empires, the largest and longest-lasting was the Ottoman.
Founded by the Turkish House of Osman, the Ottoman Empire survived from roughly 1300 to the First World War. At its peak, its territory stretched from the edge of Vienna to the Red Sea, from North Africa to the Balkans. One of the most striking features of the Ottoman Empire was its religious tolerance.
The empires of Islam, even while episodically slaughtering both Muslim and non-Muslim “heretics,” had a long history of tolerance. Almost a thousand years before the Dutch Republic became the first European state to incorporate tolerance into its governing principles, conquering Muslim rulers of the eighth century famously permitted Christians and Jews to continue worshipping as they chose—as long as they recognized the supremacy of Islam. In part, this was shrewd policy, but it also reflected the Islamic principle of protection for the “Peoples of the Book”—that is, Christians and Jews, fellow monotheists whose writings were considered by Islam to contain elements of revelation. The Ottoman Turks built on this tradition, ruling with calculating tolerance over an extraordinarily racially and religiously diverse region.1
Interestingly, the Ottoman rulers were keenly aware that through their relative tolerance they were profiting at the direct expense of their intolerant Christian rivals. In particular, they saw Sephardic Jews, with their extensive trade contacts in the Mediterranean, as potential revenue producers for
the empire. In 1492, upon hearing of Spain's expulsion decree, Sultan Bayezid II issued proclamations of welcome to the exiles and ordered the governors throughout his empire “not to refuse entry to the Jews” but rather to given them a “gracious welcome.” Those who did not do so were to be “put to death.” Bayezid is said to have gloated that “[t]he Catholic monarch Ferdinand was wrongly considered wise, since he impoverished Spain and enriched Turkey by the expulsion of the Jews.”2
The power and splendor of the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith under Suleyman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, a period often referred to as the golden age of Ottoman history. A brilliant military commander who insisted on leading his armies in person, Suleyman conquered Hungary, Iraq, and North Africa, established Ottoman supremacy over the Mediterranean, and extended the borders of the empire to their farthest limit. Suleyman was also a legendary administrator. Described by the Venetian ambassador in 1525 as “the most just of all Emperors,” Suleyman was famous the world over for his wisdom, fairness, and remarkable tolerance. (These attributes are usually not ascribed to Suleyman's father, Selim the Grim, who consolidated power by executing his brothers, six of his nephews, and three of his own sons.)
Suleyman continued the Ottoman policy of permitting Jews and Christians extensive freedom to worship their own religions and run their own communities. In exchange, non-Muslims paid special taxes, which, although an important source of imperial revenue, were based on ability to pay and not especially onerous. Under Suleyman, there were very few restrictions on where Jews and Christians could live and work, and at least in the cities, Muslims and non-Muslims casually intermingled on a daily basis. Jews and Christians participated in Muslim trade guilds and could even bring lawsuits against Muslims in Muslim courts.