Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [24]
Integral to Holland’s success was the city of Amsterdam. Protected by a forbidding network of estuaries, Amsterdam rose to international prominence as the home base, nerve center, and symbol of the Dutch revolt. It expanded rapidly as the struggle wore on, nourished by the spoils of war and the capital of merchants fleeing the devastated cities of the south. With them came religious outcasts of every denomination—Walloons (French-speaking Protestants from what is now Belgium), Huguenots (French Protestants, many of whom joined Walloon churches), Baptists, Quakers, Sephardic Jews, and a party of English Calvinists (known to their day as Separatists and to ours as the Pilgrims)—all drawn by the city’s tolerance for diversity and dissent. Together they made Amsterdam one of Europe’s liveliest and most cosmopolitan urban centers. In 1585, the year that a Spanish army laid waste to Antwerp, Amsterdam’s population numbered a mere thirty thousand. When Spain and Holland called their truce in 1609 it had risen to nearly sixty thousand. By mid-century it would exceed 150,000.
Amsterdam’s burghers, moreover, were open to newer ways of doing business. Profitmaking and capital accumulation, still the objects of medieval scorn in much of Europe, were civic virtues in Amsterdam. Before the seventeenth century was more than a decade old, the city could already boast of the world’s most up-to-date credit and banking facilities. It had Europe’s most important stock exchange, specialized commodity exchanges, and a legal system swept clean of medieval obstructions to the free circulation of money and goods. Out of its well-equipped shipyards came swarms of privateers and fleets of a cheap but efficient new cargo ship—the vlieboot or flyboat—with which Dutch traders prowled the seas in search of gain. When they returned, holds bulging with the merchandise of distant lands, it was to an ingenious new system of canals that linked the waterfront with blocks of new warehouses and municipal markets, sharply reducing the time needed to find buyers, make up an outward-bound cargo, and set off again.
In time, half Europe’s foreign trade would be in Dutch hands, and half its ships would have been built in their yards. Andrew Marvell, the English poet, linked the city’s preoccupation with moneymaking to what he thought was its appalling indifference toward dissenters. “Staple of sects and mint of schism,” he called Amsterdam—a “bank of conscience, where not one so strange/Opinion but finds credit and exchange.”
THE WEST INDIA COMPANY
Amsterdam was also the headquarters for a pair of giant trading companies whose fortunes would determine the course of Dutch exploration and settlement around the world. Their purpose was to reduce destructive competition among smaller firms while simultaneously prosecuting the war with Spain. To that end, each had its own private army and navy, almost unlimited powers of peace and war, and control over vast human and material resources.
Senior of the two was the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie—the United East India Company—created in 1602 by the States-General to manage all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. Capitalized at over six million guilders, an enormous sum at the time, the giant company quickly established Holland as a global power. East India Company merchants, backed by the company’s own armed forces, set up trading posts, or “factories” (not to be confused with modern industrial enterprises), at Bandar-Abbas (Gombroon) near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, at Batavia on the vital Sunda Strait in the Spice Islands, at Chinsura in Bengal, and at Canton in China. They negotiated exclusive trading privileges in Nagasaki, the only Japanese port open to Europeans. Company troops expelled the English from Bantam, close by Batavia, and they seized a whole