The Dirty Secret of Early Modern Capitalism

The Global Reach of the Dutch Arms Trade, Warfare and Mercenaries in the Seventeenth Century

Kees Boterbloem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138692886
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315531595
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book shows how the Dutch accumulation of great wealth was closely linked to their involvement in warfare. By charting Dutch activity across the globe, it explores Dutch participation in the international arms trade, and in wars both at home and abroad. In doing so, it ponders the issue of how capitalism has often historically thrived best when its practitioners are ruthless and ignore the human cost of their search for riches. This complicates the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalists as middle-class exploiters in arguing for a much greater agency among lower-class Dutch soldiers and sailors in their efforts to benefit from skills that were in high demand.

1 War in the Low Countries, 1566–1713

Beginnings, Victories, Glory

“Maak van de nood een deugd”
(“Make a virtue out of necessity”)
Old Dutch saying

The Netherlands, Erik Swart writes, were used to war as the normal state of being long before the outbreak of their Eighty Years’ War in 1566; as elsewhere in Europe,

War was seen as inevitable in the sixteenth century. Observers during those days considered this to be the consequence of the ambition of the princes and nobility, for whom war meant glory and fame, and of the nature of human beings as political animals. Such views were framed into cyclical theories, which showed how war and peace continually interchanged.¹

The violent conflict that began in 1566, however, proved to be relentless, linear rather than cyclical.² It was to stop only for a fairly brief hiatus in 1609, after which it resumed in 1621. By the time of the Peace of Münster (the Dutch-Spanish part of what is more commonly known as the Peace of Westphalia) in 1648, no one in the Low Countries knew otherwise than having lived in a region that had been constantly at war. Even during the twelve-year armistice, Dutch soldiers and sailors still engaged in armed clashes overseas, and the Dutch almost immediately began to pay substantial subsidies to the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years’ War after its outbreak in 1618. And 1648 did not mean enduring peace. A number of wars at sea or overseas with various European rivals marked the 1650s. Meanwhile, fighting occurred outside Europe with local and European foes between 1640 and 1662.

The 1660s saw various violent conflicts: The Dutch lost Taiwan in 1661 to the Chinese warlord Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) and New Amsterdam to the English in 1664 (even if by 1667 Surinam was received in exchange from the British). This decade saw fighting along the West African coast, eventually yielding the Dutch their most notorious slave station, at Elmina (there were others). In Indonesia, the Dutch engaged in a ruthless expedition to Makassar on Sulawesi. In the mid-1660s, Münster’s bishop Bernhard von Galen (1606–1678) briefly invaded Dutch territory, a move he repeated in 1672 when he allied with France and England as well as Cologne. That latter war, which almost led to a comprehensive Dutch defeat (at least on land), ended in 1678. A few years of uneasy peace followed, but ominous clouds began to pack when the Catholic James II became king of England in 1685, in which year Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, ending the last vestige of tolerance of Protestants in France. Another round of war began with William III’s successful invasion of England in the fall of 1688, which came to a definitive close only in 1713 at the Peace of Utrecht. Throughout the conflict with Louis XIV’s France, fighting occurred between French ships and Dutch bottoms on the oceans and along their shores, while a completely unrelated but equally lengthy war was waged on Java.

In addition, the Dutch contributed money to the precarious survival of the Protestant cause in in the first half of the Thirty Years’ War, while Dutch soldiers and sailors were sometimes recruited with the explicit help of the Dutch government by foreign-government agents for the Swedes, Danes, or Russians. They were just as often recruited by foreign recruiters without permission from the Dutch government. Dutch sailors and soldiers fought on ships in the Mediterranean Sea, the South China Sea, or the Baltic Sea, as well as along the shores of these seas, or in Ireland. And Dutch-produced arms were found across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, shipped from the Republic’s ports and sold by covetous Dutch merchants.

1.1 Warfare and the Arms Trade in the Low Countries Before 1600

While Dutch skill at warfare at sea or shipping commodities on water might seem unsurprising for a people living along a lengthy seashore, it is less obvious why the Dutch excelled at the art of war on land or the production of weapons, introducing within a brief period a slew of improvements in “small arms, artillery, siegecraft and fortifications, [and improved] drill, tactics and logistics.”³ Roots of this development can be traced to various parts of especially French-speaking Wallonia (the south-east and east of what is now Belgium) in the later Middle Ages. At that point, small-scale local suppliers (such as blacksmiths) could no longer sufficiently meet the demand of armies that used an increasingly diverse assortment of arms. Rudimentary or all-round skill was no longer adequate once ever more sophisticated weaponry was required, such as cannons or arquebuses, instead of swords, shields, longbows, or crossbows. Using the iron ore and coal mined in this region, a more complex division of labour emerged in response. The virtually autonomous territory of Liège (ruled by a prince-bishop whose suzerain was the Holy Roman Emperor) and the Mons and Namur regions to its south-west became in the fifteenth century centres of iron and lead mining and firearms manufacturing (using blast furnaces), while the demand for mercenaries from these territories in the south of the Netherlands concomitantly increased.⁴ The production of gunpowder (out of charcoal, sulphur, and saltpetre) had taken flight in the late Middle Ages, too, with the Burgundian-controlled Flemish port of Bruges pivotal because of its access to overseas supply routes of the raw materials necessary for its production.⁵

The Walloon skill at forging arms cast a long shadow, still leaving an imprint on the Dutch Republic. Walloon skilled arms manufacturers moved to the United Provinces not just as Calvinist refugees in the 1570s or 1580s, but also long thereafter, in search of lucrative opportunities in the north. From the 1610s onward, the Liège-region native Louys de Geer favoured hiring Walloon experts for his Swedish plants, as did contemporary Dutch arms producers in Russia. They were put on the payroll in Amsterdam, a popular market to hire labour of all sorts.⁶

Towards 1500, the trade of arms between the Low Countries and other parts of the Empire was stimulated by the ever intensifying trading between urbanised Flanders and its eastern hinterland. The Walloon arms industry and mercenary profession received a boost from the election as Holy Roman Emperor (in 1519) of Charles V (1500–1558), who had been born in Flemish Ghent and who was to spend his life mainly on the battlefield.⁷ Already Charles campaigned with significant numbers of Walloons among his elite fighting units of tercios.

There was a broader economic context within which the Walloon arms industry and mercenary profession developed. In the later Middle Ages, the various regions of the Low Countries increasingly grew complementary in economic terms, with metal products of the Walloon region or Flemish cloth first shipped from Flemish Bruges and then from Brabantine Antwerp overseas. All of the Netherlands had since the High Middle Ages been part of the northern end of what economic historians have dubbed the “Blue Banana,” the part of Europe that stretched from the delta of the Rhine and Meuse rivers in the north to Florence in the south, a stretch of land distinguished by a specific economic profile.⁸ This region had a comparatively high population density, a significant number of towns, and a high degree of trade and artisan activity. While trade and manufacturing flourished in the sixteenth century, agricultural specialisation emerged in Flanders, stimulated by sufficiently high demand from the urban population. This has led historians to suggest that the “Agricultural Revolution” that overtook England in the eighteenth century occurred even earlier in the Low Countries. In the less developed and populated northern maritime provinces (Zeeland, Holland, and Friesland), other key developments that prepared the ground for the later boom can be traced to the late Middle Ages, as in the herring fishery, or the ever greater share Amsterdam shippers acquired in transporting Baltic (primarily Polish-Lithuanian) grain to the markets of Western Europe. By 1500, Amsterdam, albeit still a small town, survived on Baltic rather than Netherlandic grain for its bread and beer.

Rivers such as the Rhine, Meuse, or Scheldt were navigable for long stretches, as were many smaller streams, and the coastline was lengthy. This made trade and communication between the various provinces often easier than elsewhere in Eurasia, and although flooding (of the sea and of rivers) was a threat in most parts, the natural environment of the region was comparatively friendly: There were no mountain passes to traverse or extreme temperatures threatening to ruin crop cultivation, for instance. Shared social and economic traits and certain common legal traditions informed a political effort to forge closer ties between the provinces. This effort truly began with the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold’s (r. 1467–1477) strategy to resurrect a sort of Lotharian monarchy (a recreation of one of Charlemagne’s grandsons’ kingdoms) located in the borderlands between the Holy Roman Empire and France. The Emperor Charles V, his great-grandson, brought under his control all 17 provinces that made up the Low Countries, the northernmost part of Charles the Bold’s imagined realm.

The move towards a unified polity was underlined when, after 1550, Charles V began to reflect on the division of his vast empire among his heirs. Charles wanted to preserve his recently created “Burgundian Circle” intact, linking their continued prosperity to maintaining the common government he had begun to set up. Despite hindsight efforts from Dutch historians such as Pieter Geyl (1887–1966) to argue for the historical unity of this area, the Low Countries had, however, little in common culturally or historically, even if the provinces were all Christian, or uniformly Catholic before 1517, and even if there was a certain geographic logic to their organisation as a unified polity.⁹

In his multiple roles as emperor, king, duke, or count, Charles V had not been able to exert control over his disparate territories in the manner that he would have liked. He never had sufficient time to reorganise at least one of his many lands into a coherent political entity, whether Spain, his German lands, his Italian possessions, or the Low Countries. To a considerable degree, this was due to the enormous distance between those parts in an age of horses. But his failure at accomplishing any meaningful political unification of the Netherlands, or of the other geographically linked and culturally affiliated territories of which he was formally the overlord, was to a significant degree due to his incessant preoccupation with warfare. He poured his energy into fighting his foes but proved unable to defeat any of his major enemies definitively, despite the vast resources he could command, such as the gold and (growing supply of) silver of the Americas, or the mercantile wealth of the Low Countries, as exemplified by the bustling port of Antwerp. He battled endlessly and inconclusively with the king of France, the German Protestant princes, the Turkish sultan and his allies, mostly on land, sometimes at sea.¹⁰ In the Low Countries, he defeated Duke Charles of Guelders (1467–1538), but it took Emperor Charles long enough to overcome even this minor player opposing him, and this conflict sapped Charles V’s strength further.

Towards the end of his life, Charles V concluded that it was best to divide up his realm between the lands located around the old Habsburg core in Austria (which now included both the kingdom of Bohemia and the rather truncated kingdom of Hungary), possessions supporting the perennial Habsburg claim to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Spanish or western Mediterranean part, which was to include the Americas. In making this division, however, the Low Countries— historically largely a part of the Empire, but closely linked to the bustling long-distance Spanish and Portuguese trade—were difficult to apportion: It probably would have been better if Charles had identified a third heir, next to his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip, to succeed him in the Burgundian Circle, which at the time still included the Free County (Franche-Comté) of Burgundy, located to the south of the Low Countries. A ruler who from Brussels (the city in which gathered the Estates-General, the meeting of representatives of all the seventeen provincial estates) exerted full sovereignty over this realm might have been able to stave off the calamity that began to unfold in the Low Countries in the middle of the 1560s. There may not have been much of a common past that the seventeen provinces shared, but there may have been a common futur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 War in the Low Countries, 1566–1713: Beginnings, Victories, Glory
• 2 The Early Modern Dutch and War, Part 1: Economy, Society, and Culture
• 3 The Early Modern Dutch and War, Part 2: Morale
• 4 Sailors, Soldiers, and Arms Abroad, Part 1: Empire
• 5 Sailors, Soldiers, and Arms Abroad, Part 2: Beyond Europe
• 6 Dutch Activity in Scandinavia
• 7 Dutch Activity in Russia, Part 1: Trade and Technology
• 8 Dutch Activity in Russia, Part 2: Merchants and Mercenaries
• Conclusion
• Appendix: On Kondratiev Waves and Dutch Capitalism
• Index