Free A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali

eight hundred, transport cargoes six times bigger than all the other European fleets combined — in other words, three-quarters of the grain, salt, and timber and half the metals and textiles of all Europe. And since war always supports trade, the Dutch navy becomes master of the seas from the Baltic to Latin America. The Dutch East India Company, and later the Stock Exchange and Bank of Amsterdam, now turn this naval power into an instrument of financial and commercial domination. It is also Amsterdam that dreams up the financing of land-bound operations by stockholding companies in 1604.
    Like its predecessors, this new format replaces new services with industrial products and new forced laborers with wage-earners. It increasingly concentrates the wealth in a decreasing number of hands, and grants greater freedoms to its citizens and to consumers while inflicting increasing alienation on its workers.
    This fifth core is no longer just a city: it is now a whole region. Leiden is its industrial center, while Rotterdam focuses on shipbuilding. Amsterdam’s bourgeois regents dominate the province and control the surplus, despite conflict between the Great Pensioner of Holland and the Stadhouder of the United Provinces. Even though slavery has entirely disappeared, the people work hard and are often hungry. Protestantismalso liberates men from any guilt in regard to wealth: the church is no longer there to monopolize fortunes. Public life is sumptuous, intellectual life intense; famous universities welcome foreigners. Around 1650, one of their descendants, Baruch Spinoza, has the audacity to imagine a world in which God would be lumped together with Nature, without attempting to impose a moral code on men resolutely autonomous and free.
    The rest of the world gazes, fascinated, at this triumph (it will last nearly two centuries and will be the longest-lived mercantile form of all time).
    Yet when they describe this period, our history books still dwell longer on the fate of monarchs than on that of wealth. In 1644, the Middle Kingdom is still the world’s leading economic power when Manchu nomads overthrow the Ming dynasty and found the Qing, its capital now in Beijing. The Qing will remain in power for two and a half centuries. In France in 1643, Louis XIV ascends the throne and in 1648 puts an end to the Thirty Years’ War that has devastated Europe. But despite his apparent splendor, the Sun King lacks the means to rival the United Provinces. By 1685 (date of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes), the per capita income of Amsterdam’s inhabitants is already four times higher than that of Parisians — and the gap widens still further with the departure from France of its Protestant Huguenots.
    The world is changing. Bruges is now just a second-rank city, Antwerp a suburb of Amsterdam; Genoa is in decline: along with the rest of the rest of Lombardy, it is gradually excluded from the major mercantile circuits. Venice is no more than a sumptuous chapter inthe history of trade with the East. Spain remains sealed off behind the Pyrenees. China timidly raises its head: in 1683 the emperor occupies Taiwan. New powers emerge: Austria rises to become a rampart against the Turks; in 1689 Peter the Great’s Russia becomes an international player. Prussia does the same in 1740 under Friedrich von Hohenzollern. In 1720, Qing China takes Tibet and then the Altai region (modern Xinjiang) — a Muslim zone. All this time seventeen million Africans, sold as slaves by Arab traders, have been deported to various European colonies by Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Frenchmen. As it has done since the inauguration of the mercantile order, the science of geopolitics develops more fruitfully alongside trade and industry than dynasties.
    For the Low Countries, the eighteenth is still a triumphant century — and for its rivals a time of repeated failure. With its small population (about three hundred thousand inhabitants), it