ABSTRACT
After the establishment of the Dutch Republic, painting and publishing developed from fairly modest trades into booming industries. This study has traced the changing faces of these industries, through their emergence at the end of the sixteenth century to their extraordinary expansion during the first half of the seventeenth century, and then through their stagnation or decline, depending on the sector. Previous studies have identified a number of factors that contributed to the boom in cultural production in the Golden Age as well as to its subsequent decline, ranging from individual genius, changing market forces, the general commercial infrastructure, unique cultural preferences, and adverse conditions in other countries. I argue that the extraordinary artistic and economic outcomes described in this book were more than the sum of these factors, and that Dutch book and art producers did not simply ride the Golden Age wave. The local organization of production proved to be just as conducive to growth and innovation as the general circumstances. Creativity was organized in such a way that it generated exceptional levels of economic competitiveness throughout the cultural industries for a century at least. The findings of this research are presented here, organized around the three primary analytical elements of the theoretical model on spatial clustering outlined in the introduction: the industry life cycle, properties of cultural industries, and the diamond model.
