The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World

S. Reinert, P. Røge, S. Reinert, P. Røge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315557
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of essays draws on fresh readings of classic texts as well as rigorous research in the archives of Europe's greatest imperial power. Its contributors paint a powerful picture of the nature and implementation of political economy in the long eighteenth century, from the East to the West Indies.

Part I

Theorising the Early Modern Empire

1

An Empire of Trade: Commercial Reason of State in Seventeenth-Century Holland

Jan Hartman and Arthur Weststeijn

In his reinterpretation of 1688 as the ‘first modern revolution’, Steve Pincus argues that England’s revolutionary epoch of the 1690s involved a significant change in the way people thought about the relation between politics and economics.¹ The ‘new political economy’, which rose to prominence in public discourse and state policy, held that wealth and power were based on manufacture instead of agriculture, on labour instead of land. Its underlying principle was that property was man-made and t-hus infinite instead of flowing from (finite) natural resources. This changing vision of political economy culminated in the financial policies of king-stadholder William III, such as the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. Pincus shows that opponents of William III in the 1690s were prone to dismiss these novel policies as coming from Holland.² Was this a cheap polemic trick of guilt by association with the alien interest of Britain’s natural enemy? Or was the ‘new political economy’ really a Dutch import?

To answer these questions, we first need to establish what the dominant ideas on politics and economics were during the period in which young William III (1650–1702) grew up in Holland. Recent scholarship, in particular by Erik Reinert and Jacob Soll, has laid some of the groundwork for this task by highlighting the international significance of seventeenth-century Dutch economic theory and practice, explicitly couched by Soll as ‘the rise of political economy’.³ According to Soll, a crucial role in this process should be ascribed to Pieter de la Court’s Interest van Holland, an influential political treatise, first published in 1662, that had a large impact on foreign perceptions of Dutch mercantile success.⁴ De la Court’s work is particularly important in the context of European commercial emulation, or ‘jealousy of trade’, a leitmotif of the age that has been adopted by Istvan Hont to describe the gradual development of a Machiavellian theory of international trade at the end of the seventeenth century.⁵ Yet surprisingly Hont has paid very little attention to Dutch theorising about politics and commerce, even though the Netherlands were the principal object of much of the jealousy in question. To mention just one example, Josiah Child stressed in 1668 that the ‘prodigious increase of the Netherlands in their domestick and foreign Trade, Riches, and multitude of Shipping, is the envy of the present, and may be the wonder of all future Generations’.⁶ The Dutch themselves shared this assumption. A pamphleteer argued in 1661 that Dutch primacy in world trade, ‘the Soul and the life of the Netherlands’, had caused it to be that ‘several Nations have become jealous, especially the English, who cannot bear the prosperity of the Dutch’.⁷

In this chapter we aim to uncover this Dutch theorising about commerce as the pivot of international competition, focusing on the work of de la Court in the context of the development of reason of state theory throughout Europe. De la Court’s case, we argue, shows that the term ‘political economy’ does not adequately describe seventeenth-century Dutch thought about politics and economics, which involved a distinctive application of conventional ‘reason of state’ to a seaborne, mercantile polity. As an alternative to ‘political economy’, therefore, we propose the concept of ‘commercial reason of state’ as a more useful term to understand the context and development of Holland’s ‘jealousy of trade’ in the early-modern period.⁸

The rise of commercial reason of state

When William III came of age in the Dutch Republic, Pieter de la Court ranked among the most important Dutch theorists on the relation between politics and economics. De la Court was born in 1618 as the eldest son of a Walloon immigrant family in Leiden. Educated at Leiden University during the 1640s, he and his younger brother Johan, born in 1622, became successful entrepreneurs in Leiden’s textile industry, which was by then the largest in Europe and employed more than half of the town’s population.⁹ The combined scholarly and economic background of the brothers de la Court resulted in their large oeuvre of political treatises which critically commented upon the remarkable ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch primacy in world trade. The initiative for this intellectual enterprise had come from Johan de la Court, yet after his premature death in 1660, Pieter took over the project, adapted his brother’s work and published a range of treatises until his own death in 1685.¹⁰ All in all, the brothers’ common oeuvre, which merged a radical critique of all forms of monarchy with a groundbreaking study of the origins of Dutch prosperity, was highly contested and debated throughout the Dutch Republic – and it remained influential far beyond the country’s borders.

The very first treatise of the brothers de la Court comprised a comprehensive analysis of the economic and political situation in their hometown of Leiden. Dedicated to the local magistrate Johannes Eleman, Pieter de la Court’s brother-in-law, the treatise offered a critical assessment of the policies of the municipal government, which according to the de la Courts fundamentally obstructed the economic, religious and political liberties of Leiden’s citizens.¹¹ This treatise, which circulated in manuscript and would not be published during the brothers’ lifetime, formed the foundation of a general theory of a commercial republic that was developed in their subsequent works and applied to the case of Holland at large in the 1662 Interest van Holland. Significantly, the de la Courts started their treatise on Leiden with the explicit statement that the politics of their hometown should be conceived ‘sopra la raggion di Stato’ (on the basis of reason of state).¹² From the outset, they thus positioned themselves in the tradition of reason of state: an intellectual current comprising a heterogeneous array of political treatises which, from the end of the sixteenth century onward, flooded the European markets with intricate accounts of how to preserve and enlarge a dominion according to the notorious adage ‘necessity has no law’.¹³ What exactly was the sort of reason of state that the de la Courts adhered to?

One of the first and foremost contributions to the reason of state tradition was Giovanni Botero’s Della ragion di stato, first published in 1589. Writing in the large shadow of Machiavelli, Botero (ca. 1544–1617) chiefly argued that princes should promote the grandezza (greatness) of their ‘state’ (defined as ‘a firm dominion over peoples’) through the expansion of territory, population and, in particular, wealth. Reason of state, then, entailed a practical framework to achieve such greatness, offering princes ‘the knowledge of the means of establishing, preserving and enlarging a Dominion’.¹⁴ In its opening passages, Botero’s work revealed to be deeply indebted to the Machiavellian obsession of how to establish and pursue such a durable empire that would not be consumed by external violence and envy or internal corruption.¹⁵ Yet unlike Machiavelli, Botero did not propose republican Rome as a paragon of greatness, but rather middle-sized polities such as Sparta or Venice – examples repudiated by Machiavelli.¹⁶ More importantly, Botero duly emphasised the mercantile over the military means of attaining greatness, substituting a predominantly economic approach to politics for Machiavelli’s praise of militant virtù. He developed this economic approach further in the treatise Delle cause della grandezza delle città, which was regularly appended to Della ragion di stato. This work entailed a reason of state of cities, yet still with a focus on the central role of a prince and his urban residence. Significantly, Botero referred in this context in particular to the example of the ‘Cities of Flanders’ and their economic achievements. Some of these cities, and here Botero mentioned Antwerp and Amsterdam, were indeed ‘almost the masters of merchandize and trade because of their convenient location for many nations, to which they serve as warehouse and entrepôt’.¹⁷ Botero thus stressed the structural geographic causes behind the enviable mercantile success of the Netherlands, but he also favourably discussed the concrete policies that engendered Dutch prosperity, in particular ‘the frankness of taxes’.¹⁸ In short, Botero implicitly taught that the Dutch model of commercial greatness should not only be envied, but also imitated.

An important follower of Botero’s economic approach to reason of state who clearly understood this lesson was Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552–1618).¹⁹ In his Observations Touching Trade and Commerce with the Hollander and Other Nations, written around 1618 but only published in 1653, Raleigh adopted Botero’s envious praise of the Dutch mercantile model, which so patently outshone its competitor across the North Sea. How could it be, Raleigh wondered, that Holland had no natural resources but was still able to build more and cheaper ships than England or Spain? How could Holland be a supplier of grain to many European countries if the country mostly consisted of pastures? Raleigh postulated as the main reason for this commercial success the fact that in Holland ‘the liberty of free Traffick for Strangers to buy and sell ... maketh great intercourse’. The low duties levied on existing trades and the free customs for new trades attracted many foreign merchants to Holland, thus enlarging the country’s population and wealth. Moreover, Dutch fishing at the coasts of England guaranteed a continuous source of income, while the transportation and storage of other countries’ commodities enabled the Dutch to sell corn in times of scarcity and thereby make tremendous profits.²⁰ Like Botero, Raleigh thus argued that the Dutch commercial success was primarily due to low taxation and staple market function, and again like Botero, he also stressed that these achievements could easily be imitated. Having ‘undergone the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Political Economy of Empire
• Part I Theorising the Early Modern Empire
• Part II Imperial Experiences
• Select Bibliography
• Index