ABSTRACT
Augustus J. Veenendaal Jr. Introduction In the ‘Golden Age’ of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, the seventeenth century, an almost unassailable position in world trade and industry had been built up by the Dutch merchants, based on fisheries, the Baltic grain trade and colonial trade, both with the Americas and with the East Indies. Shipping had been stimulated by the invention of a cheap-to-run cargo ship, the Flute, which in turn stimulated the wind-powered sawmills to produce the necessary lumber, in what has been called the first industrial revolution.1 And although during the eighteenth century this pre-eminence had first been challenged and then taken over by the English, Amsterdam still remained the financial headquarters of the world. An enormous amount of capital had been accumulated there during the heyday of Dutch trade and industry, and foreign princes gladly made use of this wealth. The Bank of England was helped on its feet by Amsterdam capital, and continental monarchies borrowed large sums there, with or without guarantees by the States General in The Hague. Even the young American Republic as early as 1782 found its way to Holland when it was in need of money. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the eighteenth century was the first in the world where large amounts of foreign securities changed hands easily. Even in wartime the trade in securities continued, although on a smaller scale. In 1802 there was a brief pause in the war between France and Great Britain after the Treaty of Amiens. During this time, Napoleon wanted to sell French Louisiana in North America to the US government, and the London house of Francis Baring & Co. and its Amsterdam partner Hope & Co. between them
1 A modern economic history of the Dutch Republic is J. de Vries and A. van der
Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge 1997). See the commercial connections between the Netherlands and Prussia in J. F. E. Bläsing, Das Goldene Delta und sein Eisernes Hinterland 1815-1851. Von Niederländisch-Preussischen zu Deutsch-Niederländische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen (Leiden 1973).
