Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History.
So in the last episode, we saw the gentry
and merchant class of the British Isles defeat
the old aristocrat-backed, absolutist monarchy
in the Glorious Revolution, ushering in a
constitutional government.
And this points to a wider development in
European history--and for that matter world
history.
So, we’ve talked a lot in this series about
being able to shift perspectives--to see things
from royal perspectives, or from peasant perspectives,
and so on.
But students of history must also learn how
to shift the lenses through which they look
at the past.
Like, we might look at the past through the
lens of food availability, or through the
lens of visual art, or through the lens of
Marxist theory, and so on.
And the lenses we choose are often about our
present concerns.
The way that we look at the past changes over
time, as the present changes.
And in the present where I’m currently standing,
one of the big questions is how to distribute
power among humans.
So today, we’re going to look at history
through the lens of power--by which I mean,
who gets to decide the ambitions and priorities
of a community, and we’ll see how the distribution
of that power can change over time.
INTRO
So, in the early modern period monarchs could
coordinate national defense, and they could
try to collect taxes and even try to impose
their religious beliefs on their communities.
But increasingly over time, economic activity
was driven and controlled by the so-called
productive classes--land-owning gentry who
were producing more food per acre thanks to
the agricultural revolution, and merchants
who were making money due to expanding trade
and imperialism.
These classes held the key to government finances,
because they were the ones with the money
and land and goods that could be taxed, which
then--as now--meant that they had power to
sway governments.
And in many cases, these productive classes
used this power to give themselves a say in
the running of their country through advocating
for a constitutional government that could
keep the monarchy in check.
We see this especially in Dutch history, where
these classes brought about constitutionalism
and created what has come to be known as the
Dutch Golden Age.
It’ll last forever: just like all golden
ages.
So, like British reformers, the Dutch had
an active business class, who were backing
the struggle for independence from Spain.
This struggle involved the seven northern
provinces of the Low Countries allying with
the ten southern provinces after 1576 to defeat
the Spanish in the Eighty Years War (also
known as the Dutch revolts or the Dutch War
of Independence or I suppose the Spanish probably
thought of it as Our Northern Province’s
Illegal War of Secession.
It all depends on who’s telling the story.
But anyway, by the end of the sixteenth century
the United Provinces of the low countries
had become functionally independent from Spain,
though it wasn’t formalized until 1648 in
the Treaty of Westphalia.
The southern provinces spun off to constitute
Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of northern
France, while the seven northern provinces
became the Netherlands.
Each province of the Dutch Republic had a
regent who oversaw provincial affairs, while
as a group they participated in the States
General, a kind of council of representatives
from each province, which in turn chose a
single executive, known as the stadtholder,
or stadtholder.
Or probably somewhere halfway in between those
that only Dutch people can say.
We’ll say Stadtholder.
Anyway, all in all, this was a fairly loose
confederation of states, and they often had
competing interests.
Like, Holland, on the one hand, was the most
prosperous and contributed the most to the
overall finances of the group.
It was commercially-oriented and generally
favored peace over war.
On the other side were provinces like Zeeland
whose privateers seized ships during the chaos
of warfare and were therefore somewhat less
opposed to it.
Calvinist clergymen favored war against Catholic
Spain and some pamphleteers simply liked war
because “it caused all industry and trade
to grow and prosper.”[1] Which is a bit
of an oversimplification.
Although, whether war is good for business
is one of the big questions of history.
It’s definitely not great for people, though,
which I would argue are possibly even more
important than businesses?
There was also disagreement among the provinces
about the role of the stadtholder: Should
the Stadtholder become more of a monarchical
figure, or should the United Provinces continue
to function as a kind of republic?
So we’re talking here about big differences
about fundamental matters, like war and peace
and how power should be distributed within
the confederation.
And these differences prevented the kind of
focused central government that England built
after its Glorious Revolution.
But nonetheless, the States General had greater
unity in economic policy—that is in its
strategy for backing trade—than the English
did, whose conservative aristocracy were always
battling the commercial classes both before
and after the English civil war.
So despite a measure of political disunity,
the Dutch Republic prospered in the seventeenth
century and in spite of warfare, it actually
became a comparatively tolerant state.
In fact its prosperity made it a kind of mecca
for all sorts of artisans and business people
who wanted to participate in Dutch hustle
and bustle.
[[TV: BARUCH SPINOZA]] The republic became
a center of printing for people whose thoughts
had been censored elsewhere.
For instance, philosopher Baruch Spinoza denied
the immortality of the soul and didn’t believe
in a transcendent deity.
Those were pretty radical ideas in 17th century
Europe, and in fact, Spinoza was banished
from his Jewish congregation in his early
twenties, but he continued his philosophical
labors, and he was able to continue publishing.
It’s also worth noting that, like most philosophers,
Spinoza did have a day job--he ground lenses
for microscopes and telescopes.
Meaning that he was very good at shifting
historical lenses.
I feel like I should apologize to my friends
and family for that joke.
Except.
That I’m not sorry.
But Spinoza’s Portuguese Jewish ancestors
had settled in Amsterdam in the sixteenth
century, and Jewish people from Spain also
migrated north to escape persecution by Isabella
and Ferdinand and their royal descendants.
Pilgrims and many other religious non-conformists
also went to the Netherlands, as did many
Huguenots after the French revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685.
The citizens of the Dutch Republic were among
the most diverse in Europe at the time, and
that contributed to the Netherlands prosperity.
So thriving businesses arose at the time,
especially ones deriving from the early maritime
networks its merchants had developed in Japan,
Southeast Asia, and the New World late in
the sixteenth century.
Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge was one person
who saw overseas trade as key to advancing
overall Dutch prosperity.
Along with other military men and adventurers,
embarked on securing the spice trade for the
Netherlands
This largely involved expanding trade networks
with present day Indonesia.
Matelieff de Jonge wrote a book called Discourse
on the State and Trade of the Indies that
described the Indonesian islands and the broader
southern oceanic region, and the Dutch government
took notice of the riches promised by the
spice trade, so they authorized the creation
of trading companies whose military forces
didn’t just take territory, but also sought
to advance trade, at times acquiring goods
or establishing trade routes via force or
the threat of it.
These Indian Ocean trade networks were highly
developed, and Europeans were new to them,
and relatively inexperienced.
Especially the Dutch.
The Spanish and Portuguese had been at it
for more than a century.
And so despite armed trading companies, gaining
the upper hand in trade took the Dutch generations,
although they would use alliances with local
leaders and military might to become imperialist
powers in time, and eventually extract far
more than they invested in the well-being
of colonies.
But before all that, Holland’s merchants
began bringing back an array of plants and
commodities, which stimulated innovation,
while its geographic positioning enabled its
ships to access north-south and east-west
trade routes.
And as English merchants and leaders became
wrapped up in decades of political disputes
and lethal combat among themselves, the Dutch
began to outperform them in trade.
Soon the Dutch had replaced the Portuguese
as the primary Atlantic slave traders, although
the English would eventually overtake them.
But by the middle of the 17th Century, the
center of economic activity in Europe had
migrated from the Mediterranean and Italian
city-states, north.
The Dutch were thriving.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
The Dutch took advantage of their independence
2. and reduced war expenses by
3.
1.
expanding their shipping capacity and
4.
2. building a network of canals connecting
400 miles of major cities
5. which improved communication and trade
regionally.
6.
Amsterdam flourished,
7.
growing to over 200,000 people by late in
the century.
8.
And as it grew, land reclamation and civil
engineering advanced,
9. along with the now-famous design of Amsterdam’s
houses,
10.
many of which are still standing.
11.
In fact, I lived in a 17th century Dutch home
while writing The Fault in Our Stars.
12.
But speaking of innovation, Dutch painter
and inventor Jan Van der Heyden devised a
long-burning wick,
13. which brought cities nighttime illumination
14. and a reduction in crime.
15.
He also created portable pumping devices to
extinguish fires,
16. which drastically reduced the destructive
power of urban fires beginning in the seventeenth
century.
17.
Meanwhile Dutch artists, including Van der
Heyden, excelled in painting some relatively
new portrait subjects:
18.
common people,
19. and their everyday lives and domestic
interiors,
20. and the commodities that increasingly
filled their homes.
21.
Many of these commodities came from distant
lands
22. and included Chinese porcelain, Middle
Eastern carpets, and imported textiles.
23.
In addition, the paintings of Johannes Vermeer,
24.
alongside those of Van der Heyden,
25.
featured maps and globes,
26.
testifying to the cosmopolitanism of the middle
and upper classes.
27.
But even ordinary workers in Dutch cities
might have a painting and books for intellectual
and visual nourishment,
28. which was a stark contrast from just a
century or two earlier.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So with the Dutch now commanding trade in
a way that the English could not, Oliver Cromwell’s
government sought to take back control of
the seas with the Navigation Act of 1651.
It mandated the use of English ships for any
goods using English ports, whether in Britain
itself or in its colonies.
This was one example of legislated mercantalism.
Now, we’ve mentioned this before, but mercantalist
theory sees the global economy as finite.
We now understand that the size of the global
economy’s overall pie can get bigger and
smaller, but at the time Mercantilist theory
saw the overall economy as stagnant, which
meant to become wealthier, you had to take
wealth from other places.
Tarriffs for instance, were a common feature
of mercantalism--with a finite economic pie,
a nation should only export goods and take
in gold for them; it should never buy foreign
goods because that would mean losing wealth
to a competing nation.
Now, this obviously happened most dramatically
in colonized regions, but it also happened
within Europe, as nations sought to take wealth
and possessions from one another.
Three separate times between 1652 and 1674,
the English provoked warfare with the Dutch
in order to gain an upper-hand in trade.
For the most part, the Dutch prevailed in
the first two of these wars, even getting
some relaxation in the Navigation Acts as
part of peacemaking.
But one exception was the Treaty of Breda
that ended the war of 1665-67, when the English
gained permanent control of New Amsterdam
(now known as New York).
This effectively knocked the Dutch Republic
out of what would become the lucrative North
American sphere of trade and settlement, and
also indirectly led to They Might Be Giants’
third best song.
But the third of these wars from 1672-74 concerned
politics more than mercantilist issues.
It aroused high passions over enhancing the
role of the stadtholder and bringing William
of Orange to become perhaps stadtholder for
life.
If you’re wondering why the Dutch soccer
team wears orange, by the way, that’s why.
In 1672 an angry mob, believing that William’s
rise was being prevented by brothers and high
officials Johan de Witt and Cornelis de Witt
proceeded to lynch, flay, and cannibalize
those brothers.
The fight over how concentrated power should
be, and who should have that power, clearly
wasn’t over.
So even as it continued to prosper, the Dutch
Republic was profoundly politically divided
by the end of the 17th century.
Meanwhile, Great Britain, its rival on the
seas, had more or less resolved its political
questions and created the ground rules for
an effective monarchy and its relationship
with the commercial classes.
and that meant the Dutch Golden Age receded.
As golden ages always do.
England meanwhile, was rising again--although
only temporarily.
Next time we’ll see how eastern Europe was
faring during the seventeenth century.
Thanks for watching; I’ll see you then.
________________
[1] Quoted in Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis:
War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2014), 237.
