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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Coates
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December 2, 2022 - February 19, 2025
village of Kinderdijk was an incongruous setting for one of the Netherlands’ ten UNESCO
In the 1860s, steam pumps helped drain a huge lake south of Amsterdam, including a certain part known, on account of its many shipwrecks, as the ‘ship-hole’. The name survived at the airport built on the new polder – Schiphol – where planes could land and take off from an area that used to be several metres under water.
‘Holland’ may have been named for its abundance of holtlant (wooded land), but centuries later it was hard to find much of it.
a pitiful piece of land, an outgrowth of our country, that consumes our best juices’.
Perhaps more than anywhere in Europe other than Northern Ireland, the Netherlands was a country where one’s religious affiliation could be of as much consequence as one’s nationality. Through a process of verzuiling, or ‘pillarisation’, the country was effectively sliced into neat social groups (zuilen, or pillars) based on religion, so clearly defined that they effectively represented distinct subcultures. Nearly every aspect of social and professional life – education, healthcare, housing, unions, banking – was then decided according to which group one belonged to.
scholar called ‘indestructible legal fossils
Anouk, Blof, Nick and Simon.
Even as an atheist from sin-loving London, I was often struck by the absence of religious moralising in the Netherlands. The prevailing liberal attitudes to issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and drug consumption, together with the endless pornography and condom adverts on television, made it easy to see the country as a quintessential post-religious society.
Religious rituals and habits that had been absorbed into mainstream culture in my home country – weddings, funerals, christenings – in the Netherlands were either treated as purely legal procedures or went unmarked.
and the Dutch retained a tendency to frown on anything that smacked of frivolous spending or excessive luxury.
At a time when much of the rest of Europe was mired in crisis, one of its smallest countries had managed, within a relatively short period, to produce Rembrandt and Vermeer, inspire Locke and Voltaire, build the canals and townhouses of Amsterdam, and establish an empire that stretched around the world.
The Dutch were accomplished shipbuilders, mapmakers and navigators, and had used their expertise to achieve a powerful position in European trade.
The Low Countries were the birthplace of the atlas, the globe and the principles of triangulation, and many Dutch nautical terms found their way into the English language – yacht, schooner, jib, skipper, bow, boom, sloop, cruise, deck, wreck, blunderbuss.
Travel Accounts of Portuguese Navigation in the Orient’),
this was one of the world’s first great travel books.
‘the Moses of Dutch colonialism’.
single company would be granted a 21-year monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa.
world’s first major joint-stock company and first multinational corporation.
Further east, the Dutchman Abel Tasman became the first European explorer to reach New Zealand, his homesick crew naming it after their home in the southern Dutch province of Zeeland.
Another island they discovered was christened in honour of their captain: Tasmania.
In Mauritius – named for the Dutch Prince Maurits
1667 Raid on the Medway,
1672, Louis XIV of France invaded the Dutch Republic with support from the English navy. The French quickly seized control of much of the country, but the tables turned when the Dutch opened dikes around Amsterdam, flooding a huge area of land to create a ‘Water Line’ blocking the path of the invaders.
Further afield, the Dutch even managed to seize New York City briefly from the English, renaming it ‘New Orange’.
beaver pelts were highly prized in Europe as a material for making waterproof hats,
Over the next few decades the new colony flourished, until the Dutch ill-advisedly swapped it
with the English for the Caribbean outpost of Suriname in 1667. Its new owners promptly gave it a new name: New York.
together with the documents the Dutch had published declaring their independence from Spain, eventually helped inspire the Declaration of Independence.
When future President John Adams later visited the Netherlands to raise funds for the American Revolution, he was struck by the influence Dutch culture had had on his home country. ‘One nation is a copy of the other,’ he said.
Each of these was given a name indicative of the class of resident it hoped to attract: the Gentleman’s Canal (Herengracht), the Prince’s Canal (Prinsengracht), the Emperor’s Canal (Keizersgracht).
The houses were taxed according to their width at the front, so a unique shape of building evolved: narrow fronted but very tall and surprisingly deep, often with a sizable garden hidden Tardis-like at the back.
Steep staircases saved valuable space inside,
Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary of having seen ‘the greatest wealth in confusion that a man can see in the world’. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, described the Dutch as ‘the carryers of the world, the middle persons in trade, the factors
‘Where else in the world,’ he asked, ‘could one choose a place where all life’s commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for are as easy to find as here?’
The country was enveloped in a brief craze for blue-and-white porcelain imported from China (used as a prop in many Golden Age paintings), until imitators in Delft mastered the technology and began to sell their superior knock-offs back to the Chinese.
Early Dutch speculation led inevitably to excesses, most famously a 1637 bubble in the price of tulips, which saw prices rise more than twentyfold in just one month, with a single onion-sized bulb costing roughly the same as a decent family home.
‘In the conversations of wise men,’ Englishman William Aglionby famously wrote, ‘almost no topic features so frequently as the wondrous ascent of this small state, which has risen within no more than a hundred years, to a height which does not only infinitely exceed the standing of all the old Greek republics, but in some ways is not even shamed by the great monarchies of our time.’
The picture probably goes unnoticed by almost everyone who traipses past it on their way to the ‘Night Watch’, but it points to an important fact about the Golden Age that is rarely acknowledged: the Rijksmuseum’s treasures, together with Amsterdam’s beautiful canals and townhouses, were paid for in part with the blood and sweat of those who were unfortunate enough to live under Dutch rule overseas. Walking around tolerant, easy-going Amsterdam, most visitors remain unaware of a national dirty secret: the Netherlands was one of the world’s leading slave-trading nations.
Amsterdam, in the words of the historian Richard Oluseyi Asaolu, was ‘the European capital of slavery’.
The British officially abolished slavery in 1833, France a few years later. The Netherlands did not do so in its main slaving colony, Suriname, until 1863, and even then the ban was not fully implemented for another decade.
As Postma wrote, with typical Dutch understatement, while the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands is generally remembered as an incubator for the arts, ‘for some half a million unfortunate Africans who were transported across the Atlantic, the Dutch must have been remembered in a more negative way’.
When the Dutch slave trade ended, it was quickly forgotten and the darker side of the Golden Age was rarely acknowledged. The horror stories were, perhaps, too much of a challenge to the national
self-image of the Dutch as a kind, tolerant, liberal people.
National Institute for Study of Dutch Slavery and Its Legacy,
found it difficult not to read something into the fact that while London’s monument to slavery was situated in the very heart of the city, a few metres from the Houses of Parliament, Amsterdam’s sat largely unnoticed in a park outside the city’s historic centre. On formal state occasions, the Dutch King and Queen still rode in a golden carriage whose sides were decorated with paintings of shirtless black slaves bowing at the feet of angelic white colonisers.
Dutch writer Multatuli wrote a famous book about the corrupt administration of the Dutch colonies, Max Havelaar, one of the first publications to advocate what later became known as ‘fair trade’.
In 1949 the Dutch reluctantly agreed to transfer sovereignty and a few days after Christmas the Indonesians celebrated their independence. With the exception of a handful of small islands in the Caribbean, the Dutch Empire was no more.
Amsterdam and other major cities were filled with the likes of Javastraat, Sumatrastraat, Bataviastraat and Borneostraat.
Perhaps the most famous examples were in New York City: Harlem was named after the Dutch city of Haarlem, Brooklyn after the small town of Breukelen, and Flushing after the southern Dutch city of Vlissingen.
was originally De Waal Street and Broadway was once better known as Breede Weg.
