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03History

The Dutch Golden Age

In the 1600s the Dutch Republic was small, but its ships, banks and painters made it one of the richest places in Europe.

1600s

Follow a guilder

This is a guilder, the coin of the Dutch Republic. Any guilder will do. Scroll down and it rolls.

It stops seven times on the way through the Golden Age. At each stop there is something to try.

1594

Wind makes planks

Ships need wood, and sawing a log by hand is slow. In 1594 a windmill owner from Uitgeest, Cornelis Corneliszoon, built a sawmill that ran on wind.

A wind sawmill could cut 60 beams in about five days. By hand the same job could take about 120 days. Turn the wind up and race it.

the sawmillby hand
50%
0

Pretend wind: a full wind gives the real five days. Less wind, slower mill. Press Race.

1602

Share the risk

In 1602 the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, sold shares to anyone in the Republic. There was no smallest amount and no largest. About 6.4 million guilders came in.

In Amsterdam 1,143 people signed up. One of them was a maid, Neeltgen Cornelis, who put in 100 guilders.

Why share? A ship can sink. If you own a small piece of many ships, one loss hurts less. Try it with pretend numbers.

100 guilders
Chance of each result
1 ship

Pretend ships: 85 in 100 come home, and each pays back 1.6 times the money in it.

1620s

Five months at sea

The ships sailed from the Netherlands to Batavia, now Jakarta, around Africa. With luck it took about five months.

Many sailors never arrived. On 15 VOC ships between 1625 and 1631, an average of 14 in every 100 people died on the way. The luckiest ship lost 2 or 3. The unluckiest lost 30.

NetherlandsBataviaCape of Good HopeAfrica
0.0

At sea for 0 months. All 100 are alive.

Pretend: people die evenly along the way. The real numbers are for the whole trip.

1637

The tulip story

In the 1630s tulips were a craze for the rich. The famous story says that in 1637 one bulb cost more than a house, and that thousands of people were ruined.

Historians who read the old records say the real story was smaller. Compare the two.

The legend

  • One tulip bulb cost more than a house.
  • Thousands of people lost everything when the prices crashed in 1637.
  • The crash hurt the whole Dutch economy.

The records

  • The historian Anne Goldgar found fewer than 400 people who were surely in the trade. They were merchants and craftsmen.
  • She found only 37 people who paid more than 300 guilders for a bulb. That is about what a skilled craftsman earned in a year.
  • When prices fell, many buyers did not pay. The authorities let them cancel for about 3.5 percent of the price.
  • She did not find one person who went bankrupt because of the crash.
300guildersmy whole year of workearns 300 guilders

1642

Light the room

Amsterdam also paid for paintings. In 1642 Rembrandt finished a huge group portrait of a militia company led by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Today we call it the Night Watch.

It is 3.63 m by 4.37 m. Rembrandt was paid 1,600 guilders, and the men in the picture paid by how big a part they wanted. The captain and his lieutenant paid the most.

Light is the whole trick. Drag the lamp across the dark room and see who steps out.

A simple drawing of the scene, not a copy of the painting.

Drag the lamp across the dark room, or pick a person.

Both

Flip the coin

Every coin has two sides. So far we have only looked at one of them.

The bright side

Amsterdam grew from 54,000 people in 1600 to about 175,000 in 1650. In 1670 the Dutch fleet was about half of Europe's shipping.

The guilder was a trusted coin all over Europe. The Bank of Amsterdam, opened in 1609, helped make it so.

The other side

The Dutch traded an estimated 600,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Almost half of them were shipped by the Dutch West India Company.

In 1621 the VOC conquered the Banda Islands, the main home of nutmeg. Soldiers killed, drove out or enslaved almost all of the roughly 15,000 people who lived there. It is regarded as an act of genocide.

1672

The Disaster Year

In 1672 France, England and two German bishoprics, Münster and Cologne, attacked the Republic at the same time. The Dutch opened their dikes and flooded their own land to stop the French army.

The Dutch call it the Rampjaar, the Disaster Year. Many historians say the Golden Age ended here. The coin rolls on, but this is where the film stops.

An army is coming across the dry land. Open the sluice gate in the dike.

Key takeaways

  1. The Dutch grew rich through trade. Wind-powered mills, cheap ships and shares in a company all pushed the same way.
  2. Shares let many people each take a small part of a big risk, so one lost ship did not ruin anyone.
  3. Tulip mania is partly a myth. The records show a smaller story than the legend.
  4. The same trade that made Amsterdam rich also ran on slavery and force, in the Atlantic and in the East Indies.
  5. The Golden Age was short. Many historians end it in 1672, the Disaster Year.

Sources

The facts on this page come from the pages below. The pictures are drawings. The risk game, the sailors and the sawmill race use pretend numbers next to the real ones, and the page says so where it happens.