Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

check fact with Venetian historians]. It certainly happened in Florence in the sixteenth century, though the Florentines continue down to the present to be manufacturers with markets worldwide. It happened, too, in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. In the Dutch Republic before 1795 a tiny oligarchy—some 2000 men, perhaps a smaller group in proportion to the whole even than the 1¼ percent of the Venetian adult men —ran the country.¹⁴² Yet it left Amsterdam a leading center for finance well into the nineteenth century; and Holland is to this day a great bank and entrêpot. It is even claimed—though this time on no good evidence—that a loss of the bourgeois spirit of entrepreneurship happened in Britain itself (of all unlikely places) in the late nineteenth century (of all unlikely periods).¹⁴³

But that’s precisely what is strange about northwestern Europe. The decisive, irreversible turn to a bourgeois civilization, despite on-going signs down to the present of reluctance and bad grace, happen there and didn’t happen elsewhere. The making of the German Ocean into a bourgeois lake c. 1453-1700, to be followed in the eighteenth century by the making of the North Atlantic into a larger one, and in the nineteenth century the world’s seas into the largest one of all, constitutes only the most recent case of urban trade. But it was strangely decisive, even in places like Holland that slipped back into a proud oligarchy [check with Zanden and de Vries]. Aristocratic elites even in northwestern Europe held power into the twentieth century, and the haute bourgeoisie kept remaking themselves into gentry or, if especially lucky, aristocracy—Baron Rothschild, of all things (as an anti-Semitic aristocrat would have put it in 1885); or, still more unsettling, Sir James Paul McCartney (MBE 1965, KBE 1997), of all things (as an anti-democratic elitist would have put it in 1997). Yet a bourgeois, business-dominated civilization kept a-building. It was in some places not much retarded even by experiments in incentive-damaging socialism or by adventures in treasure-exhausting nationalism.

Why irreversible? It is not absolutely so, as the successful experiment in reversing it in the Soviet Union 1917-1991 shows. If the state is powerful and anti-bourgeois, as under Mao or Castro, it can kill the goose stone dead. The reversal need not even be tyrannical. Populist sentiment against the market or the corporations or careers in business, if skillfully aroused, can return us to the material and spiritual conditions of 1600 and $2 or $3 a day. Democracy, as much as it is to be encouraged, is not the same thing as dignity and liberty for the innovators who make us rich and free. But the history of northwestern Europe shows a mechanism of weak irreversibility, a free-market and bourgeois-dignity ratchet, that seems at length to have prevailed. Let us pray.

In 1720 the wool, silk, and linen manufacturers constituted an interest against the importing of Indian cotton goods. Yet the importing and then (to the horror of the interests) the European manufacturing of cotton evaded the fierce prohibitions of law, and eventually created an interest in cotton manufacturing that could itself demand its own laws. We call it “vested,” but the term is not quite right, since a vested interest is absolute and guaranteed in law, such as a vested inheritance to a property. The word “vested” comes from the metaphor of putting on the clothes of, say, a priest. It is permanent and unconditional. Even the English manufacturers of wool, though holding on for a long time to the exclusive right to make winding sheets for clothing the dead (to speak of literal vesting), could not prevent on other counts the putting off of their vestments and their profits. Innovation overwhelmed the existing profits pro tempore, as the lawyers might say, creating new ones, strong in their own defense. In 1774 the former barber Richard Arkwright, anxious to protect the profits from his introduction of a machine for making strong cotton yarn, bribed and persuaded his way to getting Parliament to repeal the former prohibition of all-cotton cloth, and a year later got it to remove the import tariff on raw cotton. Europe nourished, so to speak, a party of innovation.

Why northwestern Europe? It is not racial or eugenic, a hardy tradition of scientific racism after 1870 to the contrary, revived nowadays by economists and evolutionary psychologists exhibiting a dismaying ignorance of the history of eugenic politics.¹⁴⁴ Nor is it the traditions of the Germanic tribes in the Black Forest, as the Romantic Europeans have been claiming for two centuries.¹⁴⁵ That much is obvious, if the obviousness were not already plain from the recent explosive economic successes of those highly non-European and non-Germanic places India and China, and before them of Korea and Japan, and in centuries past the economic successes of overseas versions of all kinds of ethnic groups, from Parsees in England to Jews in North Africa. Yet it is still an open question, a mystery, why China, for example, did not originate modern economic growth (which I claim is one of the chief outcomes of a bourgeois civilization). It had enormous cities and millions of merchants and security of property and a gigantic free trade area when bourgeois northern Europeans were still hiding out in clusters of a very few thousand behind their tiny city walls, with barriers to trade laid on in all directions. Chinese junks gigantically larger than anything the Europeans could build until iron hulls in the nineteenth century were making trips to the east coast of Africa before the Portuguese managed by a much shorter route to get there in their own pathetic caravels. Yet, as the Chinese did not, the Portuguese persisted, at least for a long while, naming for example the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal for the Christmas time of 1497 on which they first got there, and inspiring other Europeans to a scramble for empire and trade. “We must sail,” sang Luis Camões, the Portuguese Virgil, in 1572. Gnaeus Pompey’s declaration that Navigare necessse est; vivere non est necesse (Sailing is necessary; living is not) was adopted all over Europe, in Bremen and Rotterdam for example. And so they did, sail. And the Chinese didn’t, or else North and South America would now be speaking a version of Cantonese.

Perhaps the problem was precisely China’s unity, as against the mad scramble of Europe at the time, Genoa against Venice, Portugal against Spain, England against Holland. For example, China was rhetorically unified, the way any large, one-boss organization tends to be, such as a modern university. A “memorandum culture,” such as Confucian China (or the modern university) has no space for rational discussion, because the monarch does not have to pay attention.¹⁴⁶ Look at your local dean or provost, immune to reason in an institution devoted to reason. “Rational discussion is likely to flourish most,” Barrington Moore has noted, “where it is least needed: where political [and religious] passions are minimal” (which would not describe the modern university).¹⁴⁷

The historical sociologist Jack Goldstone has noted that:

China and India had great concentrations of capital in the hands of merchants; both had substantial accomplishments in science and technology; both had extensive markets. eighteenth century China and Japan had agricultural productivity and standards of living equal or greater than that of contemporary European nations. . . . Government regulation and interference in the economy was modest in Asia, for the simple reason that most economic activity took place in free markets run by merchants and local communities, and was beyond the reach of the limited government bureaucracies of advanced organic societies to regulate in detail. Cultural conservatism did keep economic activities in these societies on familiar paths, but those paths allowed of considerable incremental innovation and long-term economic growth.¹⁴⁸

As a factor in China's failure to converge on the Western standard in the nineteenth century the historian Kenneth Pomerantz explicitly rejects the low status in Confucian theory of merchants. But wait. Until China began seriously to honor and protect entrepreneurs—namely, under the neo-pseudo-Communists of the 1980s—China's growth was modest indeed.

The contrast of northwestern Europe with Japan presents an even deeper mystery. In the eighteenth century Japan looked similar to England in literacy, city life, bourgeois intellectual traditions, lively internal trade. Donald Keene notes that from the hand of Saikaku ( 1642-93) came “a Treasury of Japan, a collection of stories on the theme of how to make (or lose) a fortune. The heroes of these stories are men who permit themselves no extravagance, realizing that the way to wealth lies in meticulous care of the smallest details."¹⁴⁹ Saikaku’s heroes are all merchants, every one. Daniel Defoe a little later couldn’t have done better. As I have argued elsewhere, the Japanese were starting to make the adjustment even to a pro-bourgeois social theory, at any rate in merchant circles, as early as the late seventeenth century.¹⁵⁰

True, Tokugawa Japan had isolated itself from foreigners, and was hostile to innovation—in guns, for example, which were successfully controlled by the Tokugawa, who had come to power through their skillful use. The retreat from the gun kept sword-fighting display going strong into the nineteenth century, providing later opportunities for samurai movies and militaristic propaganda. More startlingly, the Tokugawa outlawed wheels except for the few carriages of nobles, and rigorously enforced the law. You will see no carts even in the 1850s in Hiroshige’s “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.”¹⁵¹

At length under the Meiji restoration the Japanese, a hundred years before the Chinese finally did, began to honor and protect entrepreneurs, albeit with a heavy hand of government. Japanese growth in the late nineteenth century exploded. A theory of convergence needs to explain why the coal-poor and colony-poor Japanese—at any rate coal- and colony-poor until they commenced conquering places like Manchuria on the grounds of just such a resources-theory of international relations as historians such as Pomerantz use—converged smartly in the late nineteenth century. Coal-poor Holland and Italy did then, too. When after World War II the Japanese were compelled to abandon their militaristic and resource-based dreams of glory, they attained in short order European standards of living.

So elsewhere, mysteries. Early Islam was by no means hostile to innovation or trade, and was certainly a site for great cities. Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba were all green-field creations. It is routine to note that Western Christian culture c. 1000 CE—as against the then still formidable rump of the Eastern Greeks around Constantinople—looked comically primitive by the standard of the Abbasid Caliphate. Muslims innovated in all fields of the intellect and the economy, such as horticulture.¹⁵² The Mediterranean was dominated by Islamic fleets. Yet as the leading student of the matter, Timur Kuran, remarks, “that this economic dominance withered away forms a major puzzle in economic history.”¹⁵³ As Jared Rubin put it, “arguments appealing to ‘the conservative nature’ of Islam often overlook (or ignore). . . [that] from the seventh to the tenth centuries Islamic contract law, finance, and provision of public goods . . . were consistently modified in reaction of the exigencies of the day.”¹⁵⁴ For example, “early Islamic hiyal were closer to open lending at interest than any type of transaction allowed by the [Western] Church until the fifteenth century.”

Kuran argues that Islam chose early a mixed religious-commercial law which made the taking of interest costly (a cost shared of course with Europe, and evaded in identical ways), and especially which made the corporation inconceivable.¹⁵⁵ The notion of a partnership or corporation as a legal person was part of the Roman law inherited by Europe. In Europe an incorporated town or guild or charitable foundation could sue and be sued, but not in Islam. Even great cities in Islam did not have the legal standing routine in Europe by the twelfth century. And for some reason still to be discovered, Kuran observes, in the Middle East “the local merchant community did not see any reason to pressure local courts to create fundamentally new laws.”¹⁵⁶ On the other hand, although the partnership form was more flexible in Christendom than in Islam, in Western capitalism the literally modern corporation for business was a late flowers, not really used for much of anything important to the economy until the very late nineteenth century—except a few exotic trading companies, and then, more importantly, railways.¹⁵⁷  

Jared Rubin argues rather that “the differential persistence of economically inhibitive laws is a consequence of the greater degree to which Islamic political authorities are dependent on conforming to the dictates of religious authorities for legitimacy.”¹⁵⁸ Similarly, Cosgel et al. argue. . . .. . That is, the secular makers of laws of commerce could not risk offending the religious authorities. Christianity arose in the shell of the Roman Empire, which itself certainly had no need of priestly approval. By contrast, writes Rubin, “Islam was formed at a time of weak centralized power and tribal feuding in the Middle East,” and therefore the secular depended on the sacred to survive.¹⁵⁹ Emperor Henry IV was forced in 1077 to walk in a hairshirt through the snow of Canossa to beg forgiveness from Pope Gregory VII. But in 1527, King Gustav Vasa of Sweden in 1527, Henry VIII of England in 1534, and Elector Johann Friedrich I of Saxony in 1541 felt no such dependence on the sacred power: they pillaged the Pope’s monasteries with abandon.

One would like to know about South Asian cities. Again, like China, they were large and busy when Europe was somnolent, though under the Mughals the biggest cities were remarkably transient, and dependent on the Mughal court. Perhaps caste mattered. In South Asia it usually does. In the ancient Mediterranean, I have noted, the economic rhetoric was notably hostile to commerce even though the place was soaked in it. And the ancient Near East around 1500 BCE, with ample commercial records, would be a place to start testing whether bourgeois values such as we now understand them had precedents four millennia ago. But precedents that die out in ascensions of the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy or that are killed by kingly extractions do not a successful bourgeois world make.

A study of world bourgeoisies would be a good idea, to understand why the ultimately successful one has a conventional genealogy something like this:
The Conventional Genealogy

of the Western European

and World Bourgeoisie
Roman commercial law to 476 CE

Byzantine and Muslim trade Viking commerce 500-900

Revival of European town life 800-1100 Jewish, Lombard, Frisian commerce

Venice, Genoa, Barcelona c. 1300
Florence, Portugal c. 1500 Hanseatic towns c. 1150-1669

The Northern Lowlands 1585-1689

English, Scottish, American eighteenth century

Japanese parallels

The Rhineland, northern France, Belgium c. 1820

Political triumph of liberal and bourgeois values

in Europe

[theoretical reaction: nineteenth century] [political reaction: twentieth century]

Japan, Latin America, Asia late twentieth century: spread to world

&Chapter 9:

The Dutch Preached Bourgeois Virtue

What made such talk conceivable was the “rise” of the bourgeoisie in northwestern Europe. Numbers rose, true. But the rise was more than a matter of numbers. It was a rise in dignity, accompanied by public opinion, and of liberty, accompanied by revolution. The rise happened in the Netherlands especially, and the Netherlands was the irritating model for the rest.

The Dutch gave up aristocratic or peasant images of themselves a century before the English and Scots or even quite a few of the American English colonists did, and two centuries before the French. What made the project of ethics in commerce conceivable was the economic and political rise of the middle class around the North Sea, merchant communities hurrying about their busy-ness with ships packed with herring, salt, lumber, wheat, and later with colonial products, the “rich trades” of spices and porcelain. The league of Hansa towns in the DDDD centuries from Bergen to Novgorod, and south to Deventer in the Netherlands, never took national form, though it had fleets to put down pirates and was more powerful than most states at the time. In the eighth century a “Frisian” was a synonym for “trader”—and for “Dutchman,” since the languages nowadays called Frisian and Dutch had not yet diverged (and they had then just barely diverged from English), and Frisia was not as it is now confined to the northern Netherlands.¹⁶⁰ The Jews, the “Italians,” and the Frisians were the international traders of the Carolingian Empire around 800.

The Dutch became in the High Middle Ages the tutors of the Northerners in trade and navigation. They taught the English how to say skipper, cruise, schooner, lighter, yacht, wiveling, yaw, yawl, sloop, tackle, hoy, boom, jib, bow, bowsprit, luff, reef, belay, avast, hoist, gangway, pump, buoy, dock, freight, smuggle, and keelhaul. In the last decade of the sixteenth century the busy Dutch invented a broad-bottomed ship ideal for commerce, the fluyt, or fly-boat, and the German Ocean became a new Mediterranean, a watery forum of the Germanic speakers—of the English, Scots, Norse, Danish, Low German, Frisian, Flemish, and above all the Dutch—who showed the world how to be bourgeois.

The shores of the German Ocean seemed in, say, 98 CE an unlikely place for town life and the bourgeois virtues to flourish. Tacitus at least thought so. The storms through which a skipper would cruise in his schooner were rougher than the Mediterranean of a navicularius, and were rough more of the year. Tacitus claimed that the Germani, and certainly the wild Batavii among them, used cattle rather than gold and silver as money, “whether as a sign of divine favor or of divine wrath, I cannot say”(he was criticizing civilized greed).¹⁶¹ “The peoples of Germany never live in cities and will not even have their houses adjoin one another,” in sharp contrast to apartment-dwelling Romans at the time.¹⁶² And he claimed it was precisely those whom Dutch people later looked on as their ancestors, the Batavians, who were the first among the Germani in martial virtue (virtute praecipui).¹⁶³

The modern Dutch therefore dote on Tacitus. But it is doting, not a racial history, because the Dutch have been since the fifteenth century at the latest the first large, Northern European, bourgeois nation. It was and even still is a “nation” in a loose and ethnic sense, and nothing like as nationalistic as England or even France. The modern master of Dutch history, Johan Huizinga—his name is Frisian—believed that Holland’s prosperity came not from the warlike spirit of the Batavians of old, or in early modern times from the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capitalism, or from modern nationalism, but from medieval liberties—an accidental free trade consequent on the worthless character of Dutch mud flats before the techniques of water management were invented, and the resulting competition among free cities after the breakup of Carolingian centralization.¹⁶⁴ It was always about trade, not battle. “We [Dutch] are essentially unheroic,” Huizinga wrote. “Our character lacks the wildness and fierceness that we usually associate with Spain from Cervantes to Calderòn, with the France of the Three Musketeers and the England of Cavaliers and Roundheads. . . . A state formed by prosperous burgers living in fairly large cities and by fairly satisfied farmers and peasants is not the soil in which flourishes what goes by the name of heroism. . . . Whether we fly high or low, we Dutchmen are all bourgeois—lawyer and poet, baron and laborer alike.”¹⁶⁵

In the late sixteenth century the course of the Revolt against Spain stripped away the aristocracy, which in parts of the northern Netherlands had been pretty thin on the ground to begin with. Many aristocratic families simply died out. After the northern Dutch had made good their defiance of the Spanish, as early as 1585—though it was not official until 1648 (and bizarrely the Dutch national anthem down to the present day still declares loyalty to the King of Spain)—they lacked a king, and so the aristocracy could not be refreshed. It is an instance of the importance of marginality in theorizing the liberal evolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that North Holland was far from the courts of Burgundy or even of Brussels that attempted to rule it, and very far indeed in distance and in spirit from its nominal ruler from 1555 to 1648, Madrid. City-by-city the United Provinces were quite able to govern themselves, thank you very much. They lay behind, or rather above, the Great Rivers, as the Dutch call them, protected the same way the German army of occupation was protected in 1944 by a bridge too far. What was left to do the ruling was the haute bourgeoisie, the big merchants and bankers, very haute in such a compacted, urbanized place at the mouth of two of Europe’s larger rivers. Yet such regenten, regents, for all their pride in humanistic learning and their hard-eyed rule over the mere “residents” (inwoners) without political rights, were not aristocrats literally, in their own or in the public’s eye. They never disdained trade; they were always businesslike and numerate (to the irritation, for example, of their non-bourgeois allies); they were not soldiers or courtiers; their titles were not literally inherited; they did not deny their bourgeois or even lower roots. They were just rich and powerful: that’s not an “aristocracy” in a sense that Europeans understood it from the time of the first Greek cities down to Eton College and the German dueling fraternities.

The mud flats became rich cities without, so to speak, anybody noticing, and by the time Philip II and the Duke of Alva and others sprang to attention it was too late. The place of great European cities, true, was still the Mediterranean. In 1500 three out of the (merely) four cities in Europe larger than present-day Cedar Rapids, Iowa (viz., 100,000 check) were Mediterranean ports, two of them Italian: Venice and Naples, with Constantinople. Of the twelve in 1600 half were still Italian (Palermo and Messina, for instance, had become giants of honorable city life).¹⁶⁶ Yet it is indicative of stirrings in the German Ocean that Antwerp in the mid sixteenth century temporarily and London by 1600 and Amsterdam by 1650 permanently broke into the over-100,000 ranks.

By the early seventeenth century the tiny United Provinces contained one-and-a-half million people, as against about six million in Britain and over eighteen million in France. And more Dutch people (360,000 or so) lived in towns of over 10,000 in 1700 than did English people then, out of a much larger population. The United Provinces were bourgeois, all right.

* * * *

“Holland is a country where. . . profit [is] more in request than honor” was how in 1673 Sir William Temple concluded Chapter Five of his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The “honor” that Temple had in mind was that of a proud aristocracy. Yet the profit more in request, shamefully in the view of English aristocrats and gentry, was not achieved at the cost of the Dutch bourgeoisie’s soul. The question is whether Holland was the worse in spirit for being so very bourgeois. In the town-hating, trade-disdaining rhetoric of some Christianity and of all aristocracy and nowadays of more or less all the clerisy of artists and intellectuals, Holland would be corrupted utterly by riches earned from gin, spices, herring, and government bonds. It would be “bourgeois” in the very worst modern sense. Was such a town-ridden place less ethical than its medieval self, or less ethical than contemporary and still aristocratic societies like England or France?

Not in its declarations. The student of Dutch literature Herman Pleij has argued that “the virtues associated [in the sixteenth century] with capitalism and the Reformation were not new. . . : they had already been setting the tone for more than two centuries in Brabant and Flanders,” south of Holland proper.”¹⁶⁷ He has studied the rise of urban literature in the southern Low Countries, 1350-1550, which, he writes, “played an active role in forming, defending and propagating what came to be called middle-class virtues, which revolved around . . . practicality and utilitarianism,” what I call (and they called) prudence.¹⁶⁸ The tradesmen and burghers of Arras, Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges (all except for Arras now in Belgium; until the sixteenth