The same pattern was followed elsewhere. Rivals were pushed out of West Africa as the Dutch succeeded in dominating the gold trade, and in due course became heavily involved in slave trafficking to the Americas. New strongholds were founded, such as Fort Nassau in modern Ghana. The Portuguese were pushed out of other bases, such as Elmina, on the Ghanaian coast, which passed into Dutch hands in the middle of the seventeenth century. There was considerable success in the Caribbean and the Americas too, to the point that by the 1640s the Dutch had gained a major share of trans-Atlantic shipping, and controlled the sugar trade outright.55
The Low Countries were transformed. Fortunes were made for those who had invested in long-distance trade early on, while those who were beneficiaries of the new rich did well too. Universities were founded at Leiden and Groningen where scholars could push the boundaries of academic disciplines thanks to the funding of generous patrons. Artists and architects flourished, revelling in the sudden interest and wealth of a freshly minted bourgeoisie. In times of extraordinary affluence, magnificent buildings started to go up in Amsterdam, which rose from the water as Venice had done centuries earlier. Areas like the Jordaan were reclaimed from the sea as canal houses went up on the Keizersgracht and near by that were feats of engineering as well as architectural wonders.
The influence of the Silk Roads began to be felt in the arts. A thriving ceramics industry blossomed in Haarlem, Amsterdam and above all in Delft, heavily influenced by the look, feel and design of items imported from the east. Chinese visual themes dominated, while the characteristic blue and white wares developed centuries earlier by potters in the Persian Gulf, which had become popular in China and in the Ottoman Empire, were adopted so widely that they became the distinctive feature of Dutch ceramics as well. Imitation was not only the sincerest form of flattery; in this case, it was also part of joining a global system of material culture that now linked the North Sea with the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.56
With demand increasing for objects that helped show status, the arts in general in the Netherlands flourished. Some have suggested that 3 million paintings were produced in the seventeenth century alone.57 It was inevitable that this would stimulate new ideas and also raise standards, providing a context for painters like Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer to create works of breathtaking beauty. Given the remarkable way that the Dutch had worked together to enjoy success, it was entirely appropriate that some of the most beautiful works recorded groups, such as The Banquet of the Guard of St Adrian (the Civic Guard of Haarlem) by Frans Hals, or Rembrandt’s famous work The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch Preparing to March Out – more usually referred to as The Night Watch, which was commissioned for the Banqueting Hall of the Civic Guard of Amsterdam.
Individuals were eager patrons too, with the merchant Andries Bicker for example hiring Bartholomeus van der Heist to commemorate his success and newly elevated social status, or the shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen asking Rembrandt to paint a portrait of him and his wife working together on nautical designs. It was the turn of the Dutch – and of Dutch art – to experience a golden age.58
The Dutch were keen to show off their homeware, as in the case of Vermeer’s Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, where a blue and white bowl feautres prominently in the foreground.59 An English visitor to Amsterdam in 1640 could not hide how impressed he was by what he saw. In the Low Countries, wrote Peter Mundy, even houses of ‘indifferent quality’ were filled with furniture and ornaments ‘very Costly and Curious, Full of pleasure and home contentment, as Ritche Cupboards, Cabinetts . . . Imagery, porcelain, Costly Fine cages with birds’ and more besides. Even butchers and bakers, blacksmiths and cobblers had paintings and luxury trinkets in their homes.60 ‘I was amazed,’ wrote the English diarist John Evelyn about the annual fair in Rotterdam at around the same time; it was flooded with paintings, especially with ‘landscapes and drolleries, as they call those clownish representations’. Even common farmers had become avid art collectors.61 These attitudes were typical of the growing numbers of English visitors to the Low Countries in this period.62
The Dutch Golden Age was the result of a finely executed plan. It also had the benefit of being well timed, coming at a time when much of Europe was in disarray, engaged in endless rounds of costly and inconclusive military hostility which engulfed the continent during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48. This volatility presented opportunities, for the attention and resources that were diverted into arenas closer to home allowed the Dutch to pick off their targets on different continents one by one without facing retribution. The bloody fighting in the seventeenth century enabled the Dutch to establish a dominant position in the east at the expense of their rivals in Europe.
European warfare, however, had an even more important role: it prompted the rise of the west. Discussions about Europe in this period emphasise that the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason saw a coming of age where ideas of absolutism were replaced by notions of freedom, rights and liberty. But it was Europe’s entrenched relationship with violence and militarism that allowed it to place itself at the centre of the world after the great expeditions of the 1490s.
Even before the near-simultaneous discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, competition between kingdoms in Europe had been intense. For centuries, the continent had been characterised by fierce rivalry between states that frequently erupted into open hostility and war. This in turn prompted advancements in military technology. New weapons were developed, introduced and then refined after being tested on the battlefield. Tactics evolved as commanders learnt from experience. The concept of violence was institutionalised too: European art and literature had long celebrated the life of the chivalrous knight and his capacity to use force judiciously – as an act of love and of faith, but also as an expression of justice. Stories about the Crusades, which praised nobility and heroism and hid treachery, betrayal and the breaking of sworn oaths, became intoxicatingly powerful.
Fighting, violence and bloodshed were glorified, as long as they could be considered just. This was one reason, perhaps, why religion became so important: there could be no better justification of war than its being in defence of the Almighty. From the outset, the fusion of religion and expansion were closely bound together: even the sails of Columbus’ ships were marked by large crosses. As contemporary commentators constantly stressed, in regard to the Americas, but also as Europeans began to fan out over Africa, India and other parts of Asia, and then Australia as well, it was all part of God’s plan for the west to inherit the earth.
In fact, Europe’s distinctive character as more aggressive, more unstable and less peace-minded than other parts of the world now paid off. After all, this was why the great vessels of the Spanish and the Portuguese had proved successful in crossing the oceans and connecting continents together. The traditionally built craft that had sailed across the Indian and Arabian seas for centuries with little change to their design were no match for western vessels that could outmanoeuvre and outgun them at will. Continuous improvements in ship design that made them faster, stronger and more deadly widened the gulf ever further.63
The same was true of military technology. Such was the reliability and accuracy of arms used in the Americas that small numbers of conquistadors were able to dominate populations that were vastly superior numerically – and populations that were advanced and highly sophisticated, except when it came to weapons. In the Inca lands, wrote Pedro de Cieza de Léon, law and order were carefully maintained, with great care taken ‘to see that justice was meted out and that nobody ventured to commit a felony or theft’.64 Data was collected annually across the Inca Empire to make sure taxes were calculated correctly and fairly paid, with births and deaths recorded centrally and kept up to date. The elite had to work the land themselves for a set number of days each year and did so ‘to set an example, for everybody was to know that there should be nobody so rich that . . . he might disdain or affront the p
oor’.65
These were not the savages described by triumphalists in Europe; in fact they seemed positively enlightened in comparison to the highly stratified societies that had emerged throughout most of the continent, where the gap between the powerful and the weak was cemented in an aristocratic patrimony that protected the social position of the powerful. Although Europeans might have thought they were discovering primitive civilisations and that this was why they could dominate them, the truth was that it was the relentless advances in weapons, warfare and tactics that laid the basis for the success of the west.
One reason why the domination of Africa, Asia and the Americas was possible was the centuries of European practice in building fortifications that were all but impregnable. Castle-building had been the staple of European society since the Middle Ages, with thousands of spectacular strongholds springing up across the continent. Their purpose, of course, was to withstand heavy and determined attack; their extraordinary number was testimony to the fear and regularity of assault. Europeans were world leaders in building fortresses and in storming them. It was striking how the European insistence on constructing imposing sites that could be secured from the inside was a source of bemusement to locals. No other traders had built forts in the past, noted the Nawab of Bengal in the 1700s, so why on earth did the Europeans insist on doing so now?66
The great irony, then, was that although Europe experienced a glorious Golden Age, producing flourishing art and literature and leaps of scientific endeavour, it was forged by violence. Not only that, but the discovery of new worlds served to make European society more unstable. With more to fight over and ever greater resources available, stakes were raised, sharpening tensions as the battle for supremacy intensified.
The centuries that followed the emergence of Europe as a global power were accompanied by relentless consolidation and covetousness. In 1500, there were around 500 political units in Europe; in 1900, there were twenty-five. The strong devoured the weak.67 Competition and military conflict were endemic to Europe. In this sense, later horrors in the twentieth century had their roots in the deep past. The struggle to dominate neighbours and rivals spurred improvements in weapons technology, mechanisation and logistics, which ultimately allowed arenas of warfare to be expanded substantially and enabled the numbers killed to rise from the hundreds to the millions. In time, persecution could be perpetrated on a massive scale. It was not for nothing that world war and the worst genocide in history had their origins and execution in Europe; these were the latest chapters in a long-running story of brutality and violence.
Thus, while focus normally falls on the investment in art and the impact of new wealth on culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is perhaps more instructive to look to the parallel advances in weapon-making in this period. Just as paintings were produced in enormous quantities for a hungry audience, so too were guns. By the 1690s, some 600,000 flintlocks were being sold by the entrepreneur Maximilien Titon in central France alone; some contemporaries thought it was impossible even to estimate how many workers were employed in the handgun industry in Saint-Etienne because they were so numerous. Between 1600 and 1750, the rate of successful fire of handguns multiplied by a factor of ten. Technological advances – including the inventions of ramrods, paper cartridges and bayonets – made guns cheaper, better, quicker and more deadly.68
Similarly, although the names of scientists like Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler have become famous to generations of schoolchildren, it can be all too easy to forget that some of their most important work was on the trajectory of projectiles and understanding the causes of deviation to enable artillery to be more accurate.69 These distinguished scientists helped make weapons more powerful and ever more reliable; military and technological advances went hand in hand with the Age of Enlightenment.
It was not that aggression did not exist in other societies. As numerous examples across other continents would show, any conquest could bring death and suffering on a large scale. But periods of explosive expansion across Asia and North Africa, such as in the extraordinary first decades of the spread of Islam or during the time of the Mongol conquests, were followed by long periods of stability, peace and prosperity. The frequency and rhythm of warfare was different in Europe to other parts of the world: no sooner would one conflict be resolved than another would flare up. Competition was brutal and relentless. In that sense, seminal works like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan were quintessential texts that explained the rise of the west. Only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right.70
Moreover, the thirst for military confrontation lay behind other developments that were closely related to warfare, such as those in finance. Governments in Europe were hungry for capital to fund armies, leading to the establishment of debt markets where money could be raised against future tax revenues. Betting on success could produce handsome profits and unlock titles and other social benefits for canny investors whose investment in government debts could naturally be presented as patriotism: investing in state finances was a way of getting ahead, as well as becoming rich. London and Amsterdam became global centres of finance, specialising in sovereign debt, but also in increasingly complex stock-market listings.71
One reason for the rise to prominence of London and Amsterdam was the socio-economic acceleration of northern Europe. The latest research suggests that the population almost doubled in England and the Low Countries between 1500 and 1800. Most of this growth was felt in densely populated areas where the number of large towns rose by nearly three times.72 The process was particularly acute in the Low Countries: in the middle of the seventeenth century, as many as half the residents of Amsterdam are thought to have moved to the city from elsewhere.73 States with more urban centres had a considerable advantage over those with large rural populations. It was less time-consuming, easier and more efficient to gather taxes from cities, not least since the velocity of commercial exchange was so much greater than in the countryside. Densely populated areas also produced more reliable income streams and were less risky to lend to. England and the Dutch Republic could borrow more at better rates than their commercial and political competitors.74 Then, as now, to make money in finance it was not enough to be smart; you had to be in the right place. And increasingly, that meant London or Amsterdam.
This marked the start of the death-knell for Italy and the Adriatic. Already on the back foot thanks to new routes to market which brought goods directly to the richest consumers, the city-states with their deeply entrenched rivalries stood no chance against clusters of towns able and willing to combine their resources. Such large sums were raised to fund expansion that it became standard to spend more than half of state revenues simply servicing national debts.75 It was expensive to be locked in a constant fight against neighbours and constantly striving to gain a political, commercial and cultural edge over them. Europe became a continent running at two speeds: Old Europe in the east and the south which had dominated for centuries and which now sagged and stagnated; and New Europe, in the north-west, which boomed.76
Some saw the writing on the wall before others. As early as 1600, the British ambassador to Venice was able to write that ‘in the matter of trade, the decay is so manifest that all men conclude within twenty yeares space’ the city would all but collapse. Venice had once dominated trade with the east, but was no longer able to compete. Scores of mighty ships ‘of above 1000 tun apeece’ used to bring goods back home or head out to reload; now ‘not one is to be seene’.77 It was not long before the city began to reinvent itself, transforming from a commercial powerhouse to a centre of lascivious living, a hedonist’s delight. Although the authorities tried to put an end to the wearing of bigger and better jewels, to increasingly ostentatious parties and pleasure-seeking thrills, the city’s reinvention was in many ways understandable: what other choices did it have?78
In the place of international commerce and high politics, Venice, Florence and Rome became stops on a tourist trail for the new rich. Although first referred to as the Grand Tour in 1670, such expeditions began a century earlier, when a trip to Italy was first recognised as presenting an opportunity to buy high-quality antiquities as well as more voguish art, whose prices leapt as the numbers of visitors rose.79 It was a rite of passage, not just for the individuals who took part but for culture as a whole: the fruits of southern Europe were being devoured by the north. As the continent’s centre of gravity shifted, so did the jewels of ancient and contemporary culture. Three of the finest collections of ancient sculptures in the world, held at the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, were gathered by culturally curious travellers who were blessed with deep pockets.80
They brought back ideas about architecture, monumental tomb design and sculpture; it was not long before the poetry, art, music, garden design, medicine and science of classical antiquity were being extensively borrowed from, as England and the Low Countries set about modelling the glory of the present on that of the past.81 Roman citizens would have stood agape at the idea that small landowners and petty officials from what had once been a leafy if out-of-the-way province of the empire were commissioning busts portraying themselves not just as the heirs to the Romans but as emperors.82 Soon they would be doing more: Britannia was about to rule.
14
The Road to Empire
The shift in power to the north of Europe left some unable to compete and keep up. In the Ottoman world, for instance, the number of cities with populations of more than 10,000 remained broadly the same between 1500 and 1800. There was no pressure to intensify agricultural production to service growing demand – which meant that the economy remained sluggish and static. Tax collection was also inefficient, partly a result of tax farming, which incentivised individuals to make quick gains at the expense of the state’s long-term income.1
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