Free The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby

off the English in Amboina, putting to the sword ten traders in a dramatic gesture of their serious intention to be the only European power in the area. The English moved on to India. The Dutch also engaged in the intra-Asian trade. They bartered local goods for pepper to be shipped to China and Japan for luxury goods and gold or silver, much of which was sent back home to finance more outbound voyages. 14 Strong population growth in China and elsewhere enlarged this trade, though like European countries, Asian regions suffered from repeated famines.
    Now commanding the center of the spice-producing islands, the Dutch won over most of the indigenous rulers, who fought among themselves with great ferocity. The company established its headquarters in 1619 on Java, conferring the old Germanic tribal name of Batavia on the Javanese city that they had destroyed while capturing it. The archipelago included dozens of sovereign states that often interfered with the control the Dutch wished to exert, so what began as an aggressive commercial policy became a program of conquest. By 1670 the tasks of subduing local rulers had been accomplished. Still, the profits from the spice trade were so high that Chinese and European rivals rarely gave up trying to corner a bit of the market, muscling in on the trade of pepper, sugar, coffee, tea, silk, and textiles. Still, the Dutch East India Company enjoyed a monopoly of trade with Japan from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century as well as on the commerce in cloves, mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon. 15
    A self-perpetuating urban oligarchy oversaw the domestic and foreign commerce of the Netherlands. Once independence was secured, the regents managed to push those Catholic aristocrats left over from the Hapsburg era back into their medieval castles. The regents and their fellow merchants ran a dozen thriving cities. Those with trading interests in the Netherlands wanted to hold at bay also those religious leaders who were more concerned with the enforcement of orthodox beliefs than with the commercial benefits of toleration. And they succeeded. The regents, in deference to the polyglot nature of commerce, extended hospitality to all comers; they rushed to facilitate trade across ethnic and religious lines.
    Holland became an intellectual center, offering refuge to dissenters, freethinkers, and a raft of cranks. The book trade flourished, fostered by the high rate of literacy in the Netherlands as well as the freedom to publish writings banned in surrounding countries. Of some one hundred thousand people living in Amsterdam, a third of them were foreigners: Portuguese, Jews, Belgians, and refugees from all over Europe. Artisans seeking religious freedom added their skills to the rich reservoir of crafts already present. People in the seventeenth century loved the metaphor of the beehive. The Netherlands truly fitted the metaphor, attracting artists, writers, philosophers, and artisans, who all prospered from the crosspollination of ideas and talents. But this particular honeycomb was never chaotic, for the regents, the rulers of the Netherlands, cherished order almost as much as profit.
    Trade and Society
    Because sixteenth-century trade created new wealth and reached deeper into the countryside with its monetary exchanges, it had a more pervasive impact than had earlier commercial enterprises. The flood of silver that the conquistadors stole from the Incas and Aztecs precipitated a century-long inflation in Europe. This inflation didn’t fall, like the rain that Shakespeare’s Portia described, impartially on everyone. It hurt those with fixed incomes, like landlords tied to old leases. Wages too lagged behind price rises, but inflation gave a boost to entrepreneurs. The profits of merchants in the East Indian trade were enhanced too. Merchants from England, France, and the Netherlands sailed forth on their yearlong voyages with goods and currency to pay for