Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [87]
Dutch Jews also helped colonize Guyana, Barbados, Martinique, and Jamaica, as well as smaller islands like Nevis, Grenada, and Tobago. The largest and most important Jewish colony in the New World was Curagao, followed by the five-hundred-person Sephardic community in Suriname, which by 1694 owned forty sugar plantations and nine thousand slaves.24
By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was “indisputably the greatest trading nation in the world, with commercial outposts and fortified ‘factories’ scattered from Archangel to Recife and from New Amsterdam to Nagasaki.” Incalculable quantities of luxury goods flowed into and through Holland. On June 27, 1634, the following immense bounty was unloaded in the port of Amsterdam:
326,73372 Amsterdam pounds of Malacca pepper; 297,446 lb. of cloves; 292,623 lb. of saltpetre; 141,278 lb. of indigo; 483,082 lb. of sappan wood; 219,027 pieces of blue Ming ware; 52 further chests of Korean and Japanese porcelain; 75 large vases and pots containing preserved confections, much of it spiced ginger; 660 lb. of Japanese copper; 241 pieces of fine Japanese lacquer work; 3,989 rough diamonds of large carat; 93 boxes of pearls and rubies (misc. carats); 603 bales of dressed Persian silks and grosgreins; 1,155 lb. of raw Chinese silk; 199,800 lb. of unrefined Kandy [i.e., Ceylon] sugar.25
THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE
The Dutch have long had a reputation for thrift. Owen Felltham accused the Dutch of being “frugal to the saving of an egg-shell.” Even Sir William Temple, the English ambassador to The Hague in 1668-70 and generally an admirer of the United Provinces, expressed irritation that the Dutch had gotten so wealthy through “Parsimony”:
For never any Countrey traded so much and consumed so little: They are the great Masters of the Indian Spices and of the Persian Silks; but wear plain Woollen, and feed upon their own Fish and Roots. Nay they sell the finest of their own Cloath to France, and buy coarse out of England for their own wear. In short, they furnish infinite Luxury, which they never practise, and traffique in Pleasures which they never taste.
While some in the republic may have worn “plain Woollen” and fed upon “Roots,” others did not. As Simon Schama has shown in The Embarrassment of Riches, many Dutch, from blue bloods to artisans, had no problem reconciling the strictures of Calvinism with lives of superabundance—prodigious meals, extravagant festivals, and lavish consumerism.
Like the United States for much of its history, the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century golden age was known throughout Europe as a land of opportunity: a New Jerusalem flowing with milk and honey. There was also plenty of poverty and inequality: The thousands of immigrants who poured into the republic between 1500 and 1700 included not just financiers and magnates but also child vagrants, prostitutes, and penniless seamen from Norway and Sweden. Nevertheless, the Dutch Republic was the richest country in Europe by a long shot, with even its unskilled workers enjoying higher standards of living and better diets than most people in the world.26
Just as Americans today are the world's overeaters, so too the Dutch were famous for stuffing themselves. The seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray was revolted by the sight of Dutch men and women, most of them “big-boned and gross-bodied,” “almost always eating.” And it wasn't just the rich who ate well. Aristocrats and commoners ate surprisingly similar breakfasts, typically including bread, butter, cheese, fish, pastries, buttermilk, and beer—the latter being “the most generally recommended” breakfast drink for both adults and children.
Midday and evening meals were hearty too. A bill from April 24, 1664, shows approximately twelve professors from Groningen ordering the following fairly standard supper: “a turkey, a jugged