Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [91]
The new, modern strategy of world domination was not conquest as such but capitalism backed by military force. Although the Dutch had significant colonial holdings in Indonesia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, much of the Dutch “empire” was essentially a network of trading outposts administered by the semiprivate West and East India companies, with warships protecting the companies’ effective monopoly over the world's most lucrative trade routes. Given its clear “productive, commercial and financial superiority,” as well as its technological preeminence and overwhelmingly dominant naval power, it is no wonder that Immanuel Wallerstein concludes that the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic attained the “rare condition” of global “hegemony.”34
THE DUTCH “CONQUEST” OF ENGLAND
In 1688, a massive Dutch fleet invaded England, Dutch troops occupied London, and the stadtholder of the Netherlands, William III of Orange, became king of Britain, ruling jointly with his wife, Mary. Dutch supremacy might have seemed at its pinnacle, and Holland's commercial and military expansion unstoppable. In fact, William's ascendance to the throne marked the transfer of the mantle of world dominance from the Netherlands to Britain.35
The Glorious Revolution, or “Bloodless Revolution,” of 1688 had been engineered in part by the British parliament. Ten years earlier, Holland's ambitious William had married his first cousin Mary Stuart, daughter of King James II and heir to the English throne. Unlike William and Mary, who were Protestant, James II was Catholic, making him highly unpopular with his English subjects.
Even with Parliament's acquiescence, William's bid to wrest the English throne from his uncle (and father-in-law) was a high-risk venture. Especially because James II was allied with France's Louis XLV, it was essential for William to mobilize and move troops across the channel quickly. The Dutch naval force that William landed in England in 1688—arriving in an armada of nearly five hundred vessels—was equipped and financed in significant part by a small group of Dutch Jews. After becoming king of England, William promptly brought over his Sephardic financiers to continue provisioning his forces, which now included the English army and navy as well. They would soon be followed by many of Holland's skilled textile workers, scientists, and even Dutch portrait artists, painters, and engravers. Thus began a massive outflow of capital, human and financial, from the Dutch Republic to England.36
As an ironic result, it was England that would overwhelmingly benefit from the amalgamation of Dutch and English power. Basically, the Dutch Republic exported its tolerance, its most enterprising financiers, and its entire “business model” to England, which then replaced the Dutch Republic as Europe's preeminent land of freedom and opportunity for immigrants and religious minorities. Soon, England would also replace the Netherlands as the world's supreme maritime power, presiding over a global commercial and colonial empire of unprecedented magnitude. In doing so, England inherited a problem that the Dutch never solved.
Tolerance for the Dutch was principally an internal policy. The remarkable religious tolerance embraced by the Netherlands within its own borders never translated into ethnic or racial tolerance in its colonial outposts overseas. From Suriname to Java to South Africa, the Dutch treated their indigenous subjects as their racial and cultural inferiors, engaging in the familiar colonial practices of slavery, apartheid, and cultural destruction.