Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [90]
WAS THE DUTCH REPUBLIC A HYPERPOWER?
With its unsurpassed maritime and commercial supremacy, a fair case can be made that in its heyday, between roughly 1625 and 1675, the Dutch Republic was a world-dominant power. The obvious objection is that the Dutch army was not the largest in Europe—although it was one of the largest, best equipped, and most professional. Even during its seventeenth-century decline, Spain had more troops, and it is most doubtful that the Netherlands could have invaded and conquered the Hapsburg territories. Can it really be said then that the Dutch Republic was a hyperpower?
To focus on the size of its standing army is to misunderstand how the Dutch Republic triumphed over its rivals. The Dutch never sought to conquer the European continent. While Spain, France, and England exhausted themselves in wars of aggression against one another, the Dutch Republic built a standing army sufficient to win independence from the Hapsburgs and to defend its borders—as it did in 1672 when, to the surprise of all Europe, it defeated a simultaneous English and French invasion. Far more important, like Venice of the early Middle Ages, the Dutch Empire was an ocean-borne empire, driven by a hunger for commercial expansion, not territorial expansion.31
By the seventeenth century, naval might had become the royal road to world dominance, and the Dutch Republic took control of the seas. The extent of Dutch maritime domination is astonishing. In 1639, in the Battle of Downs, Dutch warships humiliated Spain's once formidable navy, crushing a Spanish armada of nearly one hundred ships and twenty thousand troops, and “rais[ing] the naval reputation of Holland as high as it could well be carried.” In 1667, the Dutch dealt the English perhaps the worst naval defeat in British history, adding insult to injury by towing away the Royal Charles, the flagship of the British navy. On the commercial side, Dutch maritime dominance was even more pronounced. According to one estimate, of the 20,000 ships involved in the world's carrying trade in the mid-seventeenth century, 15,000-16,000 were Dutch. By 1670, the Dutch owned more shipping tonnage than England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Prussia put together. At its peak, the Dutch navy was in size the rough equal of the French and English naval forces combined—all the more remarkable given that France was in population ten to twenty times larger than the Dutch Republic.32
The Dutch figured out before anyone else that there was a new way to achieve global dominance in the dawning modern age. Every previous hyperpower in history had begun by conquering its neighbors, expanding ever outward with the march of marauding armies, growing huge in population as it incorporated more and more peoples, and through strategic tolerance inducing these conquered peoples to contribute their strengths and talents to its Imperium.
Dutch tolerance played a different role. Largely because of brutal religious persecution throughout Europe, the years 1492 to 1715 saw the greatest migration of skilled people in history.33 As the United States would do two centuries later, the Dutch used tolerance to attract the talented and persecuted outcasts of Europe. This turned out to be the winning strategy, pulling some of the world's most economically dynamic groups—along with invaluable trade networks, cutting-edge industrial technology, and vast sums of capital—into tiny Holland, creating an economic boom that catapulted the Dutch Republic far beyond its continental rivals in wealth. The Dutch then used this wealth to globalize.
Technological advances and the rise of capitalism had vastly enlarged the parts of the globe now up for grabs and altered the objectives of power. Territorial expansion over neighboring countries had become much less important. Gold