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The DUTCH against TRADITION

Amsterdam

Amsterdam

World News for this month

History is most significant where there is change, and from the mid-1500s to the mid 1600s the most significant changes in the world took place in Western Europe. Outside of Europe much was happening, but not much change. There was more war, shifting borders and one autocrat replacing another autocrat. Some of this was happening in Europe, but in Europe was more advancement in a scientific view of the world, a new commercial agriculture and the rise in power of people with money: businessmen, bankers, the middleclass and their ethics of work, their belief in frugality and their view of trade as a dignified endeavor. This took place in the Netherlands in the first half of the 1600s

The United Netherlands had what has been called the world's first modern agricultural economy. Elsewhere in Europe close to 95 percent of the population was involved in agriculture, while in the Netherlands townspeople became more numerous than rural folk. In the Netherlands, agriculture benefited from the demand for its products in the towns, and the towns benefited from the cheap food made available in the countryside. Farmers were specializing in what they grew for the market. Success in agriculture helped the rise in commerce, and success in commerce helped agriculture.

The United Netherlands was without much in natural resources, but it had a successful fishing industry, with fishing ships that processed their catch at sea, making the fish ready for export as soon as the ships returned to port. The merchants of the United Netherlands had made themselves middlemen, transporting the goods of other countries on their cargo ships. Spain and Portugal had been the previous masters of the oceans, but now the United Netherlands was developing primacy on the seas. In the United Netherlands, ocean-going voyages for commercial gain were being financed by investors joining partnerships. And permanent associations of investors arose. Someone could buy a share of a partnership, and if he decided he wanted out of the partnership he could sell his share at whatever price anyone was willing to pay. The United Netherlands was a small country, and, with a shortage of land, those Dutch with great wealth were more inclined than other Europeans to invest in commerce than to buy large estates.

In the United Netherlands, merchants (an economic class also known as the bourgeoisie) had become more powerful politically than the landed-aristocracy. In the cities, political power was in the hands of wealthy merchants. They governed in what they saw as the interest of commerce. Living principally by trade, they established free trade at home. Gone was the toll collecting by robber barons that had made trade difficult along the Rhine through the Netherlands.

Dutch merchants believed that the state should assure order and allow commerce to function freely.  And the notion of freedom spilled over into a belief in a separation between state and church, the Dutch bourgeoisie valuing freedom from church domination and freedom from dogma, which diminished the political power of Calvinism in the Netherlands.

With many bourgeois families having risen from rags to riches, they believed that common people could rise above their circumstances through their own efforts. They attributed a greater importance to education than had the aristocracy. Businessmen were energetic, inventive and exercised thrift. Banking developed in importance, and by the mid-1600s the city of Amsterdam, with a population of more than 100,000, became the financial center of the Western nations -- replacing banking in Italy. Lending to businessmen was increasing, and lending to governments and kings was declining.

The United Netherlands was emerging as an economic power and as a home of freedom. Tolerance was practical and conducive to a well functioning economy. It was the beginning of what has been described as another golden age. In the United Netherlands, people felt freer than did a lot of people elsewhere. Immigrants came -- Jews, scientists, scholars, artists and French Huguenots attracted by the economic success and by the tolerance. There was scattered and muted hostility toward Jews, but Jews in the United Netherlands enjoyed an acceptance unique in Europe. It was in the United Netherlands that the Catholic scientist Galileo was able to publish his work on mechanics. Earlier, Lutheranism and Catholicism had been suppressed and was perceived to be a threat to social stability, but tolerance had increased, allowing for the growth of Catholicism, Catholics increasing in numbered from roughly 14,000 in 1635 to 30,000 in 1656.

In the United Netherlands, young and unmarried women were free to come and go unaccompanied or unchaperoned, and in public they engaged in conversation almost as freely as men. Wives were less subservient to their husbands than wives elsewhere. Wife beating was treated as a crime. Local citizen organizations, headed by elected officials, patrolled and guarded their section of town, preventing crime. A woman expected her scream to be answered. In the United Netherlands street lamps were common -- not to be installed in the cities of Berlin or Cologne until 1682. In the United Netherlands students were less rowdy than was the custom at German universities. Prostitution took place behind a veneer of respectability, in places where people appeared to be listening to music and not mindful of what was happening upstairs.

Diplomats, scholars, merchants, tourists, soldiers and seamen from more conservative lands were impressed by the orderliness and cleanliness of Dutch cities. They noticed the limited character of ecclesiastical power, the subordination of the military to civilian authority and the achievements in art. This was the era of Rembrandt, who began to paint in 1631.

Some from outside the United Netherlands were hostile to the new liberalism. In the Netherlands it was said, "the hen crows and the cock merely cackles," and wives were said to spend their time gossiping while husbands tended the children. To some conservatives the liberty accorded to Jews, women and servants seemed aberrant or excessive. Foreign aristocrats saw a lack of proper social hierarchy among the Dutch. They were dismayed by ordinary people talking casually with "gentlemen," and they complained of servant girls dressing and behaving in a way that made it difficult to tell which was the servant and which the mistress. Conservatives complained that in the United Netherlands the noble, soldier or even husband was not given the honor or status that was his due.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.