A little known fact of history: there was an Indian kingdom, Travancore, which defeated the Dutch in a naval battle in 1741 [1]. (This might be the only major naval victory of an Asian kingdom over European navies until the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.) The Dutch never recovered, and did not colonize India.
The king of Travancore then used the captured Dutch commander, Eustachius De Lannoy, to modernize the armed forces [2].
Reading Wikipedia (“The Mukkuvars Played a major role in defeating the Dutch East India company entering into colachal port”, “As the Dutch approached the shore, the Travancore army had made a retreat, and the locals fled the area. It was not enough for the Dutch to bombard a place and then barge in. To continue the war they required fortifications, trenches, and make-shift sheds and storerooms.”, “On 5 August, a cannonball fired by the Travancore army fell into a barrel of gunpowder inside the Dutch garrison”), it looks like a failed invasion.
Fun fact, the De Lannoys share their surname with the Delanos, as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt (although not the only presidents related to that family, and the original Delano is not related to the nobility)
Delannoy is a relatively common name from northern France, Lannoy is a commune, or more commonly a place (modern french l'aulnaie) planted with aulnes (Alders). Same meaning, different graphy, for Delaunay, as in Delaunay triangulation.
> The Dutch councils of state and war always included merchants who had experience of trading and living abroad [...]
As eloquently described by Mike Dash in "Batavia's Graveyard" most Dutch explorer ships had merchants, sailors, soldiers and civilians on board — ranked in that order. That is, not the captain but the bean counter would have final say on important matters.
This is because they weren’t explorer ships. They were trading ships first and foremost, owned by a large public for-profit corporation. It’s more like Maersk than like a navy.
Exploration, or conquest, was not a goal. If it happened, it was just a means to an end.
Thing is, trade is the most profitable when you get monopoly contracts with suppliers, especially when those suppliers are the only (known) suppliers of $THING. How do you get a monopoly contract? You make the supplier an offer they can’t refuse. All that fighting and fort building was only to enforce monopoly contracts, not empire building. Basically, to make sure the Portuguese didn't get their hands on those spices, so the price could stay high.
Sometimes suppliers broke those deals and the Dutch took out the guns, and that’s what the soldiers came along for. Eg in the Travancore battles linked in another comment. They lost that one, but often they did not: For example, one day the people of the Banda islands, then the only source of nutmeg in the world, broke the monopoly deal they had made with the Dutch and sold nutmeg to the British too. The Dutch went in fully loaded, killed everybody (the entire archipelago population), and replaced them with Dutch settlers to farm the nutmeg. Problem solved, monopoly restored! No hard feelings, it’s just business.
So yes! I concur! There’s just so much to learn from the Dutch East India Company! Who cares about all the genocide, we even have a VC fund[0] named after them, that’s how proud we are.
> It has been estimated that during the 17th and 18th centuries, 660,000 to 1,135,000 enslaved people in total must have been transported to the territories under control of the Dutch East India Company.
I wouldn't necessarily romanticize the exploitative colonialism of European explorers.
Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the colonizing countries is still very much derived from their past. Sadly, most people living in said countries today don't realize how set back the colonies really were due to exploitation and slavery.
"Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the colonizing countries is still very much derived from their past."
This does not pass the comparison test. Many highly prosperous European countries of today (Scandinavian countries, Northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Ireland) didn't have massive overseas holdings, or only for a short time.
Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Russia, four huge empires that existed for centuries (one still extant) are on the poorer side of Europe. PT and ES got only moderately prosperous in the last two generations, after shedding their last colonial possessions.
Which is still much, much wealthier than most of colonized nations... except for Russia, due to the extreme political decline after the fall of the USSR.
>Many highly prosperous European countries of today didn't have massive overseas holdings, or only for a short time.
And I never said "colonies are needed for wealth". What is your point, exactly?
> And I never said "colonies are needed for wealth". What is your point, exactly?
I think the point is that it's not this simple: "Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the colonizing countries is still very much derived from their past."
Poor countries that were colonized are definitely held back by it. The colonial powers left extremely extractive institutions that focused on funneling power and profits into small groups of people. When they left, those institutions and that culture stayed.
But isn't it difficult to say that Spain or Portugal's "wealth" today derives from colonial holdings years and years back? What did they extract that lasts today? In those 400 years, did they not spend most of their extracted silver and gold on things that are trivialities today (porcelain, tea, etc)? Or waste it buying arms during civil wars and dictatorships? I mean there was mass starvation during Franco's regime.
It seems to me likelier that their wealth comes from the things they have in common with prosperous countries that never were colonial powers (Taiwan, South Korea, etc). Educated populace, functioning capital markets, property rights, rule of law, etc.
Russia was never rich, though some Russians certainly were. In the former Soviet Union, some subjugated nations like Ukraine and the Baltics had higher standards of living that Russia proper. Whoever came back from a USSR trip commented negatively on the standard of living of ordinary Russians: already in the 1970s and the 1980s, there were shortages of everything, including food.
Anecdotally, the Russo-Ukrainian war isn't the first opportunity when Russian soldiers marveled at the sight of flushing WCs; my ancestors saw the same in 1945 and 1968, on two occassions, when Russian soldiers could be met in Czechoslovak streets. In 1968, "we" hated them and pitied them at the same time; being a random Russian soldat was an unenviable position.
Most colonial wealth is long spent, on luxury and wars long forgotten. There may be some left in Britain, though they went broke over the two world wars, too. Otherwise, a few massive buildings are left standing (such as the colonial archive in Sevilla, impressive - I was there as a tourist), and refuse pits of former palaces are full of expensive wine bottles from the 18th century, but most of the contemporary wealthy class owes its riches to the industrial revolution and its aftereffects.
And that is why the current club of rich countries consists of a mix of former colonial powers, former non-colonial non-powers and former colonies. Places like Czechia, Poland, Ireland, Estonia, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Israel and Taiwan were actually subjugated by stronger empires for much of their modern existence.
As another commenter said, strong rule of law, relatively free trade, ability to attract qualified workforce and protection of wealth makes countries in the 21st century prosperous much more reliably than violent land grabs that may actually cost you wealth instead of making it.
I am not disputing past atrocities or still ongoing exploitation.
However, reducing everything to "they exploited others for X years" strikes me as dishonest.
Some are born into wealth and don't accomplish anything. With others it's the exact opposite (but harder, duh). Could be just luck but I am not convinced. Take a look our neighboring Russia just across the Black Sea. By far the biggest country in the world, and yet their society sucks.
Sure they have clean streets, quiet cities and pretty quaint scenery...but have you seen their toilets? They are so freakin tiny. The dutch are skew on the taller side so I don't know how they deal with this. As a 6' 2 in person I hate it. Also the food isn't anything to celebrate. Having lived in both Amsterdam and the US, I greatly prefer the US and our larger houses with proper sized toilets.
Wut? What is your beef with Dutch toilets? I’m 6’4” and I can’t say it ever bothered me.
The food is ok. It’s just that Dutch people seem to be a bit more utilitarian about food consumption (something I didn’t know until leaving the Netherlands).
The bathrooms are typically smaller as well. It can often be claustrophobic. (Although the bathrooms in France are the worst, I once couldn't even close the door because my legs were too long)
>It’s just that Dutch people seem to be a bit more utilitarian about food consumption (something I didn’t know until leaving the Netherlands).
Restaurant quality seemed poor during my time living there. Bitterballen is delicious the first time, afterwards its just grease food. Other than good cheese I can't seem to point to any particular Dutch foods that really stand out.
Hard to say without anything for scale. They look about the same size to me.
They're different models though. The standing one would be considered a bit old-fashioned here. New toilets don't touch the ground for easier cleaning of the floor. And the flush compartment will be hidden in the wall just because it looks nice.
That dutch model is everywhere I have lived and traveled. Its not just an apartment thing. I lived in a monastery in the countryside for a while, same tiny toilets. Also tiny bathrooms.
Bitterballen are snacks, not a dish. If you're in a place that has bitterballen on the menu, you're not in a restaurant, you're in a cafe or a snack bar.
But yes, we do not have a haute cuisine culture. Traditional dutch dishes are mashes or stews (boerenkoolstamppot, hutspot, hachee, zuurkool met spek) or equally simple dishes based on local vegetables (witlofsalade, asperges met ham en ei, erwtensoep).
The book is in't in Dutch, though. ;-) Incredibly well written, historically accurate (for as far I could tell) and entertaining to read. Warm recommend.
By rights it should exist because the Dutch made it so. They have done so for hundreds of years in a period when the sea level was rising slightly and will most likely continue to do so, especially seeing how as modern technology makes it much easier to keep the polders (reclaimed land) dry.
It certainly is an energy and compute intensive country and it shows. I mean, they are the sole providers of the top machinery for making arguably the most valuable commodity ever, microchips. And the second exporter of agricultural products with an area similar to Maine to boot...
Any recommended material to learn about fragility in the Dutch system?
You've made a number of comments in this vein. Do you see it as apart from the cycle of the successful? Wherein we slowly relax the effort is took to make success. And then deny these efforts altogether, and create fantasies of what _really_ brought success.
I'm writing this from ~sea level, and there are large parts of the country around me that are below sea level, some more than just a little bit, think 2 to 3 meters and in extremes more than 6. As the sea level rises the risk of storm surges increases quite a bit. We have essentially barricaded the country against the sea up to a certain point. But beyond that the country would flood much like a bathtub would and even if all those barriers are closed the rivers will pour in water from the other side.
Managing all this is tricky in the short term, difficult in the mid term and quite possibly impossible in the longer term if the sea level rise is more than anticipated when these defenses were built. And you can only raise them so much, if rivers no longer flow out then you'll end up flooded anyway.
The Netherlands are perhaps surprisingly one of the best equipped countries today to deal with sea water rise. Why? Because they have unparalleled experience with it. Other regions of the world that have been routinely under sea level for centuries such as much of SE Asia dealt with the problem differently in a way that might not scale as well to a consistent increase.
Yes, there was a lot of that. Our colonial history is nothing to be proud of. But Dutch engineering prowess is something to be proud of. The whole country is essentially a giant machine and if we collectively stopped maintaining it within a surprisingly short time large chunks of it would cease to exist.
I've told lots of people the US should get prepared to pay the dutch to build the Great Atlantic and Pacific Seawalls. We should probably get started soon...
That's what history is like, unfortunately. And it is probably what the future is going to be like too.
The Dutch Republic itself, as it existed in the 1600s, was created out of an extremely bloody revolution against the Spanish (the Eighty Years' War) - in which the Spanish committed quite a bit of genocide against Dutch cities too. Look into the Spanish Fury at Mechelen, for example. Despite being the recent victims of it, they went on to commit similar acts only decades later.
Genocide has been extremely common in pretty much all of history, and it is only quite recently that most societies have at least been pretending to be explicitly against it. We should definitely remember the atrocities that have been committed, but thinking of it as an explicit "victim vs villain" on a country-per-country base doesn't really help with that.
Pretty much every single country has committed atrocities, and pretty much every single country is able to commit them in the future. We in the Western world pretend to be all modern and civilized, but recent history in the Middle East has shown that we haven't learned a goddamn thing. Pulling down statues at home of long-dead oppressors isn't going to do shit if we just keep on committing the same crimes in the present without even batting an eye.
Interesting that the article, subtitled "A refusal to confront colonial atrocities persists in the Netherlands," lead to you getting downvotes.
Coincidence? I think not.
The so-called "civilizing mission" continues to this day, with glorification of Dutch ideas and ideals, even though those ideals indeed led to mass atrocities. Such atrocities were often cited as "necessary," in order to impose "improvement" upon the victims society.
This "civilizing mission" is often seen as worth it -- it includes many good ideas, after all. Even to this day, the respect for "civlizing" ideas remains, while the acknowledging of mass atrocities is often ignored, or covered up. Even worse, many of the people who committed atrocities are thought of as heroes.
Oh I don't feel responsible or guilty for stuff that happened before I existed either (it's not like I could have done anything differently to alter the outcome), I just disagreed with the 4 centuries. I suspect we would mostly agree on the subject.
The same kind of sentiment goes for all of the colonial powers of old, it's a real problem. Some part of society finds it impossible to admit that they are where they are today because of crimes from the past. The Germans are the only country that I'm aware of that have successfully absorbed lessons from their history, but at the same time not all Germans and not all of history. This is a huge problem and is likely going to be the root cause of some of these lessons having to be learned all over again.
Today there is human trafficking and slavery in pretty much every country on the globe, just more or less of it. And yet, nobody really lifts a finger to the point where we will be able to once and for all ban this out.
Reparation payments, which would be one way to deal with all this (because obviously you can't undo history) are opposed because the people that live here today do not see themselves as complicit even if they are the beneficiaries. Hardly any Western European country has clean hands, and I highly doubt we will ever be able to move on from this in a way that satisfies everybody.
It's much more complex than that of course. First of all it is practically impossible to determine what percentage of Dutch prosperity is due to slave trade, how much of it was due to income from selling natural gas and how much came from the Dutch people being clever merchants and light-bulb-builders and chip-machine-designers and whatnot. Not to mention that putting a definite price on the enslavement of your ancestors is likely to be pretty insulting. "Sorry we enslaved your great-grandfather, here is 5000 euros and let's call it even" is probably not going over well, even if that was the inflation-adjusted profit realized.
Secondly of all the damage to local institutions we've done has often caused corruption to be normalized so much that reparations payments would merely enrich the ruling elite further. We can't just send over a few billion to soothe our conscience and hope everything will be OK. It's not really like everyone in the victim countries were innocent either, many tribes were all to happy to sell some of their rival to the westerners.
Not everyone has documentation to prove anything either, precisely because their ancestors were slaves.
Finally, how far are we going back? Do the Dutch have the right to claim reparations from German occupation? From Napoleonic occupation? From the descendants of the Romans?
I don't dispute that there is a debt of honor to help everyone on earth towards a more prosperous state, but reparation payments have so many issues that they might create more problems than they solve.
This is such an ignorant question. It completely erases the living people who are victims of colonialism right now. But whatever, apparently there were also atrocities hundreds of years ago that we can ignore too.
My home country was a republic at the time. Made for some pragmatic leadership. While the French and the Spanish were basically pyramid schemes where wealth flowed to the top, the Dutch Republic was basically prospering on trade and attracting talent from all over Europe. Basically all the intellectuals and outcasts. Spanish Jews, French Huguenots, various refugees from German warring city states, etc. That made for a potent mix of wealth, trade, science, and relative religious freedom.
The UK had their revolution in the 17th century, invited a Dutch king on the throne, and essentially copied all the best parts of Dutch practices. Basically, that's how they bootstrapped the British empire. The bank of England was created around the same time. Meanwhile the Dutch empire prospered for a while but fizzled out. Napoleon put an end to the republic. And after it's defeat, the British turned it into a monarchy.
The Dutch traders pioneered dull, boring, profitable sea commerce in commodities. Most of the other sea powers were thinking "ventures", where someone funded a ship to go someplace and maybe make some high profit. The Dutch were derided as "herring-tamers" for shipping huge amounts of fish in barrels. Profitably.
> Encouragement for inventors of new products, techniques, and import trades, who received rewards from the state, and not just temporary monopoly patents.
I think we should explore this one. It's better to solve a problem permanently than to create an industry around solving it temporarily. I'd happily pay into a fund that rewards people for doing so if it meant fewer subscription-type relationships and more now-I'll-never-have-that-problem-ever-again moments.
The Dutch seemed really advanced, controlling the spice islands (modern day Indonesia), and all the qualities listed in the article... so... how did England get ahead? (I guess, via the Industrial Revolution, which is what the blog is about.)
Also: today's semiconductor fabs rely on Dutch equipment. Surely, they get a large share of the profits of biggest industry of recent times. I am curious: was the investment that made this possible somehow facilitated by the profitability of the Dutch East Indies Company? The past extends into the future...
Yes, of course. Philips (the Dutch company that initially invested in both TSMC and ASML) was founded on old tobacco money. But that's like saying Microsoft has to thank William Gates Sr. profitable lawyer career for their success. It's technically true that without that career the circumstances would likely not have facilitated the founding of Microsoft. But it's just one of the great many factors in their story.
After being founded on Tobacco money, Philips was successful in producing high quality lightbulbs. I think they're also comparable to companies like Sony/Samsung that started out as a place where cheap labor was available, and that gradually grew into more and more high tech and intellectual property.
I think that's also an interesting side note. Despite the Dutch as a country becoming super wealthy, historically the people in The Netherlands have always been poor, there always was a very large wealth gap. I'm not a historian but I think the closing of this wealth gap (in terms of living standards, not money per se) is something that started after WW2, could be wrong.
The modern equivalent of the Netherlands is Singapore. SG has better public policies, in every area, than any Western country. As a result they are much richer, have far less crime, better education, incomparably better infrastructure, better health care, etc, etc.
Singapore is a city, let's not pretend we can compare it with countries proper. If you compare it with affluent cities, it's great but not as great as the stats would say. And when it comes to governance, let's not forget that Singapore is a dictatorship.
A benevolent dictatorship is, while it lasts, arguably the ideal form of government. The problem is that they tend to descend into malevolent dictatorships given enough time.
A benevolent dictatorship isn’t a form of government: it is only a dictatorship, but with a leader that is somehow deemed less bad for his people than most dictatorships out there.
I'd rather not live in a police state, and I think I speak for many Americans when I say that. Singapore can kind of get away with it because it is so small, but we can see what it looks like when scaled to a large country by looking at Modern China. I'll take some crime and something less than stellar education, as a national average, than have to contend with a government who welds people in their apartments, creates "reeducation camps" for minorities, and disappears business leaders.
“China is Singapore but bigger” is kind of a bizarre take. If you don’t like Singapore’s policies fine, but randomly equating them to China seems overly simplistic.
Has Singapore government evwr welded people on their apsrtments? What is thw basis for this comparison?
Why would providing better education in America lead to people being welded into their apartment? Is freedom only possible with incompetwnt governance?
Author Leopold Kohr's twentieth century books argued that bigness and scaling are a major problem for freedom, and so insoluble that it's better not to keep attempting to manage bigness. Riversflow was arguing here, correct me if I'm wrong, that some nations find it insoluble to unwind various kinds of bigness, and that none of those nations can make an attempt to emulate a nation that has managed its society without the scale factor at which they, USA included, already exist.
In college I had a friend from Singapore. After graduation he felt his plight was that he wasn't an American and he was no longer Singaporesse<sp?>. He was unable to land a job in America and had to go back to Singapore. He was sad.
Points 2, 3, 4, 6 .. 13 seem like an excellent set of principles and fundamentals for a society or country even today. Verg well said. Also helps that the author contrasts them with England. Most countries would not meet these standards even today.
A little known fact of going Dutch history: splitting the bill several ways should merit extraordinary tips in places where tipping is a necessary component to service worker income.
(This is a joke about “going dutch”, an American colloquialism for splitting the bill, that pretends like it would offer insight into the origin of the term, but then doesn’t)
Tipping is not a thing in the Netherlands, where are you getting this idea from? By and large the people who tip are tourists who are not familiar with the local customs.
This is not true, at least certainly not for all social circles apparently. I've heard this sentiment expressed here before, but I and essentially all people I know who frequent restaurants tip 10 to 15 percent. I'm dutch, as is about 70% of my social circle (The Hague area, 50ish people).
Yep, all over but mostly in the randstad. It’s absolutely not ingrained in the culture or suggested on your receipt like in the US. But staff know how to handle it and I believe it’s quite common.
I agree and actually think that countries that will regulate first the use of these tools will have and advantage. Switzerland is setting up many cryptofriendly places (Zug, Lugano) where Btc and Tether are used for small payments and cashback points, and Hong Kong is also planning next moves in this direction. Ethiopia is planning to use blockchain for education records and might expand its use in other directions. All these applications require identification and are a step towards regulation
The king of Travancore then used the captured Dutch commander, Eustachius De Lannoy, to modernize the armed forces [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Colachel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachius_De_Lannoy