A History of the World (49 page)

Yet that is only half the story. The other point about Tokugawa Japan, which we will return to later, is that it was an intensely conservative and hierarchical society, which never developed the semi-democratic and more open culture of the early-modern West. Conservatism and closure probably went hand in hand. By the time Japan did rejoin the world, it was still run by a hierarchy of aristocrats with medieval views, and its citizens were trained perhaps a little too well to obey orders. This would have implications for twentieth-century history. Japan still has its punks, of course; and despite the edicts of 1612, they remain formidable smokers.

In a Nutshell to New York

The coming British world domination was not yet obvious. The failure to break into the Japanese market was matched by others. The rise of the British as a naval and trading power is now so firmly part of world history that it may come as a shock to find that in the most lucrative contest of all, they were soundly beaten by those rivals who featured in the Japanese story, the Dutch.

Very broadly, the story of European mercantile expansion can be divided into three phases. First, from the late 1400s, came the Portuguese, whose ships explored the African coast. Then, discovering that the Cape could be reached by veering off far west into the Atlantic, allowing the winds to carry them round, they got to India and the Far East. The Portuguese operated as violently monopolistic traders rather than as empire-builders, setting up fortifications to protect their sea routes and repelling all rivals. The Spanish were next to get in on the act, but did not really try to oust the Portuguese from ‘their’ routes, focusing instead, as we have seen, on the Americas. Portugal’s greatest sailor, Ferdinand Magellan, was working for the Spanish when he discovered the route round Cape Horn to South America. He died soon afterwards. One of the ships he had set out with became the first vessel to circumnavigate the world.

The second phase saw two more northerly nations, the English and the Dutch, join the adventure. To begin with they were no more
consciously imperialist than the Portuguese, also being driven by merchants’ hopes of profit. Europe had long had a near-desperate desire for the spices that grew only in the East. The most delicious and (it was thought) healthful of these were to be found in the Spice Islands, wedged in the dangerous seas between Borneo and New Guinea. Nutmeg, cloves, mace, pepper and cinnamon had been bought from the islanders there by Muslim seafarers; then taken to India, thence through the Islamic world to Constantinople, and finally through Venice to Europe. A profit was made at each stage, so that the aromatic nuts and seeds were hugely expensive luxuries by the time they reached Paris or London. Yet before the advent of refrigeration, in an age of rank meat and dull eating, the appetite for them was as insatiable as it was for fur. Most spices were also thought to offer protection against illness: nutmeg was supposed to cure syphilis, and even the plague.

Meanwhile, Portuguese seamanship had found a shorter way to the Spice Islands. The journey might still take months, even years, and kill perhaps a third of the sailors who attempted it, but ships from Europe could now get direct access to the spices. Their owners would be able, in a single voyage, to make the fabulous profits that had formerly been shared by traders across half the world. The losers were the Arab and Indian traders, suddenly and brutally cut out of the chain; the markets of Constantinople became quieter and the avaricious palazzo-dwelling merchants of Venice’s Grand Canal grumbled. The next losers would be the Portuguese themselves, confronted by better-built ships and bolder adventurers, this time from the lowlands of northern Europe. In particular, the Dutch would mix seamanship and the arts of commerce that they had learned in Italy, to produce a world-changing formula.

We human beings remain, in part, quite simple animals: we love new tastes, pretty, shiny things to look at, soft things against our skins, pleasurable scents and interesting flavours. This has always been the case, but for Europe after its centuries of relative isolation it was particularly so. The Dutch were able to impose a virtual monopoly on what they called, with admirable straight speaking, the ‘rich trades’ – not only the spices but also silks and fine Japanese porcelain. The profits were huge. So, however, were the risks. Storms, piracy and spoiled cargo meant that many investors lost everything. Dividing, sharing out
and selling the risk, as well as guaranteeing the system of dividing profits, led the Dutch to develop the first proper stock market.

Buying and selling paper shares was not
quite
new. Charles V, to raise money for his battles in the Netherlands, had produced a system of annuities, which were transferable and tradable. In Antwerp, foreign bills of exchange were bought and sold in increasingly complex ways, and when the Protestants were expelled from that city in 1585 they ended up carrying on the trade in Amsterdam. There in 1609, the Wisselbank, often seen as the world’s first central bank, opened to guarantee the value of different coinages, for a small fee. In a world of clipped and debased currencies, this offered a basic security on which more adventurous trade could stand.
²³

Before the Amsterdam
beurs
, or stock market, opened, just a year after the Wisselbank, the city’s speculators had haggled and slapped hands on its New Bridge or in nearby churches. The new building formalized the trading, and its short opening hours added an air of businesslike frenzy so familiar to later traders; soon hundreds of different commodities were being bought and sold. Like the first central bank, the first joint-stock company was founded in Amsterdam, and in a remarkably short time the Dutch had developed all the essentials of a secure and flexible source of funding that individual English aristocrats, British monarchs or the courts of Spain and Portugal simply could not match.

The ‘rich trades’ involved almost miraculous acts of seamanship and courage. Rival Europeans tried to batter their way through the Arctic ice or penetrate the Canadian wilderness, still looking for a shorter way to the aromatic islands. In London, they tried to mimic the Dutch by founding their own East India Company, but the British discovered, not for the last time, that it is hard to be second into a new market. The Dutch were dug in, determined and utterly ruthless. In a series of vicious battles, heroic sieges, squalid deals and barbarous betrayals they would eventually capture the Spice Islands – and much of the rest of the Far Eastern trade – for themselves. The Dutch businessmen realized that to repel rivals, they would need forts, protected warehouses, secure anchorages and a permanent arrangement with the local rulers whose produce they were after. This meant that the Dutch – even though they were God-fearing republicans – were turning themselves into imperialists. The third phase had arrived. Today’s
Indonesia became their Far Eastern base, with a new, Dutch, capital, ‘Batavia’.

The under-gunned, under-shipped, under-capitalized British had so far found it impossible to loosen the Dutch stranglehold. In recent years, the heroic story of the British sailor Nathaniel Courthope, who defended the tiny spice island of Run, Britain’s first Asian colony, against a long Dutch siege, has made an inspiring bestseller. Thanks to his courageous stance, Britain was eventually able to barter her legal title to Run for another small island then held by the Dutch, called by the natives ‘Manhattan’. New Amsterdam would become New York, and the British imperial story would really start in North America, where she was already established in the outposts of Virginia and Carolina.

A yearning for religious freedom rather than spices or simple profit would result in a colonization much more significant than any struggles in the Indian Ocean. British naval power would grow to the point where, during the Napoleonic wars, she would be able briefly to return to the Spice Islands and simply dig up, pot, and transplant the valuable trees to other colonies such as Grenada, thus ending the Dutch monopoly. But that was only after nearly two hundred years of easy profits had poured into the Netherlands. Mostly, the Dutch would make sensible use of their good fortune, producing the world’s first stable, consumer-rich middle class. But before that happened, as we are about to see, these sober, business-minded, cold-headed northern Europeans would make half the world gape – and roar with astonished laughter at their expense.

A Very Modern Story

History, in its conventional sense, is made mostly outside the home. Outdoors, generals mount their horses and sailors haul rope. In workshops, inventors hack and twist, and bite their lips and scribble. In the street preachers bawl, and traders are always heaving into sight with something new. But history is not truly made until it is felt
inside
the home. The big changes are the ones experienced around the supper table, or in the sickbed. Sometimes the home is in a new continent, or is burned down or abandoned. The great discontinuities of human
life, which taken together we call ‘history’, are those that have a direct impact on how the mass of us humans live; and where we live, in general, is at home.

Pieter Wynants was a Dutch textile merchant, who also manufactured linen and thread. He had a fine house in Haarlem and on 1 February 1637 had invited some friends for family lunch. It would have been a good spread, placed by the servants before the polite, soberly dressed gathering, on a crisp tablecloth. This is a world we think we know through the great Dutch painters of the golden age – Rembrandt, Rubens, de Hooch and Vermeer – a reassuring world of straight-backed, quizzical people wearing bright white ruffs and surrounded by a softly lit abundance. Yet just beyond the edge of the canvas it was also a world of epidemics, the constant threat of war, fierce religious arguments and financial hysteria. If the Dutch of this period are the first model for today’s bourgeois, consumerist society, there was nothing stable or reassuring about it.

At Pieter Wynants’s table, everyone knew each other well and all were in the prime of life, their thirties or forties. They were well off and interconnected by their Mennonite faith, members of a Protestant group who were (and are) pacifist, hostile to state interference in religion, and against infant baptism. Among them were no fewer than three women who had been recently widowed by the latest outbreak of bubonic plague. This had taken the lives of around one in eight people in Haarlem, which had run out of places to bury the dead. It had also resulted in these women inheriting money. The host’s younger brother Hendrick had a good, if obvious, idea about how they should spend it. He suggested to one of them, Geertruyt Schoudt, whose husband had been a wool merchant, that she should buy some Switzer tulip bulbs; their price was continuing to shoot up, and she would make a hefty profit. Switzers were comparatively dull flowers, not in the same league as the subtly patterned rarities coveted by the most sophisticated tulip connoisseurs. But the great Dutch tulip mania was at its peak. Even Switzers were changing hands at 1,350 guilders a pound, the price of two very fine houses or a pair of fully fitted ships.
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We know what happened next, from detailed court records. The widow was dubious about buying the bulbs, and only came round to the idea when another man at the meal, Jacob de Block, offered to
guarantee her the sale for eight days while she raised the money. Something of the tense, competitive mood at the lunch is captured by the fact that as soon as Widow Schoudt agreed the deal, she was offered an instant 100-guilder profit if she sold them again on the spot. Egged on by Jacob, she refused the offer and decided to hold out for a far bigger profit. This would be a mistake. For the tulip bulb bubble, like all financial bubbles, was about to break. Within days the bulbs would be worth almost nothing.

This tulip mania has been seen as the classic case of financial hysteria, the precursor to the South Sea Bubble, the 1929 Great Crash, the ‘dot-com bubble’ of 1995–2000 and property bubbles before the most recent banking crash. There is a lot of truth in this. The people around the Haarlem lunch table were, like so many later investors, hard-working folk – Mennonites often call themselves ‘the plain people’ – who thought they understood the market they were dealing in. They were doing what had become normal, even ‘sensible’, in their milieu. You ‘couldn’t lose’ with tulip bulbs, just as you ‘couldn’t lose’ with Internet companies or hedge-fund mathematics. Queasy though it might have made them, the greed-is-good motto of a later investor had already wormed its way into Protestant Holland.

‘Holland’ was in fact only one of the territories in a country which then called itself the United Provinces. This was a better name. Most of Europe was a province of somewhere, and these particular ones had banded together as a result of the impact of Luther’s Reformation. The Dutch, like their north German neighbours, had mostly converted to Protestantism. At some point it would have become absurd for the agricultural and fishing lands on Europe’s northern coast to continue to be ruled from Madrid by the Habsburgs, but the religious divide gave the Dutch wars of independence a special urgency and edge. After Philip of Spain intensified the persecution of ‘heretics’, what had started as protests against high taxes and the quartering of troops turned into a full-scale revolt.

As Europe split itself up into rival religious tribes, Protestant refugees poured into the Netherlands. Following a heroic defence of the town of Leiden, the Dutch beat back the first Spanish attempt at reconquest. The Spaniards’ policy of terrorism ruled out the possibility of compromise, and a complicated struggle began, involving famine, persecution and war by both land and sea. At different points
the desperate Dutch had offered the monarchs of France and Spain the Netherlands crown in return for support, but by 1609 the northern provinces had effectively seceded, leaving the southern Netherlands Catholic and Habsburg. There would be a further Spanish invasion in 1628, and the gathering at Pieter Wynants’s house nine years later could not have been sure that more attacks might not be in the offing; the final peace was not signed until a decade after the tulip mania had ended.