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By Root 7489 0

had changed markedly by the early 1600s. At issue was the condition of Hapsburg Spain, still the most powerful European state but surrounded now by adversaries. Over the course of the sixteenth century, under Charles V and his son Philip II, the Spanish had absorbed Portugal, taken possession of the Holy Roman Empire, overrun the principal islands of the Caribbean, subdued Mexico and Peru, and invaded the Philippines. At the same time, they became involved in a series of costly military adventures aimed at rolling back the Protestant Reformation. Eventually, despite the riches extracted from its far-flung possessions, the crown ran out of money and embarked on a disastrous program of forced loans and debt repudiations that sent shock waves through European political and financial systems. France and England, would-be entrants on the global imperial stage, preyed mercilessly on Spanish shipping and launched their own colonizing projects in those parts of the western hemisphere where Spanish power seemed weakest.

Nowhere were Spain’s afflictions more apparent than in the Low Countries, or Netherlands. Inherited by Charles V and subsequently granted by him to Philip II, they had flourished under Spanish rule. Their leading cities—Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels—grew rich as the marketplaces where Spain obtained, with gold and silver from the New World, the food, clothing, manufactures, naval stores, and luxuries that it could not produce for itself. But when Protestantism spread across the Netherlands in the 1560s, a revolt broke out against Spain. The seven Dutch-speaking provinces of the northern Netherlands formed the United Provinces or Dutch Republic (foreigners called it Holland after the largest and wealthiest of the seven). Its governing body was the States General, in which each province had a single vote.

The United Provinces occupied a mere corner of Europe, not much bigger than the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined, and inhabited by fewer than two million people. Its struggle for independence would nonetheless become a central event of the early modern era. Year after year, Spanish armies ravaged the Netherlands. Year after year, the rebels fought back, fired by Calvinist zeal and led by the brilliant Prince William of Orange. Along the way they assembled the greatest fleet in Christendom, owning, Sir Walter Raleigh once estimated, more ships than eleven other nations combined.

Even before Dutch fireships helped England fend off the Spanish Armada in 1588, the war in the waters had spread far beyond the confines of Europe. Dutch squadrons, flying their orange, white, and blue banners, plundered Spanish ports throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Oranje boven! was their war cry—“Orange above!” They hounded Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and swept Spain’s Portuguese allies from the Indian Ocean. Dutch troops fought in Puerto Rico, Africa, South America, India, China, Japan, and Malaysia. Holland was already one of the world’s great maritime powers when, in 1609, weary, frustrated, and bankrupt, the Spanish at last agreed to a twelve-year truce that gave their former subjects de facto independence.

Although true independence did not come for another forty-odd years, Holland’s Golden Age had begun. Dutch traders, never far behind the fleets and armies, cornered the international markets in African slaves, Brazilian sugar, Russian caviar, Italian marble, Hungarian copper, fish from the North Sea, and furs from the Baltic. “The factors and Brokers of Europe,” Daniel Defoe called them. “They buy to sell again, take in to send out, and the greatest Part of their vast Commerce consists in being supply’d from All parts of the World, that they may supply All the World again.”

The fates of faraway kingdoms were decided in the countinghouses of Dutch bankers. Dutch investors bought Russian grain fields and German vineyards. Dutch engineers taught foreign princes the most advanced methods of building forts and draining swamps. Rich merchants and aristocrats across Europe collected the works