Name: Dutch Golden Age: Crash Course European History #15
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T02:50:35.000Z
Duration: 13 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So in the last episode, we saw the gentry and merchant class of the British Isles defeat

the old aristocrat-backed, absolutist monarchy in the Glorious Revolution, ushering in a

And this points to a wider development in European history--and for that matter world

So, we've talked a lot in this series about being able to shift perspectives--to see things

from royal perspectives, or from peasant perspectives, and so on.

But students of history must also learn how to shift the lenses through which they look

Like, we might look at the past through the lens of food availability, or through the

lens of visual art, or through the lens of Marxist theory, and so on.

And the lenses we choose are often about our present concerns.

The way that we look at the past changes over time, as the present changes.

And in the present where I'm currently standing, one of the big questions is how to distribute

So today, we're going to look at history through the lens of power--by which I mean,

who gets to decide the ambitions and priorities of a community, and we'll see how the distribution

INTRO So, in the early modern period monarchs could

coordinate national defense, and they could try to collect taxes and even try to impose

their religious beliefs on their communities.

But increasingly over time, economic activity was driven and controlled by the so-called

productive classes--land-owning gentry who were producing more food per acre thanks to

the agricultural revolution, and merchants who were making money due to expanding trade

These classes held the key to government finances, because they were the ones with the money

and land and goods that could be taxed, which then--as now--meant that they had power to

And in many cases, these productive classes used this power to give themselves a say in

the running of their country through advocating for a constitutional government that could

We see this especially in Dutch history, where these classes brought about constitutionalism

and created what has come to be known as the Dutch Golden Age.

It'll last forever: just like all golden ages.

So, like British reformers, the Dutch had an active business class, who were backing

the struggle for independence from Spain.

This struggle involved the seven northern provinces of the Low Countries allying with

the ten southern provinces after 1576 to defeat the Spanish in the Eighty Years War (also

known as the Dutch revolts or the Dutch War of Independence or I suppose the Spanish probably

thought of it as Our Northern Province's Illegal War of Secession.

It all depends on who's telling the story.

But anyway, by the end of the sixteenth century the United Provinces of the low countries

had become functionally independent from Spain, though it wasn't formalized until 1648 in

The southern provinces spun off to constitute Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of northern

France, while the seven northern provinces became the Netherlands.

Each province of the Dutch Republic had a regent who oversaw provincial affairs, while

as a group they participated in the States General, a kind of council of representatives

from each province, which in turn chose a single executive, known as the stadtholder,

Or probably somewhere halfway in between those that only Dutch people can say.

Anyway, all in all, this was a fairly loose confederation of states, and they often had

Like, Holland, on the one hand, was the most prosperous and contributed the most to the

It was commercially-oriented and generally favored peace over war.

On the other side were provinces like Zeeland whose privateers seized ships during the chaos

of warfare and were therefore somewhat less opposed to it.

Calvinist clergymen favored war against Catholic Spain and some pamphleteers simply liked war

because “it caused all industry and trade to grow and prosper.”[1] Which is a bit

Although, whether war is good for business is one of the big questions of history.

It's definitely not great for people, though, which I would argue are possibly even more

There was also disagreement among the provinces about the role of the stadtholder: Should

the Stadtholder become more of a monarchical figure, or should the United Provinces continue

So we're talking here about big differences about fundamental matters, like war and peace

and how power should be distributed within the confederation.

And these differences prevented the kind of focused central government that England built

But nonetheless, the States General had greater unity in economic policy—that is in its

strategy for backing trade—than the English did, whose conservative aristocracy were always

battling the commercial classes both before and after the English civil war.

So despite a measure of political disunity, the Dutch Republic prospered in the seventeenth

century and in spite of warfare, it actually became a comparatively tolerant state.

In fact its prosperity made it a kind of mecca for all sorts of artisans and business people

who wanted to participate in Dutch hustle and bustle.

[[TV: BARUCH SPINOZA]] The republic became a center of printing for people whose thoughts

For instance, philosopher Baruch Spinoza denied the immortality of the soul and didn't believe

Those were pretty radical ideas in 17th century Europe, and in fact, Spinoza was banished

from his Jewish congregation in his early twenties, but he continued his philosophical

labors, and he was able to continue publishing.

It's also worth noting that, like most philosophers, Spinoza did have a day job--he ground lenses

Meaning that he was very good at shifting historical lenses.

I feel like I should apologize to my friends and family for that joke.

But Spinoza's Portuguese Jewish ancestors had settled in Amsterdam in the sixteenth

century, and Jewish people from Spain also migrated north to escape persecution by Isabella

and Ferdinand and their royal descendants.

Pilgrims and many other religious non-conformists also went to the Netherlands, as did many

Huguenots after the French revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

The citizens of the Dutch Republic were among the most diverse in Europe at the time, and

that contributed to the Netherlands prosperity.

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Dutch Golden Age: Crash Course European History #15

struggle

present

thrive

productive