Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [84]
The economic benefits brought by the Jews to the Dutch Republic hardly went unnoticed by the Spanish. Many advisors even urged the Spanish crown to reverse the Inquisition and to recruit conversos back to Spain. Diego de Cisneros, for example, warned in 1637 that Amsterdam's newly arrived Jews were making the republic too powerful:
[T]he Dutch rebels have raised their head and increased their power, the Jews assisting them in their wars, conquests, negotiations and other pretensions and becoming in the lands of Your Majesty, spies of the said rebels, penetrating the centres of trade, administration of the armadas, convoy and revenues of Your Majesty…sucking out the core of wealth (from Spain and Portugal).17
But important as Jews were to the Dutch economic boom, their overall numbers were small and their contributions paled by comparison to those of another group. In the late sixteenth century, a massive influx of Protestant merchants, skilled workers, and industrialists played an even greater role in bringing what Max Weber famously called “the spirit of capitalism” to the Netherlands.
During the Middle Ages, the cities of Ghent and Bruges in the south Netherlands—with their long traditions of spinning, dyeing, and weaving—were flourishing producers of fine textiles. By 1500 nearby Antwerp was Europe's textile marketplace and a major industrial center. Although part of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges were hotbeds of Calvinism, particularly among the working and merchant classes. As anti-Protestant persecution mounted under Philip II, these cities suffered a catastrophic exodus of Protestant skill and capital. Between 1560 and 1589, the population of Antwerp plunged from 85,000 to 42,000. Over roughly the same period, Ghent and Bruges each lost about half their inhabitants.
Most of these emigres moved to the north Netherlands, typically settling in Amsterdam, Leiden, or Haarlem, where they could practice their religions freely. Many were highly skilled textile workers with sophisticated specialties. (Vermeer's father, for example, specialized in patterned satins, and Jacob van Ruisdael's father designed cartoons for tapestries.) These immigrants brought with them not just skill and experience but the most advanced techniques and technology for processing raw materials. By the 1590s, most of Antwerp's wealthiest Protestant merchants and industrialists had also resettled in Holland, attracted by the Dutch Republic's new pools of skilled labor, exploding commercialism, and the unrivaled economic and social opportunities open to individuals of all religions.18
Almost overnight—and largely because of the infusion of immigrant skill—the Dutch Republic surged to dominance in an astonishing range of industries, from sugar refining to armament manufacture to chemical production. Most crucially, Holland replaced Antwerp as Europe's leader in textile finishing and refining. With talent and technology taken straight from Antwerp, “Haarlem became the centre where coarse linens from Germany were bleached and finished…Amsterdam dyed and dressed semifinished cloths imported ‘in the white’ from England. Leyden…[was revitalized] by Southern Netherlands’ immigrants to become the largest manufacturing centre of the so-called ‘New Draperies’ of seventeenth-century Europe.”
Soon Holland had completely cornered Europe's “rich trades,” which had formerly been dominated by the Hanseatic League (an alliance of northern European trading guilds), the English, and in earlier times the Venetians. Fleets of ships laden with fine linens, velvets, camlets, satins, and damask sailed from Holland to the great ports of Spain and Portugal. There, the Dutch sold their fine textiles for Spanish silver, with which they bought raw materials and luxury goods from the East Indies and the New World: pepper, sugar, spices, metals, coffee, tea, coral, cotton, silk, wool, and mohair. With their supply