essay

THE NOBLE COURTS, city-states, and prince-practitioners who employed Renaissance technologists to build cities, wage war, entertain courts, and display dynasties were not using technologies principally to create wealth or improve industries. Rather, they were using their wealth—from land rents, banking, and mercenary activities—to pay for the creation and deployment of technologies. 1 This practice shaped the character ofthat era's technology and—through the resulting cathedrals and sculptures, urban palaces and rural villas, court automata and printed books—the character of Renaissance society and culture as well. We have seen how this occurred in the growth and expansion of the mining industry in central Europe around 1600 and in the profusion of court-sponsored technology books on mining.

The imperatives of creating wealth reshaped the content and purpose of technology during the great expansion of commerce across Europe. In Venice, Florence, and other Italian city-states commercial activities began expanding even before the Renaissance, of course, but the commercial era was fully realized a bit later in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. Each of these three cities was the node for far-flung trading networks, constructed when commercial traders following up on the pioneering "voyages of discovery" created maritime trading routes to Asia, Africa, and the New World. Even though no single year marks a shift from one era to another, the influence of Renaissance-era courts was on the wane by around 1600 while the influence of commerce was distinctly rising.2 It is impor• tant to emphasize the historical distinctiveness of the commercial era and to avoid reducing it to an "early" but somehow failed version of industrial

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capitalism. As we shall see, the era of commerce was thoroughly capitalistic but not industrial in character. The imperatives of commerce included carrying goods cheaply, processing them profitably, and funding the means for shipping and trading. Technologies such as innovative ship designs, import-processing techniques, and a host of financial innovations reflected these commercial impulses, just as 'attack chariots, court automata, and princely palaces expressed the court vision of Renaissance patrons of technologies.

The age of commerce, anticipated in Spain and Portugal as well as in China and India, found its fullest expression during the seventeenthcentury Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. The Dutch Republic at this time was reminiscent of Renaissance Italy in that all manner of cultural activities flourished to "the fear of some, the envy of others and the wonder of all their neighbors." Indeed, the many parallels between the older centers in the south of Europe and the rising commercial centers in the north led Fernand Braudel to posit long-term "secular trends" in which each city-state had, as it were, its historical moment at the center. Yet such a view, however appealing as an overarching world-historical theme, suggests a troubling inevitability about historical change and undervalues how the Dutch developed new technologies to capture the leading economic role in Europe and construct a trading empire of unprecedented global scope. 3

Venice had dominated trade in the Mediterranean, while Spain captured the riches of the New World; but the Dutch Republic became the center of a worldwide trading and processing network that linked slaves from Africa, copper from Scandinavia, sugar from Brazil, and tea and spices from Asia, with maritime, processing, and trading technologies at home. It was an improbable success for a tiny state that lacked manpower, raw materials, and energy sources. "It seems a wonder to the world," puzzled one English writer of the time, "that such a small country, not fully so big as two of our best shires [counties], having little natural wealth, victuals, timber or other necessary ammunitions, either for war or peace, should notwithstanding possess them all in such extraordinary plenty that besides their own wants (which are very great) they can and do likewise serve and sell to other Princes, ships, ordnance, cordage, corn, powder, shot and what not, which by their industrious trading they gather from all the quarters of the world."4 This chapter examines how citizens of the Dutch Republic shaped technologies in the pursuit of commerce and how commercial technologies shaped their culture.

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Technology and Trade

The Rhine River is the central geographical feature that propelled the socalled Low Countries to economic preeminence even before the seventeenth century and continues to shape commercial prospects there today. The Rhine begins with melting ice in the mountains of central Switzerland and runs 800 miles through the heart of western Europe. The river passes in turn through the cities of Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Rotterdam before exiting to the North Sea. Its several tributaries connect to a score of commercial centers, including Antwerp, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Zurich. Even today, the Rhine's vessel-tonnage nearly exceeds the tonnage carried on the Mississippi River and St. Lawrence Seaway combined. Handling this flow of cargo occupies two of the largest ports in the world, Rotterdam and Antwerp, which organize the multifarious businesses of offloading, processing, and reexporting the commerce of all Europe. Yet, these basic port and processing functions have changed surprisingly little since the Dutch Golden Age, allowing, of course, for the gargantuan scale of today's port complexes. A high level of trading activity occurred early on; by 1550 imports for the Low Countries were already four times those for England and France in per capita terms.

The Dutch Republic as a political and cultural entity took form in the wake of Luther's Bible-printing Reformation. Beginning in the 1570s, Catholic Spain and the Protestant core of the northern Low Countries, the United Provinces, fought for control over the region, then part of the Spanish empire. Spain's dominance over the southern provinces of Flanders and Brabant, the campaign for which included its recapture of Antwerp in 1585, prompted many merchants and craftsmen, including the theologically flexible printer Christopher Plantin (see chapter 1) to set up shop elsewhere during these unsettled years. The tide turned, however, when the English Navy defeated Spain's "Invincible" Armada (1588) and thereby removed a certain threat to the Dutch maritime economy. During the next decade, the Dutch blockaded Spanish-occupied Antwerp, cutting off that rival port from North Sea shipping and striking a blow to its leading role in commerce. The Dutch then forcibly reclaimed from Spain the inland provinces surrounding the Zuider Zee,

During these battles Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch military commander, turned handheld firearms into winning weapons. He transformed the matchlock muskets of the time into formidable battlefield weapons through systematic drilling of his soldiers. Maurice divided his

troops into small units and separated the loading, aiming, and firing of a musket Into forty-two individual steps, each one activated on the battle field by a particular shouted command. For instance, steps eleven to sixteen directed each soldier: 'Chold up your musket and present; give fire; take down your musket and carry it with your rest [pole that supported musket during firing]; uncock your match; and put it again betwixt your fingers; blow your [firing] pan." Maurice drilled his soldiers to form revolv ing ranks in battle: in the protected rear rank, reloading their muskets; in the middle, preparing to fire; in the front, firing a coordinated volley at the enemy; and then falling back in orderly fashion to reload. Drilled to make fewer mistakes, the disciplined Dutch soldiers, when directed, let loose deadly barrages of musket balls, The Spaniards fell in droves.5

As a result of Maurice's military victories, the newly formed Dutch Republic in 1609 secured an advantageous truce with Spain that granted it political independence. The new political confederation comprised the maritime provinces (Zeeland, Holland, and Friesland, which had federated thirty years earlier) and the inland provinces to the north. They were assertively Protestant. The southern provinces (more or less today's Belgium) remained under the control of Catholic Spain. "This had disastrous effects on the once wealthy economies of Brabant, Flanders, and the Walloon provinces," writes economic historian Joel Mokyr. "Spanish mercenaries devastated the land, a huge tax burden crippled the economy, and the relentless persecution of Protestants prompted thousands of highly skilled artisans to flee abroad, where they strengthened their homeland's competitors."6

Those fleeing the Spanish-controlled lands included craftsmen and sailors as well as merchants and financiers. Walloon exiles introduced new mills for the "fulling," or finishing, of woolen cloth at Leiden and Rotterdam, in 1585 and 1591, respectively. Many merchants fleeing the Spanishdominated lands initially went to northwestern Germany, then settled in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, Walloon exiles were among the leading shareholders in the Dutch East India Company (discussed below). Walloons and other groups who had suffered religious persecution welcomed the climate of religious tolerance in the Dutch Republic, exceptional in Europe at the time, which extended across the spectrum of Protestant sects and included even Catholics and Jews. Jews became leading figures in Amsterdam's tobacco and diamond trades.

Louis de Geer (158"1652) numbered among the emigrant merchants and technologists whose influence was felt from Portugal to Prague, es-

pecially in the fields of fortification, urban drainage, mining, and harbor engineering. De Geer; originally from a family, began his career in the Dutch city of Dordrecht trading a mix of goods, then moved to Sweden. De Geer's extensive involvement with Sweden exemplifies the substantial Dutch technical influence in northern Europe as well as a subtle but pronounced shift from court to commerce. Sweden at the time was seeking to develop its rich mineral holdings in iron and especially in copper, much in demand for coinage and cannons. The king of Sweden chartered the Royal Company (in 1619) to win back control of the copper trade, which had slipped to Amsterdam. Since Sweden's state finances were dependent on copper, the trade was a matter of some urgency. This court-sanctioned venture did not succeed, however, and in the next decade control of the Swedish copper industry passed firmly into Dutch hands. Dutch investors before and after the Royal Company's failure provided investment capital to Sweden that required repayment in copper, which tilted the field against the crown and toward commerce.

Louis de Geer played a leading role not only in routing Swedish copper exports to Amsterdam but also in transferring valuable mining and smelting technologies to Sweden. In Stockholm, de Geer created the largest industrial complex in Sweden, making iron and brass, ships and ropes, cannon and cannon balls. The garmakeriet method for refining copper was an import from the southern Netherlands, as was the vallonsmidet (literally, "Walloon smithy") process for ironmaking. Another Dutchman, with the backing of the Swedish king, set up a famous iron works at Eskilstuna that grew into another of Sweden's major industrial districts. At the peak of its copper industry, around 1650, Sweden accounted for fully half of Europe's total copper production. The only other nation with substantial copper production at the time was Japan, and Dutch merchants controlled its copper trade, too.7

The emergence of specialized ship designs in the Netherlands was another early signal that the Dutch understood how to bring technology and trade together in the pursuit of commerce. Most seafaring nations either possessed the raw materials needed for wooden shipbuilding or had ready access to colonies that did, while the Dutch had neither. Among the necessary raw materials for wooden shipbuilders were, obviously, timber for masts and planking; resin, pitch, and turpentine (naval stores) for waterproofing; and rope for rigging. In a sense Dutch shipbuilding began with wheels of cheese, which along with other export goods, including salt, wine, and herring, were shipped off to Norway and the Baltic coun-

tries in exchange for timber and naval stores. Dutch economic dominance relied on savvy trading, such as that practiced by the merchants of Dordrecht and Zeeland, the leading exporters of German and French wines, respectively. The real key, though, was in spotting where a low-value import such as salt from Spain, Portugal, or France could be processed into a high-value export. In this respect the salt-refining industry in Zeeland was an important precursor to the distinctive and wide-ranging "traffcs" system, discussed below:

An innovative, purpose-built ship secured to the Dutch an early and thorough dominance of the North Sea herring fishery. The full-rigged herring buss was an unusually large fishing vessel—with a crew of fifteen or more—and was virtually a self-contained factory, designed to stay out in open seas for up to eight weeks and through the roughest weather while carrying the salt and barrels and manpower needed to gut, salt, and pack the freshly caught herring right on board (fig. 2.1). By the 1560s the northern provinces already had around 500 herring busses; the largest brought home 140 tons of packed fish. Yet the real distinction of the Dutch herring fishery was not so much its volume of production but rather the consistently high quality of the packed herring and their correspondingly high trading value—characteristics that one finds again and again in the Dutch commercial era and that sharply distinguish it from the industrial era that followed.

Use of the factorylike herring busses was just one of the distinctive Dutch maritime activities. The province of Holland at that time had 1,800 seagoing ships. (Amsterdam's 500 ships easily exceeded Venice's fleet of seagoing ships, estimated at 300 at its peak around 1450.) The labor force required just for this shipping fleet was perhaps 30,000 men, not count ing the thousands of men needed to build the ships, ngwng, and sails and to move the off-loaded goods within the country. This shift of labor out of the agricultural sector, a defining feature of "modern" economies, relied on the large imports of Baltic grain that allowed Dutch rural workers to specialize in exportable goods, like cheese and butter, further fanning the export trade. For a small population—the Dutch Republic had two million at its height in the seventeenth century—such an exportoriented agriculture was indispensable.ß

The Dutch effected their most brilliant departure from traditional ship designs in the field of commercial trading vessels. "English shipping in the late sixteenth century was, generally speaking, multi-purpose and, being often used for voyages to the Mediterranean, tended to be strongly

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FIG. 2.1. Dutch Herring Buss.

Something like a fishing vessel married to a factory, the herring buss carried all the salt, wooden barrels, and labor needed to transform freshly caught North Sea herring into a marketable commodity. Courtesy of The Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass.

constructed, well manned, and well armed," writes Jonathan Israel. "Dutch shipbuilders, by contrast, concentrated on low-cost hull forms that maximized cargo space, discarded armaments, and used only the simplest rigging. Dutch shipping was designed for minimal crews and maximum economy."9 Venice's ships were, even more than Britain's, tailored to the commerce of the pirate-infested Mediterranean (and given the recurrent European wars and the long-running contest with the Ottoman Turks, one country's detestable "pirates" might be another country's heroic privateers). Spanish ship designs were oriented to the essential imperial lifeline of the New World silver trade, where heavily armed sailing ships packed with bullion plied the Atlantic. The same Spanish ship might, between silver runs, be ordered to shuttle goods or ferry soldiers to a European port. The higher costs of moving goods with armed ships, where space for soldiers and weaponry crowded out cargo capacity, hampered the commercial prospects of both Venice and Spain.

The famous Dutch fluytsc,lup was in several ways the precise embodunent of commerce, The fluyt, a distinctive cargo ship design which dominated northern European shipping for a century or more, emerged from the city of Hoorn in the mid-1590s (fig. 2.2). This was no graceful clipper ship with sleek lines and tall masts, The fluyt was instead stubby and squat: its sail area was small and its full-rigged masts short compared to its capacious cargo hold. The vessel was ploddingly slow, yet with its excellent handling qualities and the extensive use of pulleys and blocks, a small crew of around a dozen could easily control the yards and sails. Another economy was effected by the use of cheap light pine in the vessel, except for the heavy hull, made of oak to resist salt water corrosion.

The basic fluyt design sacrificed the standard reinforced construction, which every armed ship needed to support the weight and recoil of cannons, in exchange for increased cargo space and simplicity of handling. The resulting ship—an artifact shaped by commerce—was exquisitely well adapted to the peaceful trade of northern Europe, if not for the more dangerous waters of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. Since transit taxes in the Baltic were levied according to a ship's deck area (rather than its cargo capacity) Dutch fluyt builders logically enough reduced the topdeck's area while retaining a large cargo hold underneath. In fact, surviving models of Dutch fluyts from this era are so narrow-decked, widebodied, and round-shaped at the bow and stern that they appear to be whimsically«inflated" versions of real ships; nevertheless, these models agree closely with contemporaneous documentation of the ships' actual shapes and sizes.

Following on these innovations Dutch shipbuilders practiced a high degree of design specialization during the seventeenth century. In contrast With most other European countries, where military ships and commercial ships were used interchangeably, Dutch shipbuilders segregated military and commercial shipbuilding while segmenting the basic fluyt design. "The output of private shipbuilding yards was so much greater than that of naval yards that the republican Admiralties found it almost impossible to meddle in the affairs of commercial shipbuilders," writes Richard Unger. In the Netherlands, "the design of warships was rather in fluenced by successful experiments with merchant vessels, the inverse of what happened in the rest of Europe." 10

The Dutch East India Company (discussed below) had its own ship building yard) where it evolved a distinctive broad-hulled design for the famous East Indiaman. Also known as a retourschip, this hybrid vessel was

FIG. 2.2. Dutch Cargo Fluyt.

Line drawing of a fluyt; the original vessel was 100 feet long. Courtesy of The Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass.

a larger and more heavily armed version of the pinnance, itself an armed version of the fluyt. But while most fluyts were no larger than 500 tons displacement, the largest retourschip displaced 1,200 tons and might be 45 meters long. Meanwhile, Dutch commercial shipbuilders tailored the basic fluyt design to many special requirements. Whaling fluyts had double-thick bows to protect against the ice in far northern waters; timber fluyts had special hatches to permit the loading of entire trees; and the so-called Oostvaarder fluyts were specially designed for cheating the Danish king out of taxes. For a time, until the Danish saw through the scheme, the Oostvaarders had bizarre hourglass-shaped topdecks that were extra narrow precisely at the high midpoint where the all-important tax measurement was taken.

The commerce-inspired designs for herring busses and cargo-carrying fluyts are impressive evidence of the Dutch responsiveness to commerce. Yet the real distinction of the Dutch was to take a set of innovations and make them into broad society-wide developments that shaped Dutch culture not only at the top class of wealthy merchants and investors but also down through the merchant and artisan classes. Even rural workers milking cows for cheese exports participated in the international trading economy. The distinctive trekvaarten network of horse-towed barges provided scheduled passenger service throughout the western region of the Netherlands, enabling merchants and traders to travel to and from a business meeting within the day. The Dutch impulse to broaden the commercial economy manifested itself in uniquely broad ownership of ships and, as we will soon see, of much else. ll

At other European shipping centers of the time, the owning of a single ship had been divided among three or four investors. Impressed with how multiple-share ownership helped raise money and spread the risk of losses, the Dutch took the practice much further. For the bulk-carrying fluyts, as well as for fishing, whaling, and timber-carrying ships, ownership of sixteenth, thirty-second, or even sixty-fourth shares became common. At his death in 1610, one Amsterdam shipowner left fractional shares in no fewer than 22 ships. Middle-level merchants connected with the bulk trades were typically the collective owners of the fluyts, Technology investments similarly took collective forms, as when twelve Amsterdam brewers shared the cost for mechanizing malt grinding or in the extensive multishare ownership of linseed oil mills in the Zaan district (see below). It is worth emphasizing that, although history remembers the wealthiest merchants who patronized the famous painters and built the finest town houses, the Dutch economy, in shipping and in many other sectors, got much of its vitality from an unprecedentedly broad base of investment and activity. In short order, the Dutch led all the rest of Europe in shipbuilding. A contemporary estimate had it that in the late 1660s fully three-quarters of the 20,000 ships used in the European maritime trade were Dutch, with England and France falling into distant -second and third places. 12

Creating Global Capitalism

While the British East India Company had its heyday somewhat later, presiding, as we will see, over nineteenth-century British imperialism in India, its Dutch counterpart (1602—1798) was quick off the mark. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company's economic reach and political influence spread from its singular port at Nagasaki, Japan, clear across the Far East to Yemen in the Middle East. The company's trading patterns—a web of intra-Asian routes in addition to bilateral Asian-European routes—differed fundamentally from the simple

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bilateral trading practiced by Europeans since the days of the legendary Silk Route. By comparison, the "global" trading empire of which Spain boasted was really mostly an Atlantic one; from the 1530s onward, its showpiece West Indies trade centered on extracting silver from Mexico and Peru. Spanish trading in the Pacific focused on the Philippines, whose trade was bound for Mexico. Goods from the Philippines reached Spain only after they were transshipped across land in Mexico and then put on a second vessel and sent onward across the Atlantic. In the 1620s the Spanish lost their dominance over the Chinese silk trade and were soon expelled from Japan. At the British East India Company significant intraAsian trade emerged only in the 1830s. At the height of Dutch activities in

Asia during the mid-seventeenth century,

Bengal sugar and Taiwan sugar were sold in Persia and in Europe, while silk from Persia, Bengal, Tongking, and China was sold in Japan and in Europe. One key set of exchanges could be traced as follows: Peppery sandalwood, and other Southeast Asian goods were sold in China , and gold, tutenag (a semiprecious alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel], raw silk, and silk fabrics were bought. Much of the raw silk and silk fabrics was sold in Japan, and the silver earned, along with the gold and tutenag from China, was taken to India to buy cotton fabrics, which were the principal goods that could be exchanged for spices in Indonesia.

The their East India Company in the Pacific and West India Companyin the Atlantic, coupled with the extensive trading in Europe and Africa—in effect created the first truly global economy.

Underlying this global commercial expansion were extensive Dutch innovations in the basic institutions of commercial capitalism, including commodity exchanges, a public exchange bank, and a stock exchange. If the Dutch did not exactly invent capitalism, they created the first society where the Principles of commerce and capitalism pervaded the culture. Capitalism is typically traced back to the merchants of Venice, and it is true that at least six other European cities had commodity exchanges during the sixteenth century. But while these exchanges had typically set only regional prices, Amsterdam's exchanges became the world center of commodity pricing and trade flows. The commodity traders' guild began publishing weekly lists of prices in 1585. Within a few years, the Amsterdam commodity exchanges—for grain, salt, silks, sugar, and more—had surpassed their regional rivals and become a set of global exchanges. By 1613 the Amsterdam Exchange was lodged in a new building, where a well-

FIG. 2.3. Delivery of a Futures Contract.

Amsterdam's financial markets dealt extensively with futures contracts in grain, wool, silks, and even the "buying of herrings before they be catched.'S Courtesy of The Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass.

organized guild ensured honest trades by tightly regulating its 300 licensed brokers. Grain merchants soon built a separate grain exchange. By 1634 the commodities exchange's weekly bulletins Set authoritative prices across Europe for 359 commodities; the exchange added nearly 200 more in the next half-century.

The growth of the Amsterdam exchanges can be measured not only in their size, scope, and specialization but also in their financial sophistication. For example, futures contracts emerged, speculating on grain that had not yet been delivered and the "buying of herrings before they be catched." in time, Amsterdam merchants were purchasing such varied goods as Spanish and German wools and Italian silks up to twenty-four months in advance of their arrival. Issuing maritime insurance became yet another financial activity linked to global trade. At least until London in the 1700s (see chapter 3), there was simply no rival to Amsterdam in the breadth, depth, and refinement of its financial markets. !4

The rising volume and complexity of trading in physical commodi-

ties depended on sophisticated means of trading money. The Amsterdam Wisselbank, or exchange bank, founded in 1609, was the first public bank outside Italy and was without peer in northern Europe until similar banks were organized in Hamburg and London, in 1619 and 1694, respectively. Before the advent of exchange banks, a merchant needing to pay for a delivery of foreign goods might visit a money-changer to purchase sufficient foreign currency. Y%ere possible, merchants usually preferred so-called bills of exchange, which were in effect a merchant's paper promise to pay the bearer a certain sum of money on demand. However, bills of exchange issued by merchants circulated at a profit-sapping discount that varied with the trustworthiness of the merchant and the trading distance.

The Amsterdam Wisselbank slashed these cumbersome transaction costs. In essence, it provided a means for merchants to quickly and efficiently pay bills, backed by its huge pool of capital. By 1650 a merchant's deposit into the Wisselbank, because of the certainty of getting payment in settling an account, commanded a premium (not discount) of 5 percent. Secrecy surrounded the Wisselbank's accounts; an estimate from the early eighteenth century put its holdings in coin or specie at an astounding 300 million guilders, although modern scholars believe the bank held no more than one-tenth this amount. This deep pool of exchange capital resulted in a ready measure of confidence: Dutch interest rates were half those in England and an even smaller fraction of those in France and Germany. This meant that a Dutch merchant borrowing money to purchase goods paid substantially lower interest charges and pocketed the difference. As one Englishman put the matter in 1672, low Dutch interest rates "hath robbed us totally of all trade not inseparably annexed to this Kingdom.

It would be a mistake, even in the face of this determined financial innovation, to see the Dutch solely as sober paragons of economic calculation. After all, in the 1630s the Dutch fostered the great tulip mania, certainly the most colorful economic "bubble" the world has ever seen. Whatever the intrinsic value of a flower bulb, crazed Dutch traders bid tulip prices to remarkable heights. Already by 1633 an entire house in the shipbuilding town of Hoorn was traded for three rare tulips. More to the point, tulip trading embodied several of the classic Dutch financial techniques, including futures contracts, commodity pricing, and multipleshare ownership. Traditionally tulip bulbs had changed hands only during the months from June to September when the bulbs were "lifted" from the soil after flowering and were available for inspection. The first step toward a futures market in tulips was when traders, sensibly enough, began accepting a future delivery of a particular tulip bulb; a note on a slip of paper promised delivery when the bulb was lifted the following June.

The circulation of these valuable slips of paper seems quickly to have gotten out of hand. It was diffcult to know, in the absence of any regulatory scheme, whether a given slip of paper represented a '"real" tulip in the soil or merely the hope of a seller's obtaining one in the future. An increasing number of traders cared not at all to possess a physical bulb but simply to buy these notes low and sell them high. Other tulip trading techniques modeled on the commodity exchanges were the elaboration of weight-based pricing and the distinction between "piece" and "pound" goods. The most valuable bulbs were always sold as a «piece" good, after 1635 invariably priced according to their weight in "aces" (around onenyentieth of a gram), while aggregate lots of the less valuable bulbs were traded as ""pound" goods similar to the practice in trading commodified grain. Finally, in a move that made tulips more like ships than flowers, at least one Amsterdam grower sold a half share in three expensive bulbs to a hopeful customer.

These financial practices, fanned by greed and fear, pushed tulip prices to a sharp peak in February 1637. In the first week of that month an exceptionally fine harvest of tulip bulbs, owned outright by the surviving children of an Alkmaar tulip grower named Wouter Winkel, was auc ttoned with great fanfare. The prize in the collection was a mother bulb, including a valuable offset, Of the variety Violetten Admirael van Enkhuisen, for which a private buyer paid 5,200 guilders, while the most valuable bulbs auctioned publicly were two Viceroys that fetched 4,200 and 3,000 guilders. Dozens of other bulbs, both piece and pound goods, commanded record prices. (At the time, 5,000 guilders would purchase a large townhouse in Amsterdam while the lesser sum Of 3,000 guilders, as one contemporary pamphleteer enumerated it, would purchase 2 lasts of wheat [around 24 tons], 4 lasts of rye, 4 well-fed oxen, 8 well-fed pigs, 12 well-fed sheep, 2 oxheads of wine, 4 tons of eight-guilder beer, 2 tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, 1 bed with accessories, 1 stack of clothes, and 1 silver chalice. And a boat to load the goods into.) Altogether, Winkel's prime lot of tulips brought in the stupendous sum of 90,000 guilders. 16

One might guess that tulip traders at the height of the mania, while calculating and profit-minded, were far from sober. While tulip trading in earlier years had been the province of wealthy connoisseurs, the runup in tulip prices in the 1630s drew a large number of fortune seekers into the trade. Instead of the tightly regulated commodity exchanges or the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, which opened in 1610 and oversaw a set twohour trading day, the trading floor for tulips consisted of the back rooms of inns, where trading might extend from ten o'clock in the morning until the early hours of the next day. With wine for the wealthy, and beer and cheap spirits for everyone else, Dutch taverns had long-established traditions of heavy social drinking. "All these gentlemen of the Netherlands," complained one Frenchman, "have so many rules and ceremonies for getting drunk that I am repelled as much by the discipline as by the excess." Traditionally a center of beer brewing, Haarlem emerged as a center of tulip trading also; its taverns served up 40,000 pints of beer each day, onethird of the city's output—not bad for a population of just 30,000 men, women, and children. The combination of tulip trading and taverns is no coincidence. C'This trade," offered one contemporary account, "must be done with an intoxicated head, and the bolder one is the better." 17

In the same month that the Winkel bulbs drew their astronomical prices, the price of tulips collapsed, wiping out many down-market tulip speculators. Very shortly, the buzz about priceless tulip bulbs decayed into a squabble over worthless tulip futures. The crash had little effect on the mainstream commodity exchanges, the stock exchange, or Wisselbank. During the same years as the tulip mania, speculation was rampant in shares of the United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). The VOC represented a typically Dutch solution to the problems of importing spices from the East Indies and contesting the dominance of Portugal and Spain, Beginning in the 1590s, Dutch merchants had flocked into the lucrative East Indian trade. The states of Holland and Zeeland offered them not only free import duties but also free firearms. By 1601 there were fourteen separate Dutch fleets comprising sixty-five ships, all plying East Indian waters. The economic consequences of this free-for-all, however, were ominous. The prices Dutch traders paid for pepper in the East Indies had doubled over the previous six years, the prices they charged to Dutch consumers back home had fallen, and their profits had tumbled,

This ruinous competition came to an end when, at the merchants' re-

quest, the Dutch federal government assembled the directors of the numerous trading companies at The Hague. In 1602 the conference created the VOC. It was a state-supported, joint-stock trading monopoly, with a decentralized federal structure. The VOC's four "chambers" raised separate capital and kept separate books and chose separate directors. And even though Amsterdam claimed half the total votes of the VOC's board of directors, because of that city?s leading role in financing the existing East Indies trade, the prospect of Amsterdam's having such a large voting bloc went against the pervasive preference for federalism and decentralized power. Amsterdam got eight of seventeen voting seats. Four seats went to Zeeland, two each to the North Quarter (Hoorn and Enkhuizen) and South Holland (Delft and Rotterdam), with the last seat rotating among the three non-Amsterdam partners. The VOC's founding capitalization of 6.4 million guilders was comparable to the value of 1,000 large town houses. Over half of this total capitalization (57 percent) came from the Amsterdam chamber. While the richest of Amsterdam's native merchant elite invested sums of 12,000 to 30,000 guilders, Walloons exiled from the southern Netherlands made the very largest individual investments, contributing sums of from 18,000 to 85,000 guilders. 18

The VOC was much more than a harmless Dutch spice-trading cartel. It was in fact intended to break Spain and Portugal's political and trading dominance in Asia, and the VOC from its founding was granted wideranging commercial, military, and political responsibilities. The Dutch federal government gave it warships and an annual subsidy, raised to 200,000 guilders in the mid-1610s. The warships worked wonders. "The Dutch ships were very large and tall, and each carried more than a thousand guns and small arms; they blocked the whole strait," wrote one beleaguered Chinese offcial. Within three years of its founding, the VOC wrested control of the legendary Spice Islands from the Portuguese and thereby cornered the world trade in cloves, mace, and nutmeg. Further gains in Asia—effecting a network of alliances with local rulers in southern India and the Spice Islands—pushed VOC share prices on the Amsterdam Exchange above 200, or double their face value. However, the independence-making truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain in 1609, because it implied a resurgence of trade and influence by Spain and Portugal, sent VOC shares down sharply; they did not recover for years.19

The key to the lucrative spice trade, as the European rivals understood, was in Asia itself. India in the preindustrial era had a thriving cotton industry, and its cloth could be traded for spices. On the southeast coast of India and on the innumerable islands of what is now Indonesia, each of the trading countries sought to establish trading alliances; and when these alliances were betrayed, they tried unarmed trading "factories" (warehouselike buildings where "factors"—traders—did business). When these were attacked, they built heavily fortified factories garrisoned with soldiers. The Dutch, backed by its fleet of forty-odd warships, erected a massive stone fortress at Pulicat, in the southeast of India, that became the leading European factory in the region and the centerpiece of Dutch control of the Indian cotton trade. By 1617 there were twenty Dutch fortressfactories across Asia, The Portuguese too built fortress-factories in India, at Goa and Ceylon; the Spaniards, also, in the Philippines; while the English went after the Spice Islands. These "factories" sometimes finished cotton cloth imported from the countryside and as such can be considered the first cotton-textile factories in the world.20

Beginning in the 1620s, the VOC created a vast intra-Asian trading network. Not gold or silver bullion but goods were the currency of exchange. "Shipping fine spices, Chinese silks and porcelain, and Japanese copper to India, the Company purchased cotton textiles [in India] which it then sold in [Indonesia] for pepper and fine spices. In the same way, spices, Chinese silks, Japanese copper, and also coffee from Mocha helped pay for the VOCs purchases of silk and drugs [opium] in Persia. Pepper and spices also supplemented silver in the Company's purchases of Chinese wares, on Taiwan." M/hen in the 1630s the Japanese government restricted its merchants' conduct of foreign trade (one of several harsh measures to preserve its court-based culture), the Dutch took over Japan's active silk and copper trades. As of 1640, the Dutch trading factory at Nagasaki was the sole remaining European trade link with all of Japan. VOC share prices, scarcely registering the collapse of the tulip mania, climbed all the way to 500. 21

It was also in the go-ahead decade of the 1620s that a second Dutch overseas company was organized. The strategic aim of the West India Company, created in 1621—24, was to secure Atlantic-based trading routes between West Africa and the West Indies (from Brazil to Cuba). Like the VOC it was a state-sanctioned trade monopoly federated among five regional "chambers," Even more than the VOC, the West India Company drew investors from outside Amsterdam to supply its 7.1 million guilders in starting capital. Such inland cities as Leiden, Utrecht, Dordrecht, and Groningen together invested substantially more than the city of Amsterdam. Amsterdam once again had eight votes, but this time it was out of an expanded total of nineteen directors. While the VOC dealt with spices and cotton, the West India Company traded in slaves and sugar.22

The West India Company focused initially on West Africa and the trade of Swedish copperware for Guinea gold. In this way copper became part of a far-flung trading network. Whereas in the early 1620s 2 ounces ofAfrican gold traded for 70 or 80 pounds of copperware, the West India Company's competition-dampmg monopoly allowed it to exchange just 35 pounds of copper for the same amount of gold. (From an African perspective, gold was thus worth half as much in copperware.) In its first thirteen years, the West India Company imported 12 million guilders in Guinea gold, handsomely exceeding its starting capital; in addition, it raided more than 500 Spanish and Portuguese vessels, The company in one stroke netted a whopping 11 million guilders when in 1628 its ships captured an entire Spanish silver fleet off Cuba, consequently paralyzing the silver-dependent Spanish imperial economy. In response to these gains, the company's share price around 1630 topped even the VOC's. For a time it looked as if the company's booty would actually pay for its heavy expenditures for 220 large warships, a vast store of guns and munitions, and a heavy burden of wages and salaries.

The West India Company planted a profitable sugar colony on the northeast coast of Brazil, on land wrenched from Portugal in 1635. Cultivating sugar demanded a large labor force, which the Dutch West African trade was well positioned to supply in the form of slaves. "The Dutch now controlled the international sugar trade for the first time and, as a direct consequence; also the Atlantic slave trade. Plantations and slaves went together," writes Israel. During the decade 1636—45 the West India Company auctioned nearly 25,000 African slaves in its Brazilian territory, while the price of sugar in Amsterdam slid downward 20 percent because of the new supply. But in 1645 the Portuguese swarmed up from southern Brazil, staged a series of raids that forced the Dutch back into their fortifications and effectively ended Dutch sugar planting on the mainland. When Dutch shipments of Brazilian sugar came to a close in 1646, sugar prices in Amsterdam climbed 40 percent in one year. As a sugar colony, Netherlands Brazil never recovered; and West India Company shares collapsed. Dutch sugar and slave traders shifted their focus to the islands of the Caribbean. From 1676 to 1689, the Dutch shipped 20,000 black slaves from West Africa to the West Indies; most of them were deposited at Curaqao (off the coast of Venezuela), whence these hapless souls were parceled out across the sugar-cultivating region.23

The Great Traffic"

The material plenty of the Dutch Golden Age was created from a heady mix of shipping, financingy trading, warring, and slaving that generated

Title page from a book

published

in

Amsterdam

in

1697.

Courtesy

of

Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass.

a constant stream of raw materials coming into the Dutch Republic. Yet however impressive or sordid these trading activities seem today, they were not the mainstay of the Dutch commercial economy. Dutch preeminence came through the targeted processing and selective reexporting of the traded materials. 'CA more or less unique sector emerged, often referred to as trafieken (traffics) as opposed to fabrieken (manufactures)," writes Joel Mokyr. Among the "traffics" with links to the maritime sector were sugar refining, papermaking, brewing, distilling, soap boiling, cotton printing, and tobacco processing, as well as the complex of activities related to shipbuilding (fig. 2.4). Other highly specialized activities in which the Dutch gained global dominance include processing dyes and glazes, cutting and polishing diamonds, grinding glass lenses, refining whale oil, bleaching linens, and dyeing and finishing broadcloth. The making of highly precise nautical compasses, maps, and chronometers reinforced Dutch maritime dominance. Dutch control over the Swedish copper trade led at least four Dutch cities to set up copper mills, often with skilled artisans or equipment from Germany. For each of these traffics, mastering special techniques and attaining superior quality were more important than achieving high levels of output. Indeed, high wages, relatively low volumes, and high-quality production typified the traffics, in sharp contrast with early industrial technologies, which emphasized low wages, high volumes, and low-quality production (see chapter 3) .24

The "great traffic" was surprisingly wide reaching. Amsterdam was the largest city in the Dutch Republic but not by much. Its population just exceeded Haarlem and Leiden together, and these two towns often teamed With others to outvote Amsterdam on matters relating to foreign affairs and trade. The varied stream of imported goods strongly shaped which cities and which industries would thrive. For instance, although Amsterdam lobbied for a peace settlement with Spain from the 1620s on—because the war harmed its European trade—the country as a whole pursued a policy of prolonging the war, following the lead of Haarlem and Leiden, which were in league with several inland provinces, The textile towns of Haarlem and Leiden believed that prolonging war helped them compete with their chief rival, Spanish-occupied Flanders, while the inland towns favored war owing to their heavy investments in the two colonial trading companies. Amsterdam, writes Israel, "was merely the hub of a large clustering of thriving towns, all of which directly participated in the process of Dutch penetration of foreign markets.

Textile towns such as Haarlem and Leiden, no less than the betterknown commercial centers, benefited handsomely from the arrival of exiled Spanish Netherlanders. In the years after 1585 Haarlem prospered with the arrival of Flemish linen-bleachers, who found a ready supply of water and soon began bleaching "'to the highest standards of whiteness then known in Europe." The population of Leiden more than doubled from 1581 to 1600. Initially Leiden focused on lower grades of cloth (says and fustians) produced from cheap imports of Baltic wool. In the 1630s Leiden dramatically expanded its output of high-value lakens, using highquality wool from Spain (see fig. 2.5). "It seems likely that this was in part due to the important technical innovations which were soon to make Leiden fine cloth famous throughout the globe and which gave it its characteristic smoothness of texture," writes Israel. Another high-grade Leiden cloth that experienced rapid growth was camlet, made from

9

Says (Baltic wools

Rashes

Fustians

Camlets (Turkish mohairs)

Lakens (Spanish wools)

1630 1642 1654 1665 1679 1701

FIG. 2.5. Leiden's High-Grade Textiles.

In the early seventeenth century, Leiden's textile industry made middlequality fabrics, such as says (from Baltic wools). By midcentury they increasingly focused on the uprnarket camlets (from Turkish mohairs) and lakens (from superfine Spanish wools). Data from Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 195, 261.

expensive Turkish mohair. By the mid-1650s two-thirds of Leiden's 36,000 textile workers were employed in the making of lakens and camlets; the value of the city's textile output was 9 million guilders, The Dutch at that time took in at least three-quarters of Spain's wool exports and the majority of Turkey's mohair yarn. Significantly, the principal markets for Dutch fine cloth were in just the countries that had produced the raw materials—France, Spain, and Turkey.26

In 1670, when Venice tried to reestablish its fine cloth industry, importing Dutch methods was the only way it could achieve the lightness and smoothness of Leiden fine cloth, which had become the standard demanded by the principal consumers, French observers of the time noted that the Dutch methods used a third less wool and less labor to produce

the same amount of fine cloth. Even lakens from Brabant, once the chief rival, lacked the characteristic smooth finish of the Dutch product. "The technical factor was crucial to both the continuance of Dutch dominance of the Spanish wool trade and the dominance of fine-cloth production itself," states Israel. Other Dutch textile centers that grew to international prominence Included the silk industry of Amsterdam and Haarlem (which gained the skills of exiled French Protestants in the 1680s), the linen-weaving industry in the Twente and Helmond regions, and the sailcanvas industry in Haarlem, Enkhulzen, and the Zaan district.27

It must have been especially galling for the Spanish wool manufacturers to see all that wool slip through their grasp. From the late Middle Ages on, a massive "herding economy" active through much of central Spain tended the famous Merino sheep that grew superfine wool. In the late fifteenth century, the Spanish crown granted merchants in the northern town of Burgos control over the export trade in wool. Using ships from the north coast of Spain, they sent large sacks of washed, but otherwise unfinished wool to England, France, and the southern Netherlands. The Burgos merchants adopted many of the classic Italian financial techniques, such as double-entry bookkeeping, insurance underwriting, and advance purchasing. Domestic wool manufacturers in Segovia, Cordoba, Toledo, Cuenca, and other centers organized regional "putting-out" networks to spin and weave the wool, mostly for domestic markets. The Spanish wool trade flourished until around 1610. At the time when the Dutch economy took off, Spain's wool industry was hampered by high labor costs, creeping inflation, and the absence of technical innovation. A French traveler to Segovia, noting the city's past wealth from "the great commerce in wool and the beautiful cloth that was made there," observed In 1660, '(the city is almost deserted and poor."28

The rise and fall of Dutch sugar-refining shows how dependent the great traffc was on foreign trade. As noted above, Dutch sugar refining expanded in the 1630s when the Dutch briefly controlled northeast Brazil, but the loss of that colony in 1645 forced the Dutch sugar traders to fall back on the Caribbean export trade. By 1662 sugar refining was firmly centered in Arnsterdam; the city had fiftyor more sugar refineries, around half of Europe's total. In addition, there were another dozen sugar refineries located in other Dutch cities. But sugar was too important to be monopolized by any small country. The Dutch lost their largest market for processed sugar when France Imposed restrictive trade policies during the 1660s. By the end of the century, the Dutch had lost leadership in the Caribbean sugar trade to England, with its growing commercial ac-

tivities and its insatiable domestic hunger for sugar. Even so, the English frequently reexported sugar for processing in Amsterdam. (They did the same with tobacco.)29

After 1650 the Dutch traffics expanded in scope. Delft made pottery that simulated the finest Chinese blue porcelain. Gouda specialized in white clay tobacco pipes. And the Zaan, a vast inland estuary stretching from Amsterdam to Haarlem (now filled in) evolved into a major proto industrial district. Already a shipbuilding center, the site of numerous timber-sawing mills, and the world's largest timber depot, the Zaan in the latter part of the seventeenth century became the Dutch center of highquality papermaking and one of two centers for refining whale blubber into soap, lighting fuel, and other products. It also featured rope- and sailmaking concerns and refineries processing animal fats and oils. This district alone had 128 industrial windmills in 1630 and perhaps 400 by the end of the century.30

Surveying the improbable commercial success of the Dutch Republic, one Englishman observed in 1672 that the Dutch had achieved a univer sal reputation for the "exact making of all their native commodities," and that they gave "great encouragement and immunities to the inventors of new manufacturers." Not only had Dutch traders captured commercial control over many key raw materials, including Spanish wool, Turkish mohair yarns, Swedish copper, and South American dyestuffs; the "traffc" system had also erected a superstructure of processing industries that added value to the flow of raw materials. The Dutch conditions of high wages and labor scarcity put a premium on mechanical innovation, the fruits of which were protected by patents. Another economic role taken on by the Dutch state (at the federal, state, and municipal levels) was the close regulation of industry in the form of setting standards for quality and for the packaging of goods.31

Given the commanding heights attained by the Dutch economy during the seventeenth century, many have asked why did it not become the first industrial nation, when that age arrived in the eighteenth century. Three lines of inquiry seem most pertinent: raw materials and energy, international trade, and the traffic industries,32 Economic historians under the sway of British industrialization's coal paradigm often mention that the Dutch Republic lacked coal. While it is true that the Dutch Republic needed to import many raw materials, it did have numerous sources of industrial energy other than coal, including peat, water power, and wind power. Peat—a biological precursor to coal—was extensively used for

reached a breaking point. Whaling voyages decreased, while shipments of West African gold fell. Closer to home, Dutch trade with the Baltic with& ered under stiff competition from the English and Scandinavian fleets.34

These reverses, in tandem with the increasingly protectionist policies of France and England, put great pressure on the "traffics" system. Remarkably, in the years after the 1672 French invasion, there was expansion in several export-oriented industries, including silk, sail cloth, highquality papermaking, linen weaving, and gin distilling. Silk flourished with the arrival of French Protestant Huguenots in the 1680s. But the traffics system as a whole never recovered from the disruption of the invasion. The textile center at Leiden, for example, experienced several sharp declines in its fine-cloth production between 1667 and 1702. The output of camlets, from fine Turkish mohair, fell steadily across this period (see table 2.1). Growth did not resume in the early eighteenth century, even as the English woolen-textile industry was experiencing great leaps in cheaper-grade production (see chapter 3). At Leiden the production of lakens, from fine grades of Spanish wool, fell steadily, from 25,000 pieces around 1700 to a mere 6,700 pieces in 1750.

The wealth-creating imperatives of traders and merchants, boatbuilders and shipowners, sugar refiners and textile makers, and many othfar more diverse cast than the Renaissance court patrons—altered the character of technology during the era of commerce. While choosing, developing, and using technologies with the aim of creating wealth had been an undercurrent before, this era saw the flourishing of an international (if nonindustrial) capitalism as a central purpose for technology. It is really a set of wealth-creating technologies and techniques that distinguishes the Dutch commercial era: no other age and _place combined bulbous cargo-carrying fluyts and factorylike herring busses, large port complexes coupled to buzzing inland cities, the array of added-value "traffc" industries, and the elaboration of world-spanning financial institutions, including exchanges for the trading of stocks and commodities, multishare ownership of ships, and futures markets for herrings, woolens, and for a time tulips.

These technologies not only set the stage for a Dutch commercial hegemony that lasted roughly a century; they also shaped the character of Dutch society and culture at all levels and across the entire countr)4 While the fine arts record the wealthy merchants who owned the Amsterdam townhouses and commissioned portraits from the famous painters, this elite society was really only the tip of the iceberg. Just as commerce permeated Dutch Society and culture, so too did remarkably broad forms of cultural consumption. A famous generation of Oil painters flourished to meet the demands of newly wealthy merchants eager to have themselves and their families appear in portraits (and the profusion of tropical dyes coming from overseas gave pamters economical access to brilliant coloring agents). Scenes from everyday life were much prized. No less a figure than Rembrandt van Rijn, in 'SThe Mill" (1645—48), painted the signature Dutch windmills. The consumption of oil paintings was, in comparative terms, exceptionally widespread. "The most modest shopkeeper had his collection of pictures, and hung them in every room; writes Paul Zumthor. A now-collectable Ruisdael landscape or Steen genre picture then cost about a quarter of the weekly wage of a Leiden textlle worker.35

Wherever one looks—at the diverse stockholders of the two great overseas trading companies, the extensive trekvaarten network, the numerous owners of the trading ships, and even for a few years the distinctly down-market traders of tulips—Dutch commerce engaged the talents and wealth of an exceptionally wide swath of society. The depth and breadth of the changes that these activities represent lent a distinctly mod, ern character to Dutch society, not only in the details of "modern" financial institutions and economic growth patterns, but in the pervasiveness of the effect that commerce and technology had on the society as a whole. By contrast, in England, as we will see in the following chapter, a distinctively industrial society would emerge.