The Dutch Golden Age

For roughly eight decades in the seventeenth century, a small federation of provinces on the North Sea coast became the most commercially advanced society in Europe. The Dutch Golden Age is the name later historians gave to this period, which is conventionally dated from the consolidation of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands in the late 1580s to the French, English and German invasions of 1672. In those years the Dutch built the largest merchant fleet in Europe, founded the first great joint-stock trading companies, created a bank whose money was trusted across the continent, and sustained an artistic and scientific culture of remarkable density. This essay traces how that happened: the political origins of the Republic, its institutions, its trade and finance, its overseas empire, its religious arrangements, its science, philosophy, printing, art and architecture, its struggle with water, its wars, and the long debate about why its pre-eminence did not last.

A Country Without a Precedent

The territory that became the Dutch Republic had no history as an independent state before the sixteenth century. The Low Countries, a patchwork of duchies, counties and lordships between the Ems and the Somme, had been gathered piece by piece under the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century and passed by inheritance to the Habsburgs. Charles V, born in Ghent in 1500, completed the collection by acquiring Friesland, Utrecht, Overijssel, Groningen and Guelders, and in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he declared that the Seventeen Provinces should pass undivided to a single heir. Each province retained its own privileges, its own estates and its own law, and the towns of Holland, Flanders and Brabant were among the richest and most urbanised in Europe.

The southern provinces were then the economic centre. Antwerp on the Scheldt had become, by the 1540s, the chief entrepôt of northern Europe, where Portuguese spices, south German silver and copper, English cloth and Baltic grain changed hands. Holland and Zeeland, in the north, were already distinctive in a different way. Their soils were wet and peaty, their population was unusually concentrated in towns, and their economy depended on shipping, fishing and the carrying trade with the Baltic. Amsterdam was a busy port but not yet a great one. The cultural and financial capital of the Low Countries lay in the south, in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges.

The Republic that emerged after 1579 was therefore a product of rupture rather than of slow growth. It took shape in rebellion against its lawful ruler, it was governed by institutions designed for a very different purpose, and it defined itself for decades through war. Understanding the Golden Age requires beginning with that rebellion.

The Origins of the Revolt

When Charles V abdicated in 1555, the Low Countries passed to his son Philip II, who also inherited Spain, its American empire and the Italian possessions. Philip was raised in Castile, spoke no Dutch and left the Netherlands in 1559, never to return. He governed through his half-sister Margaret of Parma as regent, advised by a small council in which the Burgundian cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle held most influence. The great nobles of the Netherlands, among them William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, and the counts of Egmont and Horne, resented their exclusion from real power.

Three grievances became entangled. The first was fiscal: the provinces were asked to fund Habsburg wars and resisted new taxation that bypassed their estates. The second was constitutional: the nobility and towns believed their ancient privileges were being overridden by a centralising monarchy. The third was religious. Protestant ideas, first Lutheran and Anabaptist and later predominantly Calvinist, had spread widely in the towns, and the heresy placards issued under Charles V and enforced under Philip prescribed death for heretics. Philip regarded the defence of the Catholic faith as a sovereign duty that admitted no compromise, and he also planned a reorganisation of the bishoprics which the nobility saw as an instrument of central control.

In April 1566 several hundred lesser nobles presented a petition to Margaret asking for the suspension of the placards. A courtier reportedly dismissed them as beggars, gueux, and the petitioners adopted the name as a badge. That summer, open-air Calvinist preaching drew large crowds, and in August a wave of iconoclasm, the Beeldenstorm, swept from Flanders northwards. Images, altars and furnishings were destroyed in hundreds of churches. Margaret made temporary concessions, but Philip responded by sending the Duke of Alba with a veteran army in 1567.

Alba established the Council of Troubles, which its opponents called the Council of Blood. It condemned more than a thousand people to death, including Egmont and Horne, who were beheaded in Brussels in June 1568. William of Orange had withdrawn to his family lands in Germany and was condemned in absence. Alba also proposed a permanent sales tax, the Tenth Penny, on the Castilian model, which alienated even loyal Catholic merchants. Orange’s attempted invasions in 1568 failed. The battle of Heiligerlee in May 1568, a small rebel victory in which Orange’s brother Adolf was killed, is often taken as the opening of what Dutch historiography calls the Eighty Years’ War, though the fighting was intermittent and its character changed many times.

The Sea Beggars and the Holland Revolt

The decisive turn came from the sea. Privateers holding commissions from Orange, known as the Sea Beggars, had been operating from English ports until Elizabeth I expelled them in early 1572. On 1 April 1572 they seized the small port of Brielle at the mouth of the Maas. Within months many towns of Holland and Zeeland had declared for Orange, sometimes through internal coups by Calvinist minorities, sometimes through negotiation. In July 1572 the States of Holland met at Dordrecht without royal summons and recognised Orange as the king’s stadtholder, maintaining the legal fiction that they were resisting the king’s evil ministers rather than the king himself.

The Spanish response was severe. Mechelen, Zutphen and Naarden were sacked in 1572, and Haarlem fell in July 1573 after a seven-month siege. The tide turned at Alkmaar, which held out in 1573, and at Leiden, besieged from 1573 to 1574 and relieved in October 1574 when the dykes were cut and a rebel fleet sailed across the flooded fields. The States of Holland marked the relief by founding a university at Leiden in 1575, the first in the northern Netherlands. The episode established a pattern that would recur: the rebels used water as a weapon, and they treated learning as an expression of civic and Protestant identity.

Philip’s finances were overstretched by war with the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, and in 1575 the Spanish crown suspended payments to its bankers. Unpaid soldiers mutinied, and in November 1576 they sacked Antwerp in what became known as the Spanish Fury, killing several thousand people. Shock at the sack brought all seventeen provinces together in the Pacification of Ghent, signed that month, which aimed to expel the Spanish troops and suspend the heresy placards. The unity was short-lived. Religious tension between Catholic and Calvinist factions, especially in Flanders and Brabant where Calvinist regimes took power in Ghent and other cities, divided the coalition, and the new governor-general, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, proved a gifted soldier and negotiator.

Arras and Utrecht

In January 1579 two rival unions were formed within weeks of each other. The Union of Arras, signed by the Walloon provinces of Artois and Hainaut and the town of Douai, reconciled its members with Philip on condition that foreign troops be withdrawn and Catholicism upheld. The Union of Utrecht, concluded on 23 January 1579, bound Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, the Ommelanden of Groningen and Guelders in a defensive alliance, later joined by Friesland, Overijssel, and for a time by cities in Flanders and Brabant such as Ghent, Antwerp and Breda.

The Union of Utrecht was not conceived as a constitution. It was a treaty of alliance between sovereign provinces, providing for common defence, common foreign policy and common taxation for war. Its article thirteen allowed each province to regulate religion as it saw fit, but added that no one should be persecuted or examined for their religion, a clause that became the legal foundation of the Republic’s distinctive form of toleration. Because it was never replaced by a fuller constitutional settlement, the Union remained the Republic’s basic law until 1795, and many of the Republic’s later political conflicts concerned how its ambiguous terms should be read.

In 1581 the States General formally renounced their allegiance to Philip through the Act of Abjuration, the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe. Its argument was that a prince who oppressed his subjects and violated their privileges ceased to be a prince and could be lawfully replaced. The rebels did not at first imagine governing without a monarch. They offered sovereignty to the Duke of Anjou, brother of the French king, whose incompetence and attempted seizure of Antwerp in 1583 discredited the arrangement. William of Orange was assassinated in Delft on 10 July 1584 by Balthasar Gérard, a Catholic Burgundian who claimed the reward Philip had offered. The States then offered sovereignty to Henry III of France, who declined, and to Elizabeth I, who also declined but agreed by the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585 to send troops under Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, as governor-general. Leicester’s attempts to impose central control and to ally with radical Calvinists against the Holland regents failed, and he left in 1587.

Only after these failures did the provinces accept, almost by default, that sovereignty resided in their own estates. The jurist François Vranck articulated this view in a deduction for the States of Holland in 1587, arguing that the States had always held sovereignty on behalf of the people they represented. From 1588 the States General no longer sought a foreign sovereign. That year, the year of the Spanish Armada, is commonly taken as the founding date of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, and the starting point of the Golden Age.

The Institutions of the Republic

The Republic was a federation of seven sovereign provinces: Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen with the Ommelanden. Drenthe had its own estates but no vote, and the conquered southern territories, the Generality Lands in northern Brabant, Flanders and Limburg, were governed directly by the States General without representation. Each province was governed by its own States, an assembly whose composition differed from province to province. In Holland the States consisted of eighteen voting towns and a single vote for the nobility, so that political power lay overwhelmingly with the urban patriciate. In landward provinces such as Guelders and Overijssel the nobility held greater weight.

The States General, meeting permanently in The Hague from 1593, was an assembly of delegations from the provincial States, each province holding one vote. It conducted foreign policy, made war and peace, directed the army and the Generality Lands, and apportioned taxes. It was not a parliament in the modern sense. Delegates were bound by instructions from their provinces and had to refer back on important questions, and major decisions in principle required unanimity. In practice the system worked because Holland paid the largest share of common expenditure, generally around 58 per cent under the quota system, and its leadership could usually bring others along through persuasion, patronage or pressure.

The chief official of the States of Holland was the Land’s Advocate, later called the Grand Pensionary, raadpensionaris. He was a salaried lawyer who managed business in the States, led Holland’s delegation to the States General and conducted much of the Republic’s diplomatic correspondence. Under capable holders of the office, such as Johan van Oldenbarnevelt from 1586 to 1618 and Johan de Witt from 1653 to 1672, the Grand Pensionary was in effect the leading minister of the whole Republic, although he held no formal federal authority.

Alongside these civilian bodies stood the stadtholder. Under the Habsburgs the stadtholder had been the king’s lieutenant in a province. After the abjuration the office survived, now appointed by the provincial States rather than by a prince. Stadtholders commanded the army and navy as captain-general and admiral-general, appointed town magistrates in several provinces from lists drawn up by the towns, and arbitrated disputes. The office was almost always held by members of the house of Orange-Nassau: in Holland and Zeeland by William’s son Maurice, and later by Frederick Henry, William II and William III; in Friesland and often Groningen by a cadet branch descended from William’s brother John. The princes of Orange enjoyed prestige that no regent could match, as sovereign princes of a small territory in southern France, as the heirs of the founder of the Republic and as the focus of popular loyalty. The tension between stadtholder and States, and between the Orangist and States parties, ran through the whole of Dutch political history in this period.

The Regents

Day-to-day government in the towns lay with the regents, the patrician families who filled the town councils, the vroedschappen, and the offices of burgomaster, alderman and treasurer. In Amsterdam the council of thirty-six members served for life and filled its own vacancies by co-optation, and the four burgomasters were chosen annually from among a small circle. Over the century these families grew more distinct from active commerce. Many first-generation regents were merchants; by the later seventeenth century many lived on investments in public debt, land and company shares, and held office as a family vocation. Contemporaries spoke of contracts of correspondence, informal agreements by which families divided offices among themselves.

The regents justified their position through an ideal of public service and through their claim to represent the commonwealth. They did not regard themselves as democrats, and the political thought of the age generally considered rule by a qualified few to be natural and prudent. Citizens without office had other channels of participation: civic militias, guilds, neighbourhood associations, the consistories of the Reformed Church and the large pamphlet literature that accompanied every political crisis. In times of tension, especially in 1618, 1650, 1672 and 1747, popular agitation could shake or overturn town governments, and these episodes usually worked in favour of the house of Orange.

Foreign observers often found the system baffling. The English diplomat Sir William Temple, ambassador at The Hague in the late 1660s, wrote in his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, published in 1673, that the Republic was not properly a commonwealth but a confederacy of seven sovereign provinces, each itself a confederacy of towns. He nonetheless admired its order, its credit and the security of property it provided. The system was slow, but it was capable of extracting very large revenues by consent, and it gave the commercial towns a decisive voice in policy.

The Fall of Antwerp

While the northern provinces were consolidating, the Duke of Parma was reconquering the south. Between 1579 and 1585 he took Maastricht, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent and Brussels by a combination of sieges and negotiated surrenders. Antwerp, the greatest prize, was cut off by a fortified bridge of boats across the Scheldt, completed in early 1585, which defeated attempts at relief, including an attack with fireships packed with explosives designed by the Italian engineer Federigo Giambelli. The city surrendered on 17 August 1585.

The terms of the fall of Antwerp were relatively lenient. Protestants were given four years to settle their affairs and leave or convert. Many left, and they were followed by others from the southern towns. Estimates vary, but historians generally put the emigration from the southern Netherlands in the decades around 1585 at somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people, a large share of whom settled in Holland and Zeeland. Antwerp’s population fell from around 100,000 in the 1560s to perhaps half that figure by 1589.

The rebel fleet then closed the Scheldt, controlling the estuary from Zeeland. Ships bound for Antwerp were required to unload at Zeeland ports or pay heavy duties, and the closure was maintained, with interruptions, until 1795 and formally confirmed in 1648. Antwerp remained an important centre of luxury manufacture, printing and painting, the home of Rubens and the Plantin press, but its role as the commercial hub of northern Europe passed northwards.

The Rise of Amsterdam

Amsterdam had come late to the revolt. It remained loyal to the king until 1578, when a change of regime, the Alteration, replaced the Catholic magistrates with supporters of Orange. That delay proved useful: the city had escaped siege and sack, and it was well placed to absorb the merchants, capital and skills that left the south after 1585. Southern immigrants brought commercial contacts with Italy, Portugal and the Levant, expertise in finance and insurance, and industrial techniques in textiles, sugar refining, diamond cutting and printing. In 1609 a quarter or more of the large depositors in the new Exchange Bank were of southern origin.

The city’s population grew from about 30,000 in 1570 to around 105,000 by 1622 and roughly 200,000 by the 1670s, making it one of the largest cities in Europe after London, Paris and Naples. Other towns of Holland grew as well. Leiden became a major centre of textile manufacture, its population rising to over 60,000 by the 1660s on the basis of light woollen cloths known as the new draperies, introduced largely by Flemish immigrants. Haarlem specialised in linen bleaching and brewing; Delft in beer and later faience; Rotterdam in trade with England and France. By the middle of the seventeenth century more than half the population of Holland lived in towns, a level of urbanisation without parallel in Europe.

Amsterdam’s advantages were partly geographical. It lay at the junction of the IJ, which led to the Zuiderzee and the North Sea, and the inland waterways of Holland. Its harbour was shallow and required ships to cross the Pampus shoal, a problem later partially solved by ship camels, floating lifting devices introduced in the 1690s. But geography alone does not explain its success. Amsterdam combined concentration of market information, low transaction costs, legal security and a willingness to accept newcomers of many origins, and these features reinforced one another as the volume of trade grew.

Maurice, the Army and the Ten Years

After the death of William of Orange, military leadership passed to his son Maurice of Nassau, appointed stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland in 1585, and to his cousin William Louis of Nassau, stadtholder of Friesland. Together with Oldenbarnevelt, who managed finance and diplomacy, they transformed the Republic’s military position. Between 1590 and 1600, a period remembered as the Ten Years, Maurice captured Breda, Zutphen, Deventer, Nijmegen, Steenwijk, Coevorden, Geertruidenberg and Groningen, securing the eastern and northern frontiers.

Maurice and William Louis were interested in classical military writers, particularly Aelian and Vegetius, and they introduced reforms that later historians treated as a model for European armies. Troops were organised in smaller units, drilled systematically with standardised movements, paid regularly and employed in digging and siegework. William Louis proposed the countermarch, by which ranks of musketeers fired in succession and retired to reload, sustaining continuous fire. The engraver Jacob de Gheyn published an illustrated drill manual, Wapenhandelinghe, in 1607, which was translated and copied across Europe. Maurice also engaged the mathematician Simon Stevin as an adviser on fortification and founded an engineering school at Leiden in 1600, where instruction was given in Dutch rather than Latin.

The Republic’s armies remained largely professional and multinational, including English, Scottish, French and German regiments. The financing of this force, paid for mainly by excise taxes on consumption and by loans raised within the provinces, was one of the Republic’s most significant achievements. In the field the most celebrated engagement was the battle of Nieuwpoort in July 1600, a costly victory in Flanders that achieved little strategically. The siege of Ostend, which lasted from 1601 to 1604 and ended with the town’s capitulation to the Spanish under Ambrogio Spinola, showed the limits of each side’s capacity.

The Twelve Years’ Truce

By 1607 both sides were exhausted. Spain’s finances were again under strain, and the Republic’s merchants were divided between those who wanted peace to reduce taxation and those, particularly in Zeeland and among the founders of the new East India Company, who feared that peace would restrict expansion overseas. Oldenbarnevelt favoured an agreement. Maurice and much of the Reformed clergy were opposed, suspecting that peace would weaken the Protestant cause and the military establishment.

The resulting Twelve Years’ Truce, signed at Antwerp on 9 April 1609, was a compromise. It was a truce rather than a peace, but the Spanish king’s representatives agreed to treat with the United Provinces as free states over which they made no claims, a formula that amounted to de facto recognition. The question of Dutch trade in the East and West Indies was left vague in the text. During the truce the Republic’s trade expanded rapidly, especially with the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, which had previously been subject to embargoes.

Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants

The truce years were dominated internally by a theological dispute that became a political crisis. At Leiden, two professors of theology disagreed over predestination. Jacobus Arminius, appointed in 1603, argued that God’s decree of election took account of foreseen faith and that grace could be resisted; Franciscus Gomarus defended the stricter Calvinist position that election and reprobation were unconditional decrees preceding any human act. After Arminius died in 1609, his followers presented a Remonstrance to the States of Holland in 1610 setting out their views in five articles. Their opponents replied with a Counter-Remonstrance in 1611.

The issue was not only doctrinal. The Remonstrants held that the civil authorities had the right to oversee the church and to prevent schism by imposing moderation, a view congenial to Oldenbarnevelt and many Holland regents who wished to keep the clergy subordinate to the States. The Counter-Remonstrants argued that doctrine was for a church synod to decide and sought a national synod to settle it. Popular opinion in many towns, and in the refugee congregations from the south, was strongly Counter-Remonstrant. The dispute also mapped onto the rivalry between Oldenbarnevelt and Maurice, and onto questions of provincial sovereignty, since Holland insisted that religion was a provincial matter under the Union of Utrecht.

In 1617 Holland authorised its towns to raise local troops, the waardgelders, to maintain order, a step Maurice regarded as a challenge to his authority as captain-general. In 1618 he moved against the Holland towns, replaced magistrates in several of them, disbanded the waardgelders and, with the authorisation of the States General, arrested Oldenbarnevelt, the Leiden pensionary Rombout Hogerbeets and the Rotterdam pensionary Hugo Grotius. Oldenbarnevelt was tried by a special court on charges that included subverting the Union and was beheaded in The Hague on 13 May 1619, at the age of seventy-one. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment in Loevestein castle, from which he escaped in 1621 hidden in a chest of books.

The Synod of Dort

The national synod demanded by the Counter-Remonstrants met at Dordrecht from November 1618 to May 1619. The Synod of Dort included delegates from the Dutch provincial churches and from Reformed churches abroad, including England, Scotland, the Palatinate, Hesse, Switzerland and other territories; French delegates were prevented from attending by their king. Remonstrant theologians, led by Simon Episcopius, were summoned to appear before it but were treated as defendants rather than participants, and after disputes over procedure they were expelled.

The synod adopted the Canons of Dort, a statement of doctrine on five points that later English-speaking writers summarised under the acronym TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and the perseverance of the saints. It also confirmed the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism as the doctrinal standards of the Reformed Church, and commissioned a new Dutch translation of the Bible from the original languages. That translation, the Statenvertaling or States Bible, was published in 1637 and became a foundation of the standard written Dutch language, in a role comparable to that of the Authorised Version in English.

Around two hundred Remonstrant ministers were deprived of their posts, and many were exiled. The Remonstrants organised themselves as a separate Remonstrant Brotherhood in Antwerp in 1619, and after Maurice’s death in 1625 they were gradually tolerated in the Republic, opening a church in Amsterdam and a seminary there in 1634. Episcopius and later teachers at the seminary developed a theology that emphasised reason, moral practice and toleration, and the seminary became an important centre of learning in its own right.

Frederick Henry and the Road to Münster

The truce expired in April 1621, and war with Spain resumed in the wider context of the Thirty Years’ War, which had begun in Bohemia in 1618. Spinola besieged and took Breda in 1625, a success celebrated in Velázquez’s painting The Surrender of Breda. Maurice died in April that year and was succeeded as stadtholder by his half-brother Frederick Henry, the youngest son of William of Orange.

Frederick Henry was a more flexible politician than Maurice and a gifted commander of siege warfare. He took Groenlo in 1627 and, in 1629, the fortress town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch after a siege in which the surrounding marshes were drained by a ring of dykes and pumps. In 1632 he captured Venlo, Roermond and Maastricht along the Maas, and in 1637 he retook Breda. In the same period the Dutch navy won important victories at sea. In 1628 Piet Heyn, commanding a fleet of the West India Company, captured the Spanish silver fleet in the bay of Matanzas on the coast of Cuba, seizing bullion and goods worth around eleven million guilders, the only time an entire treasure fleet was taken. In October 1639 Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp destroyed a large Spanish fleet carrying troops to Flanders in the battle of the Downs, fought in English waters off the coast of Kent.

Frederick Henry also cultivated a princely court in The Hague. He and his wife Amalia van Solms built or remodelled palaces at Honselaarsdijk, Rijswijk and the Huis ten Bosch, commissioned paintings from Flemish and Dutch artists, and arranged the marriage of their son William to Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I of England, in 1641. This dynastic ambition worried many regents, who saw in the court a potential monarchy.

From the late 1630s the States of Holland pressed for peace. France, the Republic’s ally against Spain since 1635, was growing powerful and seemed a more dangerous neighbour than an exhausted Spain. Negotiations at the general European peace congress in Westphalia began in the mid-1640s, and the Dutch delegation dealt separately with Spain at Münster. Frederick Henry died in March 1647, before the treaty was concluded.

The Peace of Münster was signed on 30 January 1648 and ratified at a ceremony in Münster on 15 May 1648, which Gerard ter Borch recorded in a small group portrait of the delegates swearing the oath. Spain recognised the United Provinces as free and sovereign states. The Republic kept its conquests in Brabant, Flanders and Limburg, the closure of the Scheldt was confirmed, and Dutch trade in the East and West Indies was accepted within the areas the Dutch then held. Zeeland and Utrecht opposed the treaty, and Zeeland refused to ratify, but it was concluded nonetheless. The Eighty Years’ War, counted from 1568, was over.

The Mother Trade

Behind the political and military story lay an economy whose foundations predated the revolt. The Dutch themselves called the Baltic trade the moedernegotie, the mother trade, because so much else depended on it. Holland’s towns could not feed themselves from local agriculture, which had shifted from grain to dairy and cattle farming as the peat soils subsided. They imported rye and wheat from Poland and Prussia through Danzig and Königsberg, timber, pitch and tar from Norway and the eastern Baltic, and iron and copper from Sweden. In return they carried herring, salt, wine, cloth and colonial goods eastwards.

The Danish Sound toll registers, which recorded ships passing between the North Sea and the Baltic, show the scale of Dutch dominance. In many years of the early seventeenth century Dutch ships accounted for well over half of all passages, and frequently more than two thirds. Amsterdam became the central grain market of western Europe, storing large stocks in its warehouses and re-exporting grain to the Iberian peninsula, Italy and France when harvests there failed. The ability to hold stocks and respond to scarcity elsewhere gave Amsterdam merchants both profit and political leverage.

This trade was continuous with the older commerce of the Hanseatic towns, which had dominated the Baltic in the late Middle Ages. Dutch shippers had competed with the Hanse since the fifteenth century, and by the late sixteenth century they had overtaken it. The difference lay less in any single invention than in an accumulation of advantages: cheaper ships, lower freight rates, larger capital, better market information and a political authority that consistently treated commercial interests as matters of state.

The Fluyt

The most famous single instrument of Dutch shipping was the fluyt, a cargo ship first built at Hoorn around 1595. It had a long, narrow hull with a rounded stern, a flat bottom and a pronounced tumblehome, so that the deck was considerably narrower than the hold. The design maximised cargo space, allowed passage through shallow waters and reduced tolls in the Sound, which were calculated in part on deck width. The fluyt carried little or no armament, which kept it light, and its rigging was simplified with blocks and tackles so that it could be handled by a much smaller crew than comparable ships of other nations. An English observer of the period estimated that a Dutch fluyt of a given size could be sailed with roughly half the crew of an English merchant ship.

Construction costs were lowered by standardised designs and by the use of wind-powered sawmills. The Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon of Uitgeest patented a wind-driven sawmill with a crankshaft in 1594, and by the middle of the seventeenth century the Zaan district north of Amsterdam had hundreds of industrial windmills sawing timber, pressing oil, grinding pigments and making paper. Shipyards along the Zaan and in Amsterdam produced vessels in large numbers, partly to standard patterns, and sold them to foreign buyers as well as Dutch owners.

Shipping was financed through partnerships in which shares in a vessel, often sixteenths, thirty-seconds or smaller fractions, were held by many investors, including people of modest means. This partenrederij system spread risk and drew capital from a wide section of urban society. Marine insurance was available in Amsterdam from the late sixteenth century, and a chamber of insurance was established in 1598 to register policies and settle disputes. Together these arrangements made Dutch freight rates the lowest in Europe, and Dutch ships carried not only Dutch goods but the goods of other nations between foreign ports.

The Great Fishery

The herring fishery was the other pillar of Holland’s early prosperity. Herring shoals moved through the North Sea between June and the winter, and the Dutch exploited them with the herring buss, a broad, deep vessel of about seventy to a hundred tons that carried a crew of around fifteen and could stay at sea for weeks. The fish were gutted, salted and packed in barrels on board, a process that allowed the busses to follow the shoals rather than return to port daily. The method of gutting, which left part of the pancreas in place to aid curing, was traditionally attributed to a fourteenth-century Zeelander named Willem Beukelszoon, although the attribution is uncertain.

The fishery was tightly regulated by the College of the Great Fishery, which set the opening date of the season, standards for salting and barrelling, and inspection rules. Dutch herring therefore had a reputation for consistent quality and fetched good prices in the Baltic and elsewhere. At its height in the early seventeenth century, the fleet numbered several hundred busses, and estimates of the people dependent on fishing, salting, barrel-making, net-making and the salt trade run into the tens of thousands. Contemporaries spoke of Amsterdam as built on herring bones, and the fishery was a recurrent source of friction with England and Scotland, whose coasts the busses worked. Grotius’s treatise Mare Liberum, discussed below, was partly read in England as a defence of Dutch fishing rights, and the English jurist John Selden responded with Mare Clausum in 1635.

Industries of the Republic

Trade fed a range of processing industries. Imported raw materials were refined, finished and re-exported: sugar from Brazil and the Caribbean was refined in Amsterdam, which had dozens of refineries by the mid-century; tobacco was blended and cut; salt from Portugal and France was refined; whale oil from the Arctic grounds near Spitsbergen was boiled down; diamonds were cut; silk was thrown and woven. Leiden’s textile output reached its peak in the 1660s. Delft developed a faience industry imitating Chinese porcelain after imports were disrupted by the fall of the Ming dynasty. Haarlem’s bleacheries treated linen sent from Germany and Flanders, and its breweries supplied much of Holland.

The Dutch historian Jan de Vries and the economic historian Ad van der Woude, in The First Modern Economy (1997), argued that the Republic of this period displayed the features of a modern economy: market-oriented agriculture, high labour productivity, specialised industry, a dense transport network, sophisticated financial markets and a state that protected property and enforced contracts. Inland, a system of towed barges, the trekschuiten, ran on dedicated canals between the major towns on regular timetables from the 1630s onwards, offering passenger services that were reliable enough to plan journeys by the hour. Wages in Holland were among the highest in Europe, and a large share of the population was literate and numerate.

This prosperity was not evenly distributed. The land provinces of the east were poorer, and within Holland’s towns there were sharp differences between wealthy merchants, an extensive middling group of shopkeepers and craftsmen, and a large population of labourers, sailors and the poor. Wages for many workers were held back in the later century by the high excise taxes that fell on bread, beer, peat and other necessities. Poor relief was organised through the churches and the towns, with orphanages, almshouses, hospitals and workhouses, and Amsterdam’s institutions, including the Rasphuis house of correction founded in 1596, were visited and admired by foreign travellers.

The Arctic and the Whale Fishery

Dutch merchants also sought a northern route to Asia that would avoid both the Portuguese and the long passage around Africa. Willem Barentsz, a navigator from Terschelling, led three voyages to the northeast between 1594 and 1596. On the third, the expedition sighted Bear Island and Spitsbergen, and its ship was trapped in the ice off the northeastern coast of Novaya Zemlya. The crew built a shelter from driftwood and ship’s timbers, the Behouden Huys, and spent the winter of 1596 to 1597 there, the first Europeans known to survive an Arctic winter at such a latitude. Barentsz died during the return journey in open boats in June 1597; twelve of the crew reached Kola and returned home. The account of the voyage by Gerrit de Veer, published in 1598, was widely translated. In 1871 a Norwegian captain found the remains of the shelter, including books, instruments and utensils, which are now in the Rijksmuseum.

Barentsz’s discovery of Spitsbergen opened a different trade. From 1614 the Noordsche Compagnie, the Northern Company, held a monopoly of Dutch whaling in the waters around Spitsbergen and Jan Mayen. The company established a summer station on Amsterdam Island off northwest Spitsbergen, later called Smeerenburg, blubber town, where whale blubber was boiled down into oil in large copper cauldrons. Whale oil was used for lamps, soap and the treatment of wool and leather, and baleen for corsets and other products. After the company’s monopoly lapsed in 1642, whaling was opened to all, and as the whales near the coast were depleted, the ships followed them into the open sea and the ice, processing the blubber at home in the Zaan district and elsewhere. By the 1680s the Dutch whaling fleet numbered over two hundred ships a year.

The Southern Ocean and Australia

VOC ships made the first recorded European contacts with Australia. In 1606 Willem Janszoon in the Duyfken charted part of the western coast of Cape York Peninsula, believing it to be an extension of New Guinea. From 1611 the company adopted the route devised by Hendrik Brouwer, by which ships sailed east from the Cape of Good Hope in the strong westerly winds of the roaring forties before turning north towards Java, shortening the voyage considerably. Ships that misjudged their longitude reached the western coast of Australia. In 1616 Dirk Hartog in the Eendracht landed on an island in Shark Bay and left a pewter plate nailed to a post recording the visit; it is now in the Rijksmuseum.

Several company ships were wrecked on the coast. The most notorious case was the Batavia, which struck a reef in the Houtman Abrolhos in June 1629 on its maiden voyage. While the commander, Francisco Pelsaert, sailed to Batavia for help, a junior merchant, Jeronimus Cornelisz, seized control of the survivors on the islands and organised the killing of more than a hundred people. Pelsaert returned with a rescue ship, and Cornelisz and several of his followers were tried and executed.

In 1642 Governor-General Anthony van Diemen sent Abel Janszoon Tasman with two ships to explore the southern ocean. Tasman reached the island he named Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, in November 1642, and in December sighted the west coast of New Zealand, where a confrontation with Māori in Golden Bay left four of his men dead. He returned to Batavia by way of Tonga and Fiji, having sailed around Australia without seeing it. On a second voyage in 1644 he charted the northern coast of Australia. The company named the continent New Holland, but it found no commercial opportunities there and did not pursue settlement.

The Navy and Its Admirals

The Republic’s navy was administered by five admiralty colleges: Amsterdam, the Maas at Rotterdam, the Noorderkwartier at Hoorn and Enkhuizen, Zeeland at Middelburg, and Friesland at Harlingen. Each was funded largely from customs duties, the convooien en licenten, levied on imports and exports, and each built its own ships and appointed its own officers. The arrangement often produced friction, but it allowed the major ports to direct naval resources towards protecting their own trade. Convoys protected merchant fleets against privateers from Dunkirk, the base of Spanish and later French raiders who took large numbers of Dutch fishing and merchant vessels, and against corsairs from North Africa.

The Republic produced several of the most capable naval commanders of the century. Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp, who had been captured as a boy by English pirates and served as a cabin boy and seaman, rose to lieutenant-admiral of Holland in 1637 and won the battle of the Downs. Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter, born in Vlissingen in 1607, the son of a beer porter, went to sea at eleven, served as a merchant captain and privateer, and became lieutenant-admiral of Holland in 1665. He was admired by contemporaries for his skill, his modesty and his care for his crews, and he directed the Dutch fleet in the Four Days’ Battle, the Raid on the Medway and the defensive battles of 1672 and 1673. He died of wounds received fighting the French off Sicily in April 1676 and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. Cornelis Tromp, Maarten’s son, was a brave but quarrelsome commander whose disputes with de Ruyter reflected the political divisions between Orangists and the States party.

Naval tactics evolved rapidly during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Fleets came to fight in a line of battle, with ships following one another in a single column to bring their broadsides to bear, a formation that required larger, more heavily gunned warships and favoured navies built specifically for war. The Dutch, constrained by the shallow waters of their coasts, built ships of shallower draught than the English, which limited their size but allowed them to retreat into waters where deeper English ships could not follow.

The Mediterranean and the Levant

The Dutch reached the Mediterranean in force in the 1590s, when harvest failures in Italy created demand for Baltic grain that Dutch shippers were well placed to supply. Dutch ships carried grain to Livorno, Genoa, Venice and Naples and returned with Italian silk, olive oil, wine, alum and other goods. Livorno, a free port developed by the grand dukes of Tuscany, became the main Dutch base in Italy, and a Dutch merchant community settled there alongside English and Sephardic traders. During the Twelve Years’ Truce Dutch merchants also traded openly with Spain and Portugal, exchanging Baltic grain, naval stores and textiles for salt, wool, wine, fruit and the silver of the Spanish American fleets.

In 1612 the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I granted the Republic capitulations, a treaty of privileges that allowed Dutch merchants to trade throughout the empire under their own consuls, and Cornelis Haga became the first Dutch ambassador in Constantinople. Dutch merchants established themselves at Aleppo, Smyrna and other ports of the Levant, exporting textiles, particularly Leiden’s lakens, and silver coin, and importing raw silk, mohair yarn, cotton and spices. In 1625 the States General created the Directorate of Levant Trade in Amsterdam to supervise the trade, regulate convoys and fund consulates. The Dutch lion dollar, the leeuwendaalder, struck for export, circulated so widely in the Levant that it became known there as the aslanı, from the Turkish word for lion. Dutch commerce in the Mediterranean suffered from attacks by corsairs from Algiers, Tunis and Salé, against which the Republic sent naval squadrons, negotiated treaties and ransomed captive sailors.

The Voyages to the East

Until the 1590s, Dutch merchants obtained Asian spices mainly through Lisbon, where the Portuguese crown controlled the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. Philip II became king of Portugal in 1580, and Dutch access to Lisbon became intermittent and politically vulnerable. At the same time, information about the Portuguese routes became available in the north. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a native of Haarlem who had served the archbishop of Goa, published his Itinerario in 1596, which described Portuguese Asia in detail and included sailing directions. Cartographers such as Petrus Plancius, a Flemish minister in Amsterdam, compiled charts from Portuguese sources.

In 1595 a group of Amsterdam merchants financed the first Dutch expedition to the East under Cornelis de Houtman. It reached Banten in western Java in 1596 and returned in 1597 with a small cargo after heavy losses of men. The financial result was modest, but the voyage proved the route was feasible. Within five years, some fifteen fleets had been sent out by competing companies in Amsterdam, Zeeland, Rotterdam and other towns, known as the voorcompagnieën or pre-companies. The second voyage under Jacob van Neck returned in 1599 with a highly profitable cargo of pepper and cloves. Competition among the Dutch companies drove up purchase prices in Asia and lowered selling prices in Europe, and the States General, guided by Oldenbarnevelt, pressed the companies to merge.

The United East India Company

On 20 March 1602 the States General granted a charter to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company, generally known by its initials, VOC. The Dutch East India Company received a monopoly of Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Strait of Magellan for twenty-one years. It was authorised to conclude treaties with Asian rulers, build forts, maintain soldiers and appoint governors, powers that made it an agent of the Republic’s foreign policy and war against Spain and Portugal as well as a trading enterprise.

The VOC was organised in six chambers, located in Amsterdam, Zeeland (Middelburg), Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen, which reflected the former pre-companies. Its overall direction lay with a board of seventeen directors, the Heeren XVII, of whom eight came from Amsterdam, four from Zeeland and one each from the four smaller chambers, with the seventeenth seat rotating among the chambers other than Amsterdam so that Amsterdam could never command a majority alone. The directors, the bewindhebbers, were drawn largely from the regent class and were closely tied to town governments.

The company’s initial capital of about 6.4 million guilders was subscribed by more than a thousand investors in Amsterdam alone, from wealthy merchants to craftsmen and servants. Unlike earlier ventures, which were liquidated after each voyage, the VOC’s capital was committed for the duration of the charter, initially with the expectation of a settlement after ten years. In practice the capital was never repaid, and investors who wished to realise their investment had to sell their shares to others. This permanence created the conditions for a continuous secondary market in shares and made the VOC one of the first permanently capitalised joint-stock companies. Its shareholders had limited liability in practice, though the legal concept was not yet formally defined, and the directors were not obliged to give them detailed accounts, a source of repeated complaint.

The Bourse and the Share Market

Trading in VOC shares began almost immediately, at first in the open air on the Warmoesstraat and on the bridge over the Damrak, where merchants met daily. In 1611 the city completed a purpose-built exchange building, the Beurs designed by Hendrick de Keyser, on the Rokin. It was a rectangular courtyard surrounded by an arcade on columns, modelled in part on the Antwerp exchange and Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange in London, and it was open to merchants for set hours each day. Particular commodities and trades had their assigned pillars, and brokers moved among them.

By the early seventeenth century the Amsterdam market had developed forward contracts, options and short selling in VOC shares. In 1609 the merchant Isaac Le Maire, a former VOC director who had fallen out with the company, organised a syndicate to sell shares short in anticipation of a fall, partly in connection with plans for a rival French company. The directors complained to the States General, which in 1610 issued a decree prohibiting short sales of shares not actually owned, the first known ban of its kind. The ban was repeatedly reissued, which suggests it was not effectively enforced. In 1688 Joseph Penso de la Vega, a Sephardic merchant in Amsterdam, published Confusión de Confusiones, a dialogue in Spanish describing the practices of the exchange, including options, futures, pools and the psychology of traders, which is often cited as the earliest book about stock trading.

VOC dividends were initially irregular and sometimes paid in kind, in pepper, mace or cloves. Over the long run the company paid an average dividend of around 18 per cent a year on the nominal capital between 1602 and 1796, although investors who bought shares at market prices well above par received a much lower effective return. Share prices rose from par in 1602 to several hundred per cent of par by the middle of the century.

The Exchange Bank

Amsterdam’s commercial life was complicated by the profusion of coins in circulation. The Republic had no single mint; each province and several towns struck coin, and foreign coins of varying quality circulated freely. Merchants were often paid in clipped or debased pieces, and money-changers profited from the confusion. In January 1609 the city council established the Wisselbank, the Exchange Bank of Amsterdam, to address this problem.

The Bank of Amsterdam accepted deposits of coin and bullion, valued them by their metal content, and credited depositors with accounts in a unit of account known as bank money. Payments between account holders were made by transfer in the bank’s books, without coin changing hands. A city ordinance required that bills of exchange above a set amount, initially 600 guilders, be paid through the bank, which obliged merchants engaged in international trade to hold accounts there. The bank was guaranteed by the city and was originally meant to hold full reserves against its deposits.

Because bank money was stable and secure, it commanded a premium, the agio, over current coin, usually a few per cent. Merchants across Europe came to settle international bills of exchange in Amsterdam, and the city became the principal clearing centre for payments in northern Europe. From 1683 the bank introduced a receipt system that allowed depositors of bullion to withdraw it within a set period on payment of a small fee, effectively creating a market in bullion and further strengthening Amsterdam’s position. The economists Stephen Quinn and William Roberds have described the bank in this later period as a precursor of central banking, since it managed a fiat-like unit of account and could act to stabilise it. Investigations in the late eighteenth century revealed that the bank had made large secret loans to the VOC and the city, and it was wound up in 1820.

Alongside the Exchange Bank, the city established a lending bank, the Huis van Lening, in 1614 to offer loans against pledges at controlled rates. Public borrowing was organised at the provincial level. The States of Holland issued bonds and life annuities that were widely held by the Republic’s citizens, and interest rates on public debt fell from around 8 per cent at the start of the century to 4 per cent by the 1650s and lower still later. Johan de Witt, who was a capable mathematician, wrote a treatise in 1671 on the valuation of life annuities, Waerdye van Lyf-renten naer Proportie van Los-renten, which used probabilistic reasoning and mortality estimates to show that annuities were being sold too cheaply. The low cost of borrowing allowed the Republic to sustain long wars and was a major source of its strength relative to larger states.

Tulip Mania

The episode of the Golden Age best known outside the Netherlands is the tulip mania of 1636 and 1637. Tulips had been introduced to western Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, and the botanist Carolus Clusius, who became prefect of the Leiden botanical garden in 1593, planted them there and distributed bulbs. Tulips became a prized luxury among collectors, especially the varieties with flamed and feathered petals that were later found to result from a virus spread by aphids. Because these patterns could not be reliably reproduced from seed, and offsets were slow to develop, the rarest varieties commanded very high prices.

From around 1634 trade in bulbs widened beyond specialist collectors. Bulbs were traded during the winter, while still in the ground, by notes promising delivery after lifting in the summer, so that much of the trade consisted of forward contracts. Much of this business took place in taverns, in groups known as colleges, with their own customs. In the winter of 1636 to 1637 prices rose sharply, including for common varieties sold by weight. A single bulb of the variety Viceroy, Viceroij, was reported to have sold for 3,000 to 4,200 guilders, and the most famous variety, Semper Augustus, was reputedly priced at several thousand guilders, sums comparable to the cost of a substantial house. At an auction in Alkmaar on 5 February 1637, held for the benefit of the orphaned children of a tulip grower, a collection of bulbs reportedly fetched around 90,000 guilders in total. Within days, at sessions in Haarlem, buyers failed to appear and prices collapsed.

Because many contracts were forward sales, the collapse left a tangle of disputed obligations. Florists’ representatives met in Amsterdam in late February 1637 and proposed that contracts made before a certain date be honoured, with later ones cancellable on payment of a fraction of the price. The courts were reluctant to enforce what they regarded as gambling debts, and in April 1637 the Court of Holland suspended the matter; in practice many towns, including Haarlem in 1638, allowed buyers to settle by paying a small percentage of the agreed price, often 3.5 per cent.

For a long time the episode was understood through Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in London in 1841, which described a nation-wide frenzy in which people of all ranks sold houses and land and in which ruin followed. Mackay relied heavily on moralising pamphlets published in 1637, notably the dialogues between two characters named Waermondt and Gaergoedt, which were written to condemn the trade. Modern scholarship has substantially revised this account. The economist Peter Garber, in articles from 1989 onwards and in his book Famous First Bubbles (2000), argued that the high prices for rare bulbs were consistent with ordinary pricing of novelty goods, and that the brief spike in common bulb prices in early 1637 was largely a feature of unenforceable contracts traded in taverns. The historian Anne Goldgar, in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), examined notarial archives and court records and found no evidence of widespread bankruptcies, nor of economic damage to the Dutch economy. She identified a relatively small group of buyers, mainly merchants and skilled artisans rather than the poor, and argued that the episode’s real impact lay in the cultural anxiety it provoked about value, trust and the proper basis of worth. The modern consensus regards tulip mania as a real but limited price boom whose broader consequences were exaggerated by later moralists.

The Company in Asia

The VOC’s founding purpose was to obtain spices: pepper from Sumatra, Java and the Malabar coast of India; cloves from the Moluccas, the islands around Ternate, Tidore and Ambon; nutmeg and mace from the small Banda Islands; and cinnamon from Ceylon. These goods were bought in Asia with silver, much of it Spanish American in origin, and with Indian textiles, which were in high demand across the Indonesian archipelago. The company soon learned that intra-Asian trade, carrying Indian cloth to Southeast Asia, Japanese silver and copper to China and India, and Chinese silk and porcelain to Japan and Europe, could be as profitable as the trade to Europe itself.

In its first years the company sought to establish fortified trading posts and to displace the Portuguese, with whom the Republic was at war. In 1605 a VOC fleet took the Portuguese fort on Ambon. The company established factories, the term for trading stations, at Banten, Patani, Hirado and elsewhere, and in 1609 created the office of governor-general to coordinate its affairs in Asia, assisted by a Council of the Indies. The company’s directors in the Netherlands, separated from Asia by a voyage of eight months or more, had to delegate wide discretion to their servants in the East.

Coen and Batavia

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, appointed governor-general in 1617 and serving until 1623 and again from 1627 to 1629, argued that the company could only secure its position by establishing a permanent headquarters under its own sovereignty and by enforcing monopolies on spice production. In May 1619 his forces captured Jayakarta, a port on the north coast of Java under the influence of Banten, and rebuilt it as Batavia. Batavia became the company’s Asian headquarters for nearly two centuries, a walled town laid out on a grid with canals in the Dutch manner, whose population included Dutch officials and soldiers, Chinese traders and craftsmen, Javanese, Balinese and other Asian residents, and a large enslaved population from across the Indian Ocean world. The town withstood two sieges by Sultan Agung of Mataram in 1628 and 1629.

Coen’s policy in the Banda Islands was the most notorious episode of the company’s early history. The Bandanese had sold nutmeg and mace to many buyers and had resisted VOC attempts to enforce exclusive contracts. In 1621 Coen led an expedition that conquered the islands. A large part of the population was killed, died of starvation or disease, was deported to Batavia as slaves or fled to other islands; estimates commonly suggest the population fell from around 15,000 to around a thousand. The company then divided the nutmeg land into plots, perken, run by Dutch planters, the perkeniers, using enslaved labour. Coen defended the conquest as necessary to secure the monopoly and to enforce contracts the Bandanese had concluded, and the directors in the Netherlands approved the outcome, though some expressed unease at its methods. Historians have regarded the episode as a clear illustration of the coercive logic of the monopoly system.

The company applied similar methods to cloves in the Moluccas, where from the 1650s it compelled rulers to destroy clove trees outside Ambon and nearby islands in exchange for annual payments, and enforced the restriction with periodic expeditions, the hongi voyages. Rival European companies were excluded where possible. A notable confrontation came at Ambon in 1623, when the Dutch authorities tried and executed ten English employees of the English East India Company, together with Japanese and Portuguese men, on charges of conspiring to seize the fort. The English regarded the trials, in which confessions had been obtained by torture, as judicial murder, and the incident remained a grievance in English politics for decades, invoked again during the Anglo-Dutch Wars.

Ceylon, India and the Cape

The company progressively displaced the Portuguese from key positions in Asia. It took Malacca in 1641 after a long siege, gaining control of the strait between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula. In Ceylon it allied with the kingdom of Kandy against the Portuguese and, between 1638 and 1658, captured Galle, Negombo, Colombo and Jaffna, taking over the coastal cinnamon-producing districts. On the Malabar coast of India it took Cochin and other Portuguese settlements in the early 1660s. On the Coromandel coast it established trading posts at Pulicat and later Negapatnam to buy cotton textiles, and in Bengal it traded raw silk, saltpetre and cloth.

In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck founded a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope to provide fresh food and water to ships on the long voyage. The settlement was not intended as a colony, but from 1657 the company released some employees as free burghers to farm, and the settlement expanded, with the import of enslaved people from Madagascar, India and the Indonesian archipelago and recurring conflict with the Khoikhoi pastoralists over land and cattle. French Huguenot refugees arrived in 1688. The Cape community that resulted became the origin of the later Afrikaner population.

Formosa and Fort Zeelandia

The VOC sought direct access to Chinese trade, but Ming China did not admit the company to its ports, and Dutch attempts to establish a base by force, including an attack on Portuguese Macao in 1622 and the occupation of the Penghu islands from 1622 to 1624, were unsuccessful. Under an agreement with Ming officials in 1624, the company withdrew from Penghu and moved to the southwest coast of Taiwan, then known to Europeans as Formosa, which lay outside the Ming state’s direct administration. There it built Fort Zeelandia on a sandbar at Tayouan, near present-day Tainan, and later Fort Provintia on the mainland opposite.

From Taiwan the company traded Chinese silk, porcelain and gold, bought from Chinese merchants who sailed across the strait, for Japanese silver and other goods, and it exported deerskins from the island to Japan. It also encouraged migration of Chinese farmers from Fujian to grow rice and sugar, levying taxes on them, and extended its authority over many of the island’s indigenous villages through military expeditions and agreements. Reformed ministers worked among the indigenous population, and missionaries developed a written form of the Siraya language using the Latin alphabet. Chinese settlers rose in revolt in 1652 under Guo Huaiyi, and the rising was suppressed with heavy loss of life.

The fall of the Ming dynasty to the Qing in 1644 transformed the situation. Zheng Chenggong, known to Europeans as Koxinga, the son of a Chinese merchant and a Japanese mother, led Ming loyalist forces on the south China coast. After a failed attack on Nanjing in 1659, he sought a secure base and invaded Taiwan in April 1661. Fort Zeelandia, under the governor Frederick Coyett, was besieged for nine months and surrendered on 1 February 1662. Coyett was later tried in Batavia for the loss and sentenced, though he was eventually released. The historian Tonio Andrade, in Lost Colony (2011), analysed the siege as a significant encounter between Chinese and European military methods, in which Zheng’s forces proved highly effective.

Dejima and Japan

The Dutch first reached Japan in 1600, when the ship De Liefde, the sole surviving vessel of a fleet sent from Rotterdam through the Strait of Magellan, arrived on the coast of Kyushu. Its pilot, the Englishman William Adams, became an adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1609 the VOC received permission to trade and opened a factory at Hirado. During the following decades the Tokugawa shogunate suppressed Christianity, which it regarded as a threat to political order, and restricted contact with foreigners. After the Shimabara rebellion of 1637 to 1638, a peasant and samurai rising with a strong Christian element, the Portuguese were expelled in 1639. The Dutch, whose Protestant faith did not involve missionary activity in Japan and who had assisted the shogunate during the siege of Hara castle with naval gunfire, were permitted to remain.

In 1641 the shogunate required the VOC to move from Hirado to Dejima, a small artificial fan-shaped island in Nagasaki harbour that had been built in 1634 to house the Portuguese. It measured roughly 120 by 75 metres and was connected to the city by a single guarded bridge. The Dutch staff, usually a dozen or so men, were confined there, and their trade was supervised by Japanese officials and interpreters. The head of the factory, the opperhoofd, travelled each year, later every four years, to Edo to present gifts and reports to the shogun. Japanese silver was a major export in the seventeenth century, followed later by copper, and the Dutch imported Chinese silk, Indian textiles, sugar, deerskins and European goods.

For two centuries Dejima remained Japan’s principal window on European learning. Japanese scholars of what came to be called rangaku, Dutch learning, studied Dutch books on medicine, anatomy, astronomy and other subjects. The company’s physicians, notably the German Engelbert Kaempfer in the 1690s and later Carl Peter Thunberg and Philipp Franz von Siebold, collected information about Japan that shaped European knowledge of the country.

The Company’s Character

At its height in the later seventeenth century the VOC was the largest commercial enterprise in the world. It sent around 4,700 ships to Asia over its existence, and in all nearly a million people sailed to Asia in its service, many of them Germans, Scandinavians and others recruited in the Netherlands. Mortality on the voyages and in Asia was very high, and a large share of those who went out never returned. The company’s possessions in Asia were run as a system of trading posts, forts and, in some places, territories, with a hierarchy of governors and councils reporting to Batavia.

The company’s directors and contemporaries understood their enterprise in terms that combined commerce, war and the interests of the Republic. The VOC’s charter made it an instrument of the war against the Iberian powers, and its directors argued that trade in Asia could not be maintained without force. Grotius’s defence of the company’s right to seize a Portuguese ship, discussed below, articulated one version of this outlook. Later critics, both Dutch and foreign, emphasised the violence of the monopoly system, while defenders stressed the company’s role in building the Republic’s wealth. Historians now generally treat the VOC as a hybrid institution, at once a business, a state-like power and a network linking Asian and European economies, and they increasingly study it through the perspectives of the many Asian rulers, traders and labourers who dealt with it.

The West India Company

Proposals for a company to trade and wage war in the Atlantic circulated from the 1590s, promoted particularly by the Antwerp exile Willem Usselincx, who envisaged colonies of settlement. Oldenbarnevelt held the project back during the truce negotiations, but when the truce expired the States General chartered the Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie on 3 June 1621. The Dutch West India Company, or WIC, received a monopoly of Dutch trade with West Africa between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope, and with the Americas, together with the right to make alliances, build forts and maintain forces. It was organised in five chambers, with a governing board of nineteen directors, the Heeren XIX.

From the beginning the WIC was more closely tied to the war with Spain than the VOC. Privateering against Iberian shipping was a central part of its business, and its most celebrated success, Piet Heyn’s capture of the silver fleet in 1628, allowed it to pay a dividend of 50 per cent that year. But its trading revenues were less stable, its military commitments heavier, and its capital harder to raise. It was reorganised in 1674 after financial collapse and continued as a smaller enterprise until 1791.

New Netherland

In 1609 the English navigator Henry Hudson, sailing for the VOC in search of a northern passage to Asia aboard the Halve Maen, explored the river later named after him. Dutch traders followed, and the New Netherland Company held a short monopoly from 1614. Under the WIC, settlers arrived in 1624, and Fort Orange was built near present-day Albany to trade for beaver pelts with the Mohawk and Mahican peoples. In 1626 the director Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from local Lenape people for goods valued at sixty guilders, according to a contemporary letter, an exchange that each side probably understood in different terms with regard to the rights conveyed. The settlement of New Amsterdam grew at its southern tip.

New Netherland developed slowly. The company introduced the patroon system in 1629, granting large estates to investors who brought settlers; only one, Rensselaerswyck near Fort Orange, endured. Relations with neighbouring Native peoples were damaged by Kieft’s War of 1643 to 1645, initiated by the director Willem Kieft. The colony’s population was diverse, including Dutch, Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, English settlers on Long Island and enslaved Africans, and the Jesuit visitor Isaac Jogues reported in 1643 that eighteen languages were spoken there. Petrus Stuyvesant, director-general from 1647, improved administration but quarrelled with the colonists, who sought a greater voice, and he attempted to restrict the settlement of Jews and Quakers; the company’s directors instructed him to allow both, citing the commercial value of toleration and the practice of Amsterdam. In 1654 Stuyvesant conquered New Sweden on the Delaware River.

In August 1664, during a period of tension preceding the Second Anglo-Dutch War, an English fleet sent by James, Duke of York, appeared before New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant, with weak defences and little support from the inhabitants, surrendered on terms that protected property, religion and inheritance customs. The town was renamed New York. The Dutch retook it in 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, naming it New Orange, but returned it to England under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674. Dutch language, churches and family networks persisted in the Hudson valley for generations.

Dutch Brazil

The WIC’s largest Atlantic project was the conquest of Portuguese Brazil, then the world’s leading producer of sugar. A first attempt captured Salvador da Bahia in 1624, but it was retaken by a Spanish and Portuguese fleet in 1625. In 1630 the company took Olinda and Recife in the captaincy of Pernambuco and gradually extended its control along the northeastern coast. From 1637 to 1644 Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen governed Dutch Brazil as governor-general. He built a new town, Mauritsstad, beside Recife, with palaces and gardens, brought scholars and artists, including the painters Frans Post and Albert Eckhout and the naturalists Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf, and allowed a measure of freedom of worship to Catholics and Jews. Piso and Marcgraf’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, published in 1648, was a major work of European natural history on the Americas. Sephardic Jews settled in Recife and established the Kahal Zur Israel synagogue, the first in the Americas.

After Portugal regained independence from Spain in 1640, Portuguese planters in Brazil rose against Dutch rule in 1645. The company’s forces lost two battles at Guararapes in 1648 and 1649 and were gradually confined to Recife, which surrendered in January 1654. The Republic formally renounced its claims in the Treaty of The Hague in 1661 in return for a substantial indemnity and commercial concessions. Many Jews of Recife left; some returned to Amsterdam and others settled in the Caribbean, and a group of twenty-three reached New Amsterdam in 1654, forming the beginning of the Jewish community there.

The Caribbean and Suriname

The Dutch occupied several small Caribbean islands, including Curaçao in 1634, Sint Eustatius in 1636 and part of Sint Maarten. Curaçao and Sint Eustatius became trading entrepôts, dealing with the Spanish, English and French colonies, often in defiance of their mercantilist restrictions. In 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a Zeeland fleet under Abraham Crijnssen captured the English colony of Suriname, and the Treaty of Breda that year confirmed Dutch possession of Suriname while England kept New Netherland. Suriname developed into a plantation colony producing sugar and later coffee.

The Dutch and the Atlantic Slave Trade

The Dutch entered the Atlantic slave trade relatively late. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was some opposition to involvement; a frequently cited anecdote holds that the Middelburg authorities in 1596 freed a cargo of captive Africans brought into the port. The conquest of Brazil changed this. Sugar plantations depended on enslaved African labour, and to supply them the WIC seized Portuguese forts on the West African coast, including Elmina on the Gold Coast in 1637 and Luanda in Angola in 1641, though Luanda was retaken by the Portuguese in 1648. Elmina remained the centre of Dutch activity in West Africa until 1872.

The company also supplied enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies, particularly through Curaçao. In 1662 the Spanish crown granted the asiento, the contract to supply its American colonies with enslaved Africans, to two Genoese merchants, Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelín, who subcontracted much of the supply to the WIC. Estimates based on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database suggest that Dutch carriers transported around half a million to six hundred thousand Africans across the Atlantic over the whole history of the trade, roughly five per cent of the total, the majority after 1660. Enslaved people were bought from African rulers and merchants on the coast in exchange for textiles, metal goods, firearms and other commodities. Mortality during the Middle Passage was high.

Contemporaries in the Republic largely accepted the trade, as did most Europeans of the period. Some Reformed theologians debated whether Christians might hold other Christians in slavery, and the Synod of Dort itself discussed whether baptised enslaved people should be freed, without reaching a decisive conclusion. Within the Republic itself, slavery had no legal standing, and enslaved people brought to the Netherlands could in principle claim their freedom, a principle not consistently applied. The trade was justified in commercial terms, in the language of the law of nations, and by reference to the existing practice of the Iberian powers. The Netherlands abolished the slave trade in 1814 and slavery in its colonies in 1863, and the subject has become a significant field of historical research and public discussion in the Netherlands in recent decades.

The Public Church

The Reformed Church emerged from the revolt as the only church permitted to hold public worship, the publieke kerk. It took over the medieval parish churches, which were stripped of altars, images and side chapels, whitewashed and refitted around the pulpit. Its ministers were paid from public funds and confiscated church property, and town governments exercised considerable influence over appointments. Yet it was never a state church in the sense of the Church of England or the Lutheran churches of Scandinavia. Membership was voluntary and demanding: full members, those admitted to communion, accepted the discipline of the consistory, which could bar people from the Lord’s Supper for drunkenness, quarrelling, sexual misconduct or doctrinal error. Many people attended Reformed sermons without becoming members, a category known as liefhebbers, sympathisers.

Estimates of religious affiliation are necessarily approximate. Around 1600 committed Reformed members were a minority of the population, perhaps a tenth or less. By the middle of the century the Reformed Church had grown considerably, but it is generally thought that only around half the population was affiliated with it, with Catholics forming perhaps a third and the rest Mennonites, Lutherans, Remonstrants, Jews and others. The proportions varied sharply between regions: Holland’s towns had large Reformed majorities, while parts of Utrecht, Guelders, Overijssel and the Generality Lands remained heavily Catholic.

Ministers and consistories frequently pressed the magistrates to suppress other forms of worship, close taverns on Sundays, restrict fairs and theatres and enforce moral discipline. Regents often resisted these demands, partly because they valued civil peace and commerce and partly because they were unwilling to cede authority to the clergy. The resulting balance between a privileged but not all-powerful church and pragmatic magistrates created the characteristic Dutch form of toleration.

Toleration in Practice

Dutch toleration rested on a distinction between freedom of conscience, which the Union of Utrecht guaranteed, and freedom of public worship, which it did not. People could not be persecuted for their beliefs, but non-Reformed worship was confined to private spaces. The historian Benjamin Kaplan has used the term schuilkerken, hidden or clandestine churches, for the meeting places of Catholics and other dissenters, which were often fully equipped churches built inside houses or behind street facades. The Amsterdam church now known as Our Lord in the Attic, created in the 1660s in the upper storeys of a merchant’s house on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, is a surviving example. The authorities knew of such churches and allowed them as long as they remained discreet from the street, and Catholics frequently paid fees, described by contemporaries as recognition money, to local officials to secure this forbearance.

Catholics were excluded from public office and faced periodic restrictions, especially in wartime when they were suspected of sympathy with Spain. Priests operated under the Holland Mission, overseen by an apostolic vicar responsible directly to Rome, since the medieval bishoprics had lapsed. Lay religious women known as klopjes played a significant role in sustaining Catholic communities. Mennonites, heirs to the Anabaptist movement, were admitted to worship relatively freely from the 1570s and became prominent in commerce and shipping, though they were divided among themselves into several branches. Lutherans, many of them German or Scandinavian immigrants, built substantial churches in Amsterdam, including a domed round church on the Singel completed in 1671.

Contemporaries explained this toleration in several ways. Some argued from principle, citing the impossibility of compelling conscience, a theme developed by the Holland humanist Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert in the sixteenth century. Others argued from prudence and commerce, holding that persecution drove away useful inhabitants and that diverse communities enriched the towns. Many Reformed ministers, by contrast, regarded toleration as a regrettable concession. The arrangement was therefore always contested, and its extent depended on local politics.

The Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam

The first Jews to settle in Amsterdam in the 1590s were Portuguese conversos, descendants of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal in 1497, many of whom had preserved Jewish identity in secret and were subject to the Inquisition. Arriving as Portuguese merchants, often via Antwerp, they gradually returned to open Judaism. The first congregations, Beth Jacob and Neve Shalom, formed in the early years of the seventeenth century, and a third, Beth Israel, in 1618. Rabbis were brought from Venice and Salonica, and the communities merged in 1639 into the single congregation Talmud Torah.

The legal position of Jews was settled pragmatically. In 1619 the States of Holland left it to each town to decide whether to admit Jews, and Amsterdam allowed them to live and worship openly, with restrictions on entry into most guilds and on marriage with Christians. Grotius drafted a set of proposed regulations, the Remonstrantie, in 1615, which argued for admission under conditions. Jews were not confined to a ghetto, although many lived in the area around the Breestraat and the Vlooienburg island. They were prominent in the Iberian, Brazilian and Caribbean trades, in sugar refining, tobacco, diamond cutting and printing, and, by the later century, in trading VOC shares. A small number of wealthy families, such as the Curiel, Pinto and Belmonte families, rose to great prominence, while many community members were poor.

The Portuguese community built its great synagogue, the Esnoga, designed by Elias Bouman and inaugurated in 1675. Its size and grandeur, which visitors compared with the Temple of Solomon, attested to the community’s confidence. From the 1630s Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and, after the Chmielnicki uprising of 1648 to 1649 and subsequent wars, from Poland and Lithuania, arrived in growing numbers. They were initially poorer and dependent on Sephardic charity, and established their own congregation, building the Great Synagogue in 1671 across the street from the later Esnoga. By the end of the century the Ashkenazim outnumbered the Sephardim.

Amsterdam became a centre of Hebrew printing and Jewish learning. The rabbi and scholar Menasseh ben Israel founded the first Hebrew press in the city in 1626, corresponded with Christian scholars across Europe and in 1655 travelled to London to petition Oliver Cromwell for the readmission of Jews to England. Rembrandt etched a portrait believed to depict him and illustrated one of his books. In 1665 and 1666 the community was swept by enthusiasm for Sabbatai Zevi, the claimed messiah from Smyrna, whose conversion to Islam in 1666 caused deep disillusion.

The community’s leaders, the mahamad, exercised strict discipline over members, partly to maintain religious orthodoxy among people raised as Catholics and partly to avoid giving offence to their Christian hosts. Their principal sanction was the herem, a ban of exclusion. The case of Uriel da Costa, a former converso who questioned rabbinic tradition and the immortality of the soul, ended with his death by suicide in 1640 after repeated bans and a humiliating public penance.

Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a Portuguese Jewish merchant family and educated in the community’s schools. On 27 July 1656 the mahamad pronounced a herem against him in exceptionally severe terms, citing his abominable heresies and monstrous deeds without specifying them. Historians have inferred from later accounts and from his writings that he had begun to question the divine origin of the Torah, the immortality of the soul and the conventional idea of a personal, providential God. Steven Nadler’s biography of Spinoza discusses the episode in detail.

After his expulsion Spinoza lived in Rijnsburg, Voorburg and The Hague, supporting himself partly by grinding optical lenses and receiving modest support from friends. He associated with Collegiants, Mennonites and other dissenting Christians, and with scientists and regents, including, it seems, Johan de Witt. He published Principles of Cartesian Philosophy in 1663 under his own name and the Theological-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670. The treatise argued that the Bible should be interpreted historically, by examining its authors, language and contexts, that prophecy did not provide philosophical truth, and that the state should allow freedom of thought and speech, which he held was the true purpose of the commonwealth. It provoked fierce opposition and was formally banned by the Court of Holland in 1674. Spinoza’s chief work, the Ethics, set out in geometric form, identified God with nature and analysed human emotions and freedom in rigorously naturalistic terms. It was published by his friends in his Opera Posthuma after his death in The Hague in February 1677.

Spinoza’s thought was widely condemned in his own century by Reformed, Catholic, Jewish and Cartesian critics alike, who regarded it as atheism. The historian Jonathan Israel has argued that Spinoza and his circle founded a Radical Enlightenment whose ideas of democracy, equality and freedom of thought had a deep subterranean influence on European thought, a thesis that has been extensively debated. Whatever its later influence, Spinoza’s work was possible in part because the Republic’s institutions, though they suppressed his books, did not prosecute him personally.

Universities and Learning

Leiden University, founded in 1575, was followed by universities at Franeker in 1585, Groningen in 1614, Utrecht in 1636 and Harderwijk in 1648, together with illustrious schools, athenaea, in Amsterdam from 1632 and in other towns. Leiden in particular attracted students from across Protestant Europe, including large numbers from Germany, England and Scotland. It developed a botanical garden, the Hortus Botanicus, in 1590, an anatomical theatre in 1596 and an astronomical observatory in 1633. Its faculty included the classical scholars Justus Lipsius and Joseph Justus Scaliger, the orientalists Thomas Erpenius and Jacobus Golius, and in the later century the physician Herman Boerhaave, whose teaching made it the leading medical school of Europe.

Several features of Dutch society favoured scientific work: wealth, a well-developed book trade, skilled craftsmen in instrument-making and optics, close contacts between merchants and scholars, and practical problems in navigation, engineering and water management. The historian Harold Cook, in Matters of Exchange (2007), argued that the values of commerce, with their emphasis on accurate description and exchange of specific information, shaped the empirical character of Dutch natural knowledge in this period.

Simon Stevin and Practical Mathematics

Simon Stevin, born in Bruges in 1548, moved to the north and became tutor and engineering adviser to Maurice of Nassau. In De Thiende, The Tenth, published in 1585, he explained decimal fractions and advocated their use in coinage, measures and calculation, though his notation was cumbersome and the modern decimal point came later. In De Beghinselen der Weeghconst of 1586, on statics, he proved the law of the inclined plane by a demonstration known as the wreath of spheres, in which an endless chain draped over a triangular prism cannot move spontaneously since perpetual motion is impossible. In the same period he reported an experiment, conducted with Jan Cornets de Groot in Delft, in which two lead balls of different weight dropped from about thirty feet struck the ground at nearly the same time. He also wrote on hydrostatics, fortification, navigation, accounting and music, and constructed a wind-powered sailing chariot that carried Maurice and guests along the beach at Scheveningen. Stevin insisted that Dutch was an ideal language for science and coined many Dutch scientific terms, among them wiskunde for mathematics, which remain in use.

Willebrord Snellius, professor of mathematics at Leiden, is known for the law of refraction, which he formulated in 1621 in a manuscript that was not published; Descartes published an equivalent law in 1637, and the question of priority has been discussed ever since. Snellius also developed the method of triangulation for surveying, measuring a chain of triangles between Alkmaar and Bergen op Zoom to calculate the length of a degree of meridian, published in Eratosthenes Batavus in 1617. His result was imperfect but the method became fundamental to geodesy.

Christiaan Huygens

Christiaan Huygens, born in The Hague in 1629, was the son of Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the stadtholders Frederick Henry and William II, a poet and a patron who introduced Rembrandt’s early work to the court. Christiaan was educated at Leiden and Breda and worked largely as an independent scholar. With his brother Constantijn he ground lenses and built improved telescopes, with which in 1655 he discovered Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. He proposed that the changing appearance of Saturn could be explained by a thin flat ring surrounding the planet, publishing the theory in Systema Saturnium in 1659.

In 1656 Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which he patented in 1657 and described in Horologium in 1658, with the clockmaker Salomon Coster of The Hague building the first examples. The pendulum improved the accuracy of clocks from errors of perhaps fifteen minutes a day to around fifteen seconds. In Horologium Oscillatorium (1673) he showed that a pendulum swinging along a cycloidal arc would be isochronous, independent of amplitude, developed the theory of evolutes and derived a formula for centrifugal force. He wrote one of the earliest treatises on probability, De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae (1657), and worked on the laws of collision, establishing conservation of what would later be described as momentum and kinetic energy in elastic impacts. In his Traité de la lumière, written in 1678 and published in 1690, he developed a wave theory of light, explaining reflection and refraction by the principle that every point of a wave front acts as a source of secondary wavelets.

Huygens was a founding member of the French Académie Royale des Sciences, established in 1666, and lived in Paris until 1681, receiving a pension from Louis XIV. He also attempted to solve the problem of longitude at sea using marine pendulum clocks, which were tested on voyages but proved insufficiently reliable in the motion of a ship. He returned to The Hague and died there in 1695.

Microscopes and Natural History

Dutch spectacle-makers were associated with the invention of the telescope. In 1608 Hans Lipperhey of Middelburg applied to the States General for a patent on a device for seeing things far away as if nearby; the States declined the patent because others claimed the same invention. Compound microscopes were also developed in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the early century.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in 1632, was a draper and municipal official with no university training. He made single-lens microscopes, small brass plates holding a tiny ground or blown glass lens, which achieved magnifications of more than two hundred times and possibly more. From 1673 until his death in 1723 he sent around two hundred letters in Dutch to the Royal Society in London, which translated and published many of them. In 1676 he reported tiny living organisms in water, which he called animalcules, now recognised as protists and bacteria. He described spermatozoa, red blood cells, the structure of muscle fibres and the life cycles of insects and other small creatures, and he argued against spontaneous generation. His observations were initially met with scepticism, and the Royal Society sent witnesses to confirm them. He was elected a Fellow in 1680.

Jan Swammerdam, born in Amsterdam in 1637, trained in medicine at Leiden and devoted himself to the dissection of insects using fine instruments under the microscope. He showed that the stages of insect development, egg, larva, pupa and adult, were stages in the growth of a single organism rather than transformations into different creatures, and he described the anatomy of the honeybee, including the identification of the queen as female. He also made contributions to human anatomy and physiology, including experiments on muscle contraction. Late in life he came under the influence of the mystic Antoinette Bourignon. His major work, the Bybel der Natuure, Bible of Nature, was published posthumously by Boerhaave in 1737 and 1738.

Other Dutch scholars made major contributions to natural history and medicine. The Leiden anatomist Reinier de Graaf described the ovarian follicles that bear his name. Nicolaes Tulp, praelector of anatomy to the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild, was the subject of Rembrandt’s group portrait of 1632. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a VOC merchant on Ambon, compiled a vast description of the island’s plants, the Herbarium Amboinense, despite going blind in 1670. Hendrik van Rheede, a VOC administrator on the Malabar coast, organised the Hortus Malabaricus, published in twelve volumes from 1678, drawing on the knowledge of local physicians.

Descartes in Holland

René Descartes lived in the Dutch Republic for most of the period from 1628 to 1649, moving between Franeker, Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, Leiden, Santpoort, Endegeest and Egmond, among other places. He valued the country’s freedom, its quiet and its distance from the obligations of French society. In a letter of 1631 he described Amsterdam as a place where everyone was occupied with business and he could live unnoticed. He published the Discourse on Method in Leiden in 1637, with its accompanying essays on optics, meteorology and geometry, and the Meditations on First Philosophy in Paris in 1641 with a second edition in Amsterdam in 1642, followed by the Principles of Philosophy in Amsterdam in 1644.

Descartes’s philosophy became the subject of fierce controversy in Dutch universities. At Utrecht the theologian Gisbertus Voetius, a leading figure of orthodox Reformed theology, attacked the Cartesian Henricus Regius and Descartes himself, and in 1642 the university senate condemned the new philosophy. At Leiden a similar dispute led the curators to forbid discussion of Cartesian ideas in 1647. Cartesianism nonetheless spread rapidly in Dutch universities over the following decades, particularly in physics and medicine, and the Leiden theologians of the Cocceian school found ways to accommodate it. Descartes left for Stockholm in 1649 at the invitation of Queen Christina and died there in February 1650.

Grotius and the Law of Nations

Hugo Grotius, born in Delft in 1583, was a prodigy who entered Leiden University at eleven and accompanied Oldenbarnevelt on an embassy to France at fifteen. In 1603 a VOC captain, Jacob van Heemskerck, captured the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore with a cargo of enormous value. The seizure raised questions of whether a private company could legitimately wage war and keep its prize. Grotius was engaged to write a defence, De Jure Praedae, of which a chapter was published anonymously in 1609 as Mare Liberum, The Free Sea. It argued that the sea could not be owned and that all nations were free to navigate and trade, a principle aimed against Portuguese claims to exclusive rights in the Indian Ocean.

After his imprisonment and escape in 1621, Grotius lived mainly in Paris, where he wrote De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace, published in 1625. It set out a systematic account of when war might be justly waged and how it should be conducted, grounded in natural law, which he described as valid even if one were to concede that God did not exist, a hypothesis he rejected but used to show the law’s rational basis. The work became a foundation of international law. Grotius later served as Swedish ambassador to France from 1634 to 1645 and died in Rostock in August 1645 after a shipwreck. He also wrote works of theology, history, poetry and an influential introduction to the jurisprudence of Holland.

Printing, Maps and the Book Trade

The Republic was the leading centre of European publishing in the seventeenth century. Its presses were relatively free of censorship, although books could be banned after publication, and its printers produced works in Latin, French, English, German, Hebrew and other languages for export. The house of Elzevir, founded by Louis Elzevir, a Protestant bookbinder from Louvain who settled in Leiden in 1580, became the most famous. His descendants served as printers to Leiden University and published classical texts, scholarly works and the series of small duodecimo editions of classical authors and the Republics, descriptions of states, which were prized for their elegance and portability. They published Galileo’s Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences in Leiden in 1638, after its publication in Italy had become impossible.

Newspapers developed early in the Republic. The Amsterdam Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c., first issued in 1618 by Caspar van Hilten, is one of the earliest regular newspapers in Europe, and the first English-language and French-language newspapers were printed in Amsterdam in 1620. Political pamphlets were produced in enormous numbers; tens of thousands survive from the seventeenth century.

Map-making flourished alongside navigation. Willem Janszoon Blaeu, who had studied with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, established a printing and globe-making business in Amsterdam and was appointed cartographer to the VOC in 1633. His son Joan Blaeu succeeded him and produced the Atlas Maior, published between 1662 and 1672 in Latin and translated into French, Dutch, Spanish and German. It ran to nine to twelve volumes depending on the edition and contained around six hundred maps, making it the largest and most expensive book of the century. Coloured copies were presented as diplomatic gifts. A fire destroyed the Blaeu printing house in 1672. The rival Hondius and Janssonius firms also published atlases, building on the earlier work of Gerard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius.

Collections, Gardens and Cabinets

Trade brought a constant flow of exotic objects into the Republic, and collecting became a widespread pursuit among merchants, physicians, apothecaries and scholars. Cabinets of curiosities, rariteitenkabinetten, combined shells, minerals, preserved animals, coins, ethnographic objects, scientific instruments and works of art. The Amsterdam apothecary Albertus Seba assembled one of the largest such collections, and Peter the Great of Russia bought the first of his cabinets in 1717. Shells from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific were especially prized, and rare specimens could command prices comparable to paintings. Rembrandt himself assembled a large collection of prints, drawings, weapons, shells, busts and natural specimens, recorded in the inventory drawn up at his insolvency in 1656.

Botanical gardens and private gardens played a similar role. The Leiden Hortus received plants and seeds from VOC and WIC servants across the world, and the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus, founded in 1638 and moved to its present site in 1682, cultivated tropical plants in heated greenhouses. A coffee plant grown in the Amsterdam garden from a specimen brought from Java around 1706 was the ancestor, through a gift to Louis XIV in 1714, of much of the coffee later planted in the Caribbean and Latin America. Wealthy merchants laid out formal gardens at their country houses along the Vecht and in the Beemster, and the stadtholders’ gardens at Honselaarsdijk and, later, William III’s palace at Het Loo, completed in the 1680s, set a fashion for geometrical parterres, canals and clipped hedges that was copied in England after 1688.

Scientific instruments were manufactured in the Republic for local and foreign buyers. Amsterdam and Leiden craftsmen made globes, astrolabes, quadrants, compasses, thermometers and microscopes. The physician Johannes Hudde, burgomaster of Amsterdam, was also a mathematician whose work on the algebra of equations was published with the Latin edition of Descartes’s Geometry, and he took an interest in lens-grinding and in the city’s water management. The circulation of instruments, books, specimens and letters through Dutch ports made the Republic a principal junction of the European republic of letters in this period.

A Society of Pictures

The scale of artistic production in the Republic had no precedent in Europe. Economic historians, beginning with John Michael Montias’s studies of Delft and Amsterdam inventories, have estimated that several million paintings were produced in the northern Netherlands during the seventeenth century, perhaps between five and ten million in total. Hundreds of painters were active at any time; Montias found that in Delft in the mid-century a large share of households owned paintings, and that even modest households often owned several. Paintings were bought not only by princes, regents and wealthy merchants but by bakers, shopkeepers and craftsmen.

The Reformed Church did not commission altarpieces or devotional images for its churches, and the court at The Hague, though an important patron, was small compared with the courts of Spain, France or the Spanish Netherlands. Painters therefore worked largely for an open market. They sold through their own workshops, through dealers, at fairs and lotteries, and at auctions, and many specialised in particular subjects in which they could work efficiently and build a reputation: landscapes, seascapes, church interiors, still lifes, genre scenes or portraits. Painters were organised in guilds of Saint Luke in each town, which regulated training and the sale of pictures. The economic historian Michael North has examined how this market functioned and how specialisation and new techniques lowered costs, enabling the production of affordable paintings in large numbers.

Dutch art was neither as uniformly realistic nor as free of meaning as later writers sometimes supposed. Many paintings carried moral, religious or allegorical associations that contemporaries recognised, drawing on emblem books such as those of Roemer Visscher and Jacob Cats. The art historian Eddy de Jongh developed an influential iconological approach that read many scenes in terms of such hidden meanings, while Svetlana Alpers, in The Art of Describing (1983), argued that Dutch painting should be understood primarily as a culture of visual description, akin to mapping and scientific observation. Most scholars now regard both perspectives as illuminating aspects of the work.

Frans Hals

Frans Hals was born in Antwerp around 1582 and brought to Haarlem as a child by his family, part of the emigration from the south. He worked almost entirely in Haarlem as a portraitist and was distinguished by his loose, rapid brushwork, which conveyed animation and immediacy. His large group portraits of the Haarlem civic guard companies, beginning with the Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard of 1616, transformed a traditionally stiff genre into lively compositions. His single portraits, such as the Laughing Cavalier of 1624 in the Wallace Collection, and his genre portraits of musicians, drinkers and children, show sitters caught in transient expression. In old age he painted the regents and regentesses of the Haarlem old men’s almshouse, completed around 1664, in sombre tones. Hals’s reputation declined after his death in 1666 and was revived in the nineteenth century by painters and critics who admired his technique.

Rembrandt

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606, the son of a miller. He trained in Leiden and briefly in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman, a history painter who had studied in Italy. In Leiden he worked alongside Jan Lievens, and both attracted the attention of Constantijn Huygens, through whom Rembrandt received commissions for a series of Passion paintings for Frederick Henry. He moved to Amsterdam around 1631 and became the city’s most sought-after portraitist, while also painting biblical and mythological subjects. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) established his reputation.

In 1634 Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, and in 1639 he bought a large house on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, now the Rembrandt House Museum, for 13,000 guilders, a sum he never fully paid. Of the couple’s four children only Titus, born in 1641, survived infancy. Saskia died in 1642, the year Rembrandt completed the militia painting now known as The Night Watch, formally The Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch. Its dynamic composition, in which the militiamen appear to be setting out in movement rather than posed in rows, departed from conventions of the genre. The later name derives from the darkened varnish that obscured its daylight setting; it was trimmed on all sides in 1715 to fit a wall in the town hall.

Rembrandt’s later career was marked by financial difficulties. He lived with Geertje Dircx, Titus’s nurse, and later with Hendrickje Stoffels, who was summoned before the Reformed consistory in 1654 for living with him unmarried. In 1656 he applied for a cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency, and his house and collection were sold. Hendrickje and Titus formed a business to employ him and protect him from creditors. His work in these years includes The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662), the Jewish Bride and a series of self-portraits of unusual introspection, of which around forty painted examples survive among a larger number of etched and drawn ones. He was also among the greatest etchers in the history of the medium, notably in the Hundred Guilder Print and the Three Crosses. Hendrickje died in 1663 and Titus in 1668. Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in October 1669 and was buried in the Westerkerk. Many pupils trained in his studio, among them Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Carel Fabritius, Samuel van Hoogstraten and Nicolaes Maes. Since 1968 the Rembrandt Research Project has re-examined the attribution of works ascribed to him, removing many from his catalogue.

Vermeer and Delft

Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632, the son of a silk weaver and art dealer, and lived there all his life. He joined the Delft guild of Saint Luke in 1653, the same year he married Catharina Bolnes, from a Catholic family, and he appears to have converted to Catholicism. He served several times as an officer of the guild. Only around thirty-five or thirty-six paintings are generally attributed to him, a small output reflecting slow and painstaking work. A Delft baker, Hendrick van Buyten, and especially the collector Pieter van Ruijven, who may have bought around half of Vermeer’s output, were among his patrons.

Most of Vermeer’s paintings depict one or two figures in a room lit from a window on the left, engaged in quiet activity: reading a letter, pouring milk, playing an instrument, weighing pearls, writing. They are characterised by careful construction, often with a single vanishing point marked in the canvas by a pinhole, by subtle rendering of light on surfaces, by the use of costly natural ultramarine and by small highlights of paint, pointillés, that give an impression of glinting light. Whether he used a camera obscura has long been debated. His View of Delft of around 1660 to 1661 is among the most celebrated cityscapes in European art. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is a tronie, a study of a head and expression rather than a commissioned portrait. Vermeer died in December 1675, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt, after the economic depression of the war years had destroyed the art market. He was largely forgotten until the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger championed his work in the 1860s.

Delft supported other remarkable painters in the 1650s. Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt’s pupil, painted The Goldfinch in 1654, the year he died in the explosion of the city’s gunpowder magazine, which destroyed much of the town. Pieter de Hooch, born in Rotterdam in 1629, worked in Delft from the early 1650s and moved to Amsterdam around 1660. He painted courtyards and domestic interiors with sequences of rooms and doorways opening onto light beyond, figures of mothers, maids and children at household tasks, and carefully measured perspective. Emanuel de Witte and Gerard Houckgeest painted the interiors of Delft’s churches, in which the whitewashed architecture became itself the subject of the picture.

Jan Steen and Genre Painting

Genre painting, depicting scenes of everyday life, became a major category. Earlier painters such as Adriaen van Ostade painted peasant taverns and village scenes; later artists including Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, Frans van Mieris and Gerrit Dou, the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders, fine painters, depicted affluent households, letter-writing, music-making and courtship in meticulously finished detail.

Jan Steen, born in Leiden around 1626, was the son of a brewer and himself ran a brewery in Delft and later an inn in Leiden. He painted hundreds of works, many of them crowded scenes of disorderly households, feasts, tavern revels, doctors’ visits and celebrations of the feast of Saint Nicholas. The Dutch expression een huishouden van Jan Steen, a Jan Steen household, still denotes a chaotic home. His paintings are usually comic and often carry proverbial or moral messages, with details such as discarded pipes, upturned jugs or inscribed proverbs pointing to the consequences of folly. Steen also painted religious and historical subjects, and he frequently included himself in his compositions as a laughing participant.

Landscape and the Sea

Landscape painting developed into one of the distinctive achievements of the Dutch school. In the 1620s and 1630s painters of the so-called tonal phase, including Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael and Pieter de Molijn, depicted dunes, rivers and flat country under wide skies in a restricted palette of browns, greens and greys. From the 1650s a more monumental and colourful style emerged. Jacob van Ruisdael, born in Haarlem around 1628 or 1629 and the nephew of Salomon, painted forests, waterfalls inspired by Scandinavian scenery, windmills, panoramas of Haarlem with its bleaching fields, and the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk, often with dramatic skies and a sense of the transience of human works. His Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede of around 1670 is one of the best-known Dutch landscapes.

Meindert Hobbema, born in Amsterdam in 1638, trained with Ruisdael and specialised in wooded landscapes with watermills, cottages and sunlit clearings. In 1668 he married a kitchen-maid of an Amsterdam burgomaster and obtained a post as a wine gauger for the city’s excise, after which he painted less. His Avenue at Middelharnis of 1689, in the National Gallery in London, with its road lined with tall thin trees running directly towards the viewer’s vanishing point, is among the most famous of all Dutch landscapes.

Marine painting reflected the country’s dependence on the sea. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom painted early fleet scenes, and Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son Willem van de Velde the Younger recorded naval battles, sometimes from boats in the midst of the fighting, before moving to England in 1672 to work for Charles II. Jan van de Cappelle painted calm seas with ships at anchor, and Ludolf Bakhuizen painted storms. Aelbert Cuyp of Dordrecht painted river landscapes with cattle bathed in golden light, influenced by Italianate painters such as Jan Both who had worked in Rome.

Still Life

Still-life painting was practised in numerous sub-genres. Haarlem painters such as Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda developed the monochrome breakfast piece, ontbijtje, depicting a table with bread, pewter, glass and a half-peeled lemon in a narrow range of tones. Later, painters such as Willem Kalf and Abraham van Beyeren painted pronkstilleven, sumptuous still lifes with silver, Chinese porcelain, Venetian glass, oriental carpets and exotic fruit, reflecting the goods brought by Dutch trade. Flower painting was led by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Jan Davidsz de Heem and later Rachel Ruysch, whose career extended into the eighteenth century and who became court painter in Düsseldorf. Flower pieces often combined blooms that flowered in different seasons, assembled from separate studies.

Leiden painters developed the vanitas still life, depicting skulls, extinguished candles, hourglasses, books and other objects as reminders of the brevity of life and the vanity of earthly pursuits, themes linked to the city’s university culture and its Calvinist environment. Painters of trompe l’oeil, such as Samuel van Hoogstraten, created deceptive illusions of letter racks and objects. Women artists, including Judith Leyster in Haarlem, who joined the guild in 1633 and ran her own workshop, and Maria van Oosterwijck, a flower painter whose works were bought by European monarchs, achieved recognition in the period, though their numbers were small.

History Painting and Portraiture

The common impression that Dutch painters avoided grand subjects is misleading. History painting, depicting biblical, mythological, allegorical and historical scenes, retained the highest prestige in contemporary art theory, and it flourished especially in Utrecht, which had a large Catholic population and close ties to Rome. Painters known as the Utrecht Caravaggisti, among them Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, studied in Rome in the 1610s and returned to paint scenes of musicians, drinkers and biblical episodes with the strong contrasts of light and shadow associated with Caravaggio. Honthorst became known in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti for his candlelit night scenes and later worked for Charles I and for the Orange court at The Hague. Abraham Bloemaert taught a large number of pupils in Utrecht over a long career.

Great public commissions continued in the Republic. After Frederick Henry’s death, Amalia van Solms commissioned a cycle of paintings to decorate the Oranjezaal, the central hall of the Huis ten Bosch, glorifying her husband’s life, executed between 1648 and 1652 by Flemish and Dutch painters including Jacob Jordaens, Caesar van Everdingen and Gerard van Honthorst under the direction of Jacob van Campen and Constantijn Huygens. The Amsterdam town hall’s decoration likewise employed Rembrandt’s former pupils Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, as well as Jan Lievens and Jacob Jordaens.

Portraiture was the most reliable source of income for many painters. Regents, merchants, ministers and their wives commissioned single and pendant portraits, and institutions commissioned group portraits of civic guard companies, guild officials and the governors of orphanages, hospitals and almshouses. These group portraits, a specifically Dutch genre, displayed the civic responsibilities of the sitters and were hung in the buildings where they met. Bartholomeus van der Helst, whose Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster of 1648 hangs in the Rijksmuseum, was the most fashionable portraitist in Amsterdam in the mid-century, preferred by many patrons to Rembrandt for his polished finish. Gerard ter Borch painted small, refined full-length portraits and interiors with figures in silk and satin rendered with great delicacy. Nicolaes Maes, after training with Rembrandt, turned in the later century to an elegant portrait style influenced by Flemish and French fashion, reflecting changing tastes among the regent class.

Literature and the Theatre

The Golden Age was also a period of achievement in Dutch-language literature. The Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, De Eglantier, and its offshoot, the Nederduytsche Academie founded in 1617 by the physician and playwright Samuel Coster, cultivated drama and poetry. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, bailiff of Muiden, wrote lyric poetry and tragedy and, late in life, the Nederlandsche Historien, a history of the revolt modelled on Tacitus. He gathered a circle of writers, scholars and musicians at Muiden castle, the Muiderkring, which included Constantijn Huygens, the scholar Caspar Barlaeus and the poet sisters Anna and Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher. Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero wrote farces and comedies in the dialect of Amsterdam, notably De Spaanschen Brabander of 1617, which portrays a bankrupt Brabant immigrant with mordant humour.

The leading poet and dramatist was Joost van den Vondel, born in Cologne in 1587 to Antwerp Mennonite parents who had settled in Amsterdam. A hosier by trade, he wrote tragedies on biblical and historical subjects, among them Gysbreght van Aemstel, written for the opening of the new Amsterdam theatre, the Schouwburg designed by Jacob van Campen, in January 1638, and Lucifer of 1654, which the Reformed consistory succeeded in having banned after two performances. His satirical poem Palamedes of 1625 attacked the execution of Oldenbarnevelt, and he was fined for it. Vondel converted to Catholicism around 1641. Late in life, after his son’s financial ruin, he worked as a clerk in the city’s pawn bank. Jacob Cats, Grand Pensionary of Holland from 1636 to 1651, wrote moralising emblem books and verse on marriage and household life, such as Houwelick of 1625, which were among the best-selling books of the century and were found in many Dutch households alongside the Bible.

Music in the Republic lacked the court and church patronage of other countries, since the Reformed Church sang metrical psalms without accompaniment in services and regarded organs with suspicion. Town governments, however, owned the church organs and employed organists to give recitals outside service times. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, organist of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam from about 1580 until his death in 1621, was the most important composer, whose keyboard works and teaching influenced a generation of north German organists. Carillons in town towers, many cast by the brothers François and Pieter Hemony from the 1640s, played tunes through the day.

Households and Daily Life

Foreign visitors repeatedly remarked on the cleanliness of Dutch houses, the scrubbing of steps and floors, and the independence of Dutch women, who managed households and shops and were often involved in business. Marriage was based on mutual consent and was regulated by both church and civil authorities; from 1580 Holland permitted civil marriage before magistrates for those not wishing to marry in the Reformed Church. The household, rather than the extended family, was the basic unit, and the home was celebrated in paintings and literature as a sphere of order and virtue. The historian Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches (1987) interpreted Dutch culture of this period as shaped by a tension between the enjoyment of unprecedented prosperity and moral anxiety about its dangers, a reading that drew both admiration and criticism from other historians.

The Dutch diet included bread, cheese, butter, beer, fish and vegetables, with meat for the more prosperous; imports of sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee spread across social groups during the century. Tobacco smoking in clay pipes, made in large numbers in Gouda, became ubiquitous among men. Education was widespread: elementary schools taught reading, writing, arithmetic and the catechism, Latin schools prepared boys for university, and literacy rates in Holland’s towns were high by European standards, with marriage registers suggesting that a majority of men and a large proportion of women in Amsterdam could sign their names by the later century.

Building the Brick City

The architecture of the Golden Age was shaped by soft ground, scarce land and the needs of commerce. Most towns in Holland stood on peat and clay, and buildings had to be supported on wooden piles driven down to a firmer sand layer; the Amsterdam town hall rests on 13,659 piles. Building plots were narrow and deep, partly because property along the canals was expensive, and houses rose several storeys, with storage space in the attics. A hoisting beam projecting from the top of the facade allowed goods and furniture to be lifted to upper floors, and many facades were built with a slight forward lean so that loads would not strike the front.

The facade’s top was the most expressive element. Early in the century many houses carried stepped gables, a form with medieval roots throughout the North Sea and Baltic worlds, now often embellished with stone ornament in a style that combined brick with bands of light sandstone. Hendrick de Keyser, Amsterdam’s city architect and sculptor from 1595 until his death in 1621, was the leading exponent of this Amsterdam Renaissance style. He designed the Zuiderkerk, the Westerkerk and the Noorderkerk, the exchange building on the Rokin and numerous houses, including the House with the Heads on the Keizersgracht. His son Pieter de Keyser and his successors continued his work. As fashions changed, the stepped gable gave way to the neck gable, a tall central section with scroll-like side ornaments, and later to the bell gable and to straight cornices in the eighteenth century.

Dutch Classicism

From the 1630s a more restrained classicism, drawing on the Italian architects Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi, was introduced by Jacob van Campen, a painter and architect from a wealthy Haarlem family, together with Constantijn Huygens and the architect Pieter Post. The Mauritshuis in The Hague, built between 1633 and 1644 for Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, is the first major example: a compact, symmetrical block with giant pilasters rising through two storeys and a pediment, built in brick with stone dressings. Post designed the Huis ten Bosch for Amalia van Solms, and Philips Vingboons and Justus Vingboons applied the style to merchants’ houses and to the Trippenhuis, built for the arms-trading Trip brothers between 1660 and 1662, whose chimneys took the form of mortars.

Van Campen’s masterpiece was the Amsterdam town hall on the Dam, begun in 1648 to mark the Peace of Münster and inaugurated in 1655, although it was completed only in the following decade. It replaced the medieval town hall, which burned down in 1652. Built of sandstone over a brick core, it was at the time one of the largest buildings in Europe, and contemporaries called it the eighth wonder of the world. Its central Burgerzaal, the citizens’ hall, has floors inlaid with maps of the eastern and western hemispheres and of the celestial sphere, placing Amsterdam at the centre of the world. The sculptor Artus Quellinus the Elder of Antwerp and his workshop executed an extensive scheme of reliefs and statues representing justice, prudence, the city’s dominion over the seas and episodes from classical and biblical history. Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, commissioned in 1661 for the building’s galleries, was returned to the artist and cut down; the surviving fragment is in Stockholm. In 1808 the building became the royal palace of Louis Napoleon, and it remains the Royal Palace of Amsterdam.

The Canal Ring

Amsterdam’s population growth demanded planned expansion. In 1613 the city began a major extension to the west and south, digging three concentric canals, the Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht, beyond the old city wall, the Singel. The plan was developed by the city carpenter Hendrick Jacobsz Staets, with input from the surveyor Lucas Sinck and others, and was carried out in phases: the western section from 1613, and the extension to the south and east from 1658, reaching the Amstel and beyond by the 1660s. The Grachtengordel, the canal ring, was enclosed by a new fortified wall with bastions.

The plan combined residential, commercial and defensive purposes. The three main canals were reserved for substantial houses, and regulations specified plot widths, building heights and materials, and prohibited noxious trades. Radial streets and smaller canals linked the rings. To the west, the Jordaan district was laid out on the existing pattern of field ditches for artisans and smaller industries, and became densely populated. The canals served for transport of goods, drainage and the disposal of waste; their water was not fresh, and the city periodically struggled with smells and silting. Along the main canals elm trees were planted. The urban historian Ed Taverne and others have stressed that the plan was a product of municipal speculation, since the city bought land cheaply, laid out the canals and quays and sold the plots at high prices. In 2010 the seventeenth-century canal ring area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Other cities followed. Leiden expanded several times; Haarlem built a new extension in the 1670s; and Dutch planners carried their methods abroad, to Batavia, to New Amsterdam, to Swedish Gothenburg, founded in 1621 and laid out by Dutch engineers, and to Danish and German towns.

Water and Windmills

Much of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland lay at or below sea level, and the management of water was a condition of survival. Drainage of the peat lands since the Middle Ages had caused the ground to subside, increasing the risk of flooding and making mechanical drainage necessary. The waterschappen, regional water boards responsible for dykes, sluices and drainage, date from the thirteenth century and were among the oldest representative institutions in the country. Their governing bodies, made up of landowners, levied charges on the land that benefited from protection.

The polder mill, a windmill driving a scoop wheel to lift water from a drained area into a higher channel, was the essential technology. Improvements in the late sixteenth century, including the rotating cap that allowed the sails to be turned into the wind while the body of the mill stayed fixed, made mills more efficient. Mills could be arranged in series, each lifting water a step higher, to drain deeper basins. Peat digging, which supplied the towns’ main fuel, created lakes as excavations filled with water, and these lakes enlarged as storms eroded their banks, threatening farmland and villages.

Leeghwater and the Beemster

The most ambitious drainage projects of the Golden Age were the reclamations of large lakes north of Amsterdam. Merchants and regents, many of them investors in the VOC, provided the capital, and the engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater, a millwright from De Rijp, supplied much of the technical expertise. Leeghwater, whose adopted name means empty water, was involved in the draining of the Beemster, the Purmer, the Wormer, the Heerhugowaard and other lakes.

The Beemster lake, about 7,000 hectares, was the first large project. A charter was granted in 1607, a ring dyke and ring canal were built, and draining began in 1610 using around forty-three windmills. A storm breached the dyke in 1610 and the work had to be restarted, but the polder was dry by 1612. The land was divided into a regular grid of square plots, each about 1,850 metres on a side, divided further into smaller lots, with roads and ditches laid out according to geometrical principles influenced by classical and Renaissance ideas of rational order. Wealthy Amsterdam merchants built country houses there, and the farmland produced cattle and dairy products for urban markets. The Beemster was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999.

Between 1610 and 1640 around 27,000 hectares of land were reclaimed in North Holland alone. Leeghwater also proposed draining the Haarlemmermeer, a large and growing lake between Amsterdam, Haarlem and Leiden, and published a plan in his Haarlemmermeer-boek of 1641, suggesting the use of around 160 windmills. The project was beyond the means of the age; the Haarlemmermeer was drained only between 1849 and 1852, using steam pumps. Investment in reclamation slowed after the 1640s, partly because grain prices fell, reducing the returns on new farmland.

Water was also an instrument of defence. The Dutch Water Line, a system of sluices and low-lying land that could be inundated to a depth too shallow for boats but too deep for marching troops, was developed from the 1620s and became decisive in 1672.

William II and the Coup of 1650

Frederick Henry’s son William II succeeded as stadtholder in 1647 at the age of twenty. He had opposed the Peace of Münster and hoped to renew war with Spain in alliance with France, and perhaps to assist his brother-in-law Charles I, and after 1649 the exiled Charles II, in England. The States of Holland, meanwhile, sought to reduce the army now that peace had come, to cut the tax burden. The dispute over troop reductions in 1649 and 1650 became a constitutional confrontation over whether Holland could disband troops paid from its own revenue without the consent of the States General.

In July 1650 William arrested six leading members of the States of Holland and sent an army under his cousin William Frederick, stadtholder of Friesland, to seize Amsterdam. The attempt failed when a courier warned the city, which closed its gates and prepared to open the dykes. The city reached an agreement with the prince, and the prisoners in Loevestein were released after resigning their offices. William’s position appeared strengthened, but on 6 November 1650 he died of smallpox. His son, the future William III, was born eight days later.

The First Stadtholderless Period

The States of Holland seized the opportunity. In January 1651 a Great Assembly of all the provinces met in The Hague and agreed that the provinces would assume the stadtholder’s powers. Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel left the office vacant, while Friesland and Groningen kept William Frederick as their stadtholder. The period that followed, from 1650 to 1672, is known as the First Stadtholderless Period, and its leading statesman was Johan de Witt, a regent from Dordrecht who became Grand Pensionary of Holland in 1653 at the age of twenty-eight.

De Witt and his allies articulated a political doctrine, sometimes called True Freedom, Ware Vrijheid, which held that the Republic was best governed by the sovereign provinces and their regents without an eminent head whose ambition could endanger liberty. Pieter de la Court, a Leiden cloth manufacturer, developed related arguments in his Interest van Holland of 1662, arguing that the province’s prosperity depended on trade, peace, low taxes and freedom from princely rule. The Orangists, supported by many Reformed ministers, much of the army and a large part of the populace, regarded the house of Orange as the guarantor of the Republic’s unity and the Reformed religion.

The First Anglo-Dutch War

Commercial rivalry with England had been growing for decades over fisheries, the East Indies, the Baltic and the carrying trade. The English Parliament passed the Navigation Act in October 1651, requiring goods imported into England to be carried in English ships or in ships of the producing country, a measure aimed at the Dutch carrying trade. Disputes over the English demand that foreign ships salute the English flag in the Channel led to a clash between the fleets of Maarten Tromp and Robert Blake off Dover in May 1652, and war followed.

The First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652 to 1654 was fought entirely at sea, in a series of large fleet actions in the Channel and the North Sea. The English fleet, with larger and more heavily armed ships, built under the Commonwealth’s naval programme, generally had the advantage. Tromp was killed at the battle of Scheveningen in August 1653. The English blockade disrupted Dutch trade and caused hardship. Peace was made at Westminster in April 1654. A secret annex, the Act of Seclusion, demanded by Oliver Cromwell, committed the States of Holland not to appoint a member of the house of Orange as stadtholder, a provision that de Witt negotiated and that caused fury among the Orangists.

De Witt responded to the war by building a new navy. The Republic’s navy was administered by five separate admiralties, three of them in Holland, and its fleet had previously relied on converted merchant ships. From 1653 the States General commissioned a substantial number of purpose-built warships, and the process continued through the following decades. The fleet also intervened in the Baltic, where in 1658 a Dutch fleet relieved Copenhagen, besieged by Charles X of Sweden, at the battle of the Sound, to preserve the balance of power and free passage through the Sound.

The Second Anglo-Dutch War

After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, rivalry resumed. English forces under Robert Holmes attacked Dutch posts on the West African coast in 1664, and an English expedition took New Amsterdam in August of that year. The States General sent Michiel de Ruyter to recover the African posts, and war was formally declared in March 1665. In June 1665 the English won a major victory at Lowestoft, where the Dutch commander Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam was killed when his flagship blew up. In June 1666 the Dutch, now under de Ruyter, won the Four Days’ Battle, one of the longest naval engagements of the age, but were defeated in the St James’s Day Battle in August. England was then weakened by the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in September 1666, and Charles II laid up much of his fleet to save money while peace negotiations began at Breda.

The Raid on the Medway

De Witt planned a stroke to force a peace on favourable terms. In June 1667 a Dutch fleet under de Ruyter, accompanied by de Witt’s brother Cornelis as plenipotentiary of the States General, entered the Thames estuary. On 20 June the Dutch took the fort at Sheerness. They then sailed up the Medway towards Chatham, the principal base of the English navy. On 22 June they broke through a heavy chain stretched across the river at Gillingham and burned several English warships. They captured the Royal Charles, the flagship that had carried Charles II home in 1660, and towed it back to the Netherlands, where it was later broken up; its carved stern ornament is preserved in the Rijksmuseum. Three other large ships, the Royal Oak, Loyal London and Royal James, were burned on 23 June. The English navy official Samuel Pepys recorded the panic in London in his diary.

The Raid on the Medway was among the most damaging defeats in the history of the English navy. The Treaty of Breda, signed on 31 July 1667, modified the Navigation Act in the Dutch interest, allowing goods from the German hinterland brought down the Rhine to count as Dutch. England kept New Netherland and the Republic kept Suriname and the nutmeg island of Run in the Bandas. The terms recognised the existing position of each power.

The Triple Alliance and French Ambitions

The main threat to the Republic now came from France. In 1667 Louis XIV invaded the Spanish Netherlands in the War of Devolution, claiming territories on behalf of his wife, the Spanish infanta Maria Theresa. The prospect of a French frontier on the Republic’s borders alarmed de Witt, and in January 1668 he joined England and Sweden in the Triple Alliance, which pressed Louis to make peace at Aachen in May 1668, keeping some of his conquests in Flanders. Louis regarded Dutch interference as an affront. Commercial tensions, including high French tariffs introduced by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1667 and Dutch retaliation, added to the antagonism. In the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670, Charles II agreed to join Louis in war against the Republic in exchange for subsidies. The archbishop-elector of Cologne and the prince-bishop of Münster, Bernhard von Galen, joined the coalition.

The Disaster Year

In 1672 the Republic was attacked by France, England, Münster and Cologne. The year became known as the Rampjaar, the disaster year, and a contemporary saying described the people as redeloos, the government as radeloos and the country as reddeloos: irrational, desperate and beyond rescue. England declared war in March, France in April. The Dutch army had been neglected during the long years when the regents’ priority was the fleet, and its frontier fortresses were poorly maintained. In June a French army of more than 100,000 men crossed the Rhine at Lobith near Tolhuis and overran Guelders, Overijssel and Utrecht, while troops of Münster and Cologne invaded from the east. Utrecht surrendered without resistance at the end of June. Groningen, besieged by the bishop of Münster, held out and was relieved in August, a date still celebrated in the city.

Holland was saved by water. The States opened the sluices of the Water Line, flooding a band of land from the Zuiderzee to the Merwede, and the French advance stopped before Amsterdam. At sea, de Ruyter fought the combined Anglo-French fleet at Solebay off the Suffolk coast on 7 June 1672, preventing an invasion from the sea.

The crisis was political as well as military. Popular anger turned against de Witt and the regents, who were blamed for neglecting the army and suspected of treachery. Riots broke out in many towns demanding the elevation of the young William of Orange. In February 1672 William had been appointed captain-general for one campaign; in July the States of Zeeland and Holland named him stadtholder, and the Perpetual Edict of 1667, which had abolished the stadtholderate of Holland, was revoked.

On 21 June 1672 Johan de Witt was attacked and wounded in The Hague. Cornelis de Witt was arrested on a charge of plotting to assassinate the prince, an accusation made by a barber-surgeon of dubious reputation, and was tortured but did not confess. He was sentenced to banishment. On 4 August Johan resigned as Grand Pensionary. On 20 August, when he went to the Gevangenpoort prison in The Hague to collect his brother, a crowd including members of the civic militia broke in, dragged both brothers out and killed them. Their bodies were mutilated and hung on a scaffold. William III did not act to punish the leaders of the mob, and some of them were rewarded, which led contemporaries and later historians to discuss the extent of his responsibility. William then purged the town councils of Holland, replacing many States party regents with his supporters.

Recovery and the Peace of Nijmegen

William organised the Republic’s defence and built a coalition against France. Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and Brandenburg entered the war on the Republic’s side. At sea, de Ruyter fought the Anglo-French fleet in two battles off Schooneveld in June 1673 and at Kijkduin, known in English as the Texel, in August 1673, preventing an Allied landing. England withdrew from the war by the Treaty of Westminster in February 1674. Münster and Cologne also made peace in 1674. William took Naarden in 1673 and Bonn later that year, and the French withdrew from most Dutch territory by 1674. De Ruyter was killed in 1676 off Sicily, fighting the French in the Mediterranean in support of Spain.

The war ended in the Treaties of Nijmegen in 1678 and 1679. The Republic lost no territory, and France reduced its tariffs on Dutch goods, although Spain ceded the Franche-Comté and several towns in the Spanish Netherlands to France. In 1677 William had married his cousin Mary, the elder daughter of James, Duke of York, and heir to the English throne after her father, a marriage that tied the house of Orange closely to English politics.

William III and Europe

After 1672 the Republic’s foreign policy was dominated by William III and his determination to contain the power of Louis XIV. William was a reserved, physically frail man, an accomplished soldier but rarely a victorious one in pitched battle, whose strengths lay in persistence, diplomacy and coalition-building. He relied on a small group of trusted advisers, notably Hans Willem Bentinck and the Grand Pensionary Gaspar Fagel, who served from 1672 until his death in 1688. Amsterdam’s regents, who feared the costs of war, frequently resisted William’s policies, and in the early 1680s Amsterdam blocked plans for new troop levies.

French policy in the 1680s gradually united Dutch opinion behind William. Louis XIV annexed territories along his eastern frontier through the so-called reunions, seized Strasbourg in 1681 and Luxembourg in 1684, and in October 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted toleration to French Protestants. Tens of thousands of Huguenot refugees arrived in the Republic, bringing accounts of persecution. In 1687 France imposed new restrictions on Dutch herring and textiles. The Amsterdam regents concluded that French power now threatened both the Republic’s religion and its commerce.

The Glorious Revolution

In England, James II had succeeded his brother Charles II in 1685. A Catholic, he sought to secure toleration for Catholics and to appoint them to offices in the army, government and universities, using his prerogative to suspend the penal laws. Many English Protestants feared that his policies would lead to Catholic absolutism on the French model. The birth of a son to James and his second wife, Mary of Modena, in June 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic succession, displacing William’s wife Mary as heir. On 30 June 1688 seven English political figures, later known as the Immortal Seven, signed an invitation to William to intervene.

William and the States General had already been preparing. With the support of Amsterdam and the States of Holland, who were persuaded that England under James would join France against the Republic, the Republic assembled a fleet of around 463 ships, including 53 warships, and an army of some 20,000 men, among them Dutch, Scottish, English, German and Huguenot troops. The States General justified the expedition to European courts as necessary to prevent an Anglo-French alliance. The fleet sailed in November and, driven by an easterly wind that kept the English fleet in the Thames estuary, landed at Torbay in Devon on 5 November 1688. James’s army disintegrated through desertions, and he fled to France in December. Dutch troops took control of London, including the guard at Whitehall.

In February 1689 the Convention Parliament declared that James had abdicated and offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, accompanied by a Declaration of Rights, later enacted as the Bill of Rights, which limited the royal prerogative. The Glorious Revolution, as it came to be called, has traditionally been presented in English historiography as a domestic constitutional event. Historians such as Jonathan Israel and Lisa Jardine have emphasised that it was also a Dutch invasion, carefully planned and financed by the Republic’s institutions, which brought England into the coalition against France. William remained stadtholder of Holland while reigning as king in England, Scotland and Ireland, and the two countries fought together against France in the Nine Years’ War from 1688 to 1697 and, after William’s death in March 1702, in the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1713.

The union under William had commercial consequences that many historians have regarded as favouring England. Dutch investors and financial techniques moved to London, contributing to the development of the national debt and the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. Within the alliance, the Republic was assigned primary responsibility for land forces in the Low Countries and England for the larger share of naval effort. William died without children, and the Republic entered a Second Stadtholderless Period in Holland and most provinces, lasting until 1747.

The Question of Decline

When the Golden Age ended, and why, has been debated since the eighteenth century. The Republic did not collapse after 1672. It remained a great power, a major creditor nation and a centre of finance, publishing and trade for much of the following century. Yet its relative position weakened, its population stagnated at around two million, and contemporaries increasingly described it as being in decline. Historians have offered several explanations, which are not mutually exclusive.

The first concerns the mercantilist policies of larger neighbours. The English Navigation Acts, Colbert’s tariffs and similar measures in the Baltic states and Scandinavia aimed precisely at excluding Dutch shipping and manufactures, and they succeeded in reducing the share of trade available to Dutch intermediaries. Jonathan Israel, in Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585 to 1740 (1989), argued that Dutch commercial dominance rested on the control of high-value rich trades as much as on bulk freight, and that it was undermined from the 1670s and especially after 1720 by the protectionism of England, France and other states.

The second explanation concerns costs. The Republic’s wages were high, its taxes on consumption among the heaviest in Europe, largely to service the debts of repeated wars, and these raised the cost of Dutch manufactures relative to foreign competitors. Leiden’s textile industry declined from its peak in the 1660s as production moved to lower-cost regions. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude argued that the Dutch economy reached the limits of its early modern growth pattern by the late seventeenth century, having exhausted the advantages of cheap peat energy, abundant wind power and the international division of labour that favoured it, in a phase of stagnation rather than absolute decline.

The third explanation is political and military. The wars against England and France after 1652 consumed large resources, and from 1689 the Republic sustained a large army and navy in alliance with England, accumulating public debt on a scale that left Holland heavily burdened after 1713. The Republic’s federal institutions, effective in managing commerce and defensive war, made it difficult to reform the tax system or to concentrate power.

A fourth line of interpretation, common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attributed decline to the regents’ withdrawal from active commerce into rentier life, and to a cultural change towards French fashions and luxury. Modern historians tend to treat this moral account with caution, while recognising that capital increasingly flowed into government bonds and foreign loans, including loans to Britain, rather than into domestic enterprise. Amsterdam remained a leading financial centre through the eighteenth century until the disruptions of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780 to 1784 and the French invasion of 1795, which ended the Republic and established the Batavian Republic in its place.

Dutch historians have also discussed the term Golden Age itself. Because of its association with colonial violence and slavery, the Amsterdam Museum announced in 2019 that it would cease using the term in its galleries, a decision that prompted public debate. Other institutions retain it, regarding it as a conventional period label. Many historians now use it in a descriptive sense to denote the Republic’s exceptional economic and cultural position, without implying that the age was golden for everyone who lived in or was affected by it.

Legacy

The Republic’s institutions and practices left a lasting imprint on the modern world. Its chartered companies, permanent capital, share markets and public credit provided models that were copied and developed in London and elsewhere. The Exchange Bank’s handling of a stable unit of account, the fiscal machinery that let a small state borrow at low interest, and the commercial law and insurance practices of Amsterdam formed part of the long history of modern finance. Economic historians continue to study the Republic as a test case of how institutions that secure property and lower transaction costs can support growth.

In political thought, the Republic’s experience fed into European debates about federalism, toleration and republicanism. Grotius’s natural law, Spinoza’s arguments for freedom of thought, and the treatises of the de la Court brothers were widely read. The American founders studied the Union of Utrecht, and the authors of the Federalist Papers, in essay number twenty, discussed the weaknesses of the Dutch confederation as a warning against an overly weak central government. The Republic’s practice of toleration, limited and contested as it was, offered contemporaries in Britain, France and Germany an example of a society in which people of several religions lived together under a single government. John Locke wrote his Letter Concerning Toleration in Latin while in exile in the Republic in 1685 and it was first published in Gouda in 1689.

Overseas, the Golden Age left a mixed legacy. Dutch place names and institutions persist in New York and the Hudson valley. Indonesia, Suriname, the Caribbean islands and South Africa were shaped by the company system and the later colonial state, and the history of the VOC and WIC, including the Banda conquest and the slave trade, is now the subject of extensive research and public discussion in the Netherlands and in the former colonies. In 2023 the Dutch king Willem-Alexander apologised for the Netherlands’ role in slavery, following an apology by the Dutch government in December 2022. Japanese rangaku contributed to the country’s later engagement with Western science.

The art of the period has been continuously collected and studied since the eighteenth century, and works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and their contemporaries are among the most widely recognised in Western art. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem hold the largest public collections in the Netherlands, while much of the work is dispersed across collections in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The modern image of the Dutch Golden Age, with its canal houses, sober merchants and luminous interiors, derives substantially from these paintings, a fact that has prompted historians to distinguish the painted record from the more complex reality of the society that produced it.

The period also left traces in other languages. English absorbed many Dutch words in this era, particularly from shipping and trade, among them yacht, skipper, sloop, cruise and freebooter, as well as words from art such as landscape, easel and etch. In North America, Dutch settlers contributed cookie, boss and stoop, and the place names Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bowery derive from Breukelen, Haarlem and the Dutch word for a farm, bouwerij.

The Dutch landscape itself carries the period’s marks: the canal ring of Amsterdam, the gridded polders of the Beemster, the town halls and almshouses, the windmills of the Zaan and the dykes and sluices maintained by water boards that still levy taxes and elect governing bodies. The struggle with water, carried forward from the drainage of the lakes to the Zuiderzee Works of the twentieth century and the Delta Works after the flood of 1953, continues to define the country’s relationship with its land.

The Dutch Golden Age remains significant for historians because it shows how a small, federal, commercial society, with limited natural resources and constantly at war, could attain for several generations a position of economic and cultural leadership out of proportion to its size. The circumstances that made this possible, the collapse of Antwerp, the war with Spain, the openness of its towns to immigrants, the strength of its institutions of credit and the energy of its trade, were particular to their time. Explaining how they combined, and why their effects faded, remains one of the central questions in the economic and cultural history of early modern Europe.