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The book Going Dutch by Lisa Jardine has a interesting take on the effect of William of Orange going to Britain and the why the industrial revolution happened in Britain not Holland. Others have pointed this out. also, but I have the above book convenient in my book shelf.

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Learned so much from this post! Thank you.

Related, which you probably know about: The Great Transformation, The Institutional Revolution, and Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City.

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A Pyrrhic victory.

Almost nobody today knows the Dutch once conquered England. I will concede this is just one of the ways to look at the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as it has also been described as an internal coup. Still, to assure victory, William III sailed with an armada of around 450 vessels (three times the number of the Spanish Armada) from the mainland to England and a year later, the Tower of London was still guarded by Dutch soldiers.

How is this related to the subject of this post? I will tell you. It was the moment Dutch naval and commercial supremacy was replaced by English supremacy because of the transfer of financial expertise and techniques from Holland to England.

Thus it was a Pyrrhic victory.

As you might imagine from the above I am Dutch, so I might be slightly biassed :)

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The Glorious Revolution is an interesting case, certainly. And some things do appear to have transferred over as a result of it. But that said, I'm often very surprised at just how much Dutch expertise and investment there was in England even decades before it - with fen drainage, for example, and various other investments.

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After I wrote my reply I decided to expand it into a blogpost:

https://henkb.substack.com/p/victory-and-downfall

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I think that you are correct in that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was actually a Dutch invasion with English Whig support. The British have a hard time admitting that they were actually conquered by a smaller nation.

It is an interesting take that it was a pyrrhic victory that lead to the fall of Dutch naval and commercial supremacy. I would also include that the French invasion of 1672 played a major role. I have great admiration for the Dutch people and the Dutch republic, but unfortunately they were caught between two hostile powers.

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In Dutch we call 1672 het Rampjaar (the year of Disaster) because the Re4publis was attacked by three forgein forces at once. It was great year for William III though. He was able to snatch away power from the States General (dominated by the wealthy merchant class) because many people felt the SG had fucked up and a strong leader was needed.

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Fascinating - my first comment is that a number of causes are actually symptoms of a deeper cause - presumably better available credit, bills of exchanges, banks, registers, etc are the product of a more cohesive political system. Second, it's deliciously reminiscent of the debate about whether Victorian Britain failed by exporting too much of its capital rather than investing it at home.

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On the first comment, possibly. Antwerp had already been the key trading hub before the 1560s, however, and it lost many of its merchants and manufacturers to the nascent Dutch Republic in the Revolt, as well as all of its trade when they blocked the Scheldt. So some of it will also be much older.

And yes, it's strikingly similar to Victorian Britain exporting so much capital! As a few other commenters have noted, perhaps the Netherlands was a victim of its own success by investing so much in its key competitor!

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Interesting but maybe a bit naive in places. Relying on Child in particular is not a great idea.

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I mean, I’m not taking him at his word, and have even corrected him in a few places where he was certainly wrong, as well as adding quite a bit of context. But I thought it was an interesting list nonetheless.

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You may already be aware of this paper, but I couldn't help thinking of it:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-022-09213-5

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What is the gavelkind argument, exactly? Is it that it spreads the wealth more equally and thus directly creates additional wealthy individuals, or that this allows for more financial actors and that this has downstream consequences which eventually results in a wealthier people?

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Great question, because Child didn't go into much detail, at least in this early version of his work (there's a much longer 1690s version though, which I've not yet had a chance to read - so I might update later on).

My impression is that it's partly about more equal distribution of wealth (he makes arguments about the importance of that elsewhere in the tract), and perhaps partly about primogeniture being a problem in England because it thereby has too many merchants all competing with one another (which may also partly be about them being insufficiently skilled)

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I also thought that comment was strange. After all these days primogeniture is commonly cited as one of the keys to England's success. It Forced later sons of nobles to seek their fortunes abroad, and meanwhile kept estates intact rather than dividing them into ever smaller portions each generation.

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Some of these things sound like they could go either way on increasing wealth, and, given that the British soon became substantially richer, it does seem like some of these things did go the other way!

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Totally plausible, yeah. Though in terms of general availability of capital, it's striking to me that the Industrial Revolution seems to have happened despite it being so restricted, especially compared to the Low Countries (and perhaps Italy, where interest rates were also often reputedly in the 4-5% range)

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Glad that you are mentioning the Dutch. I think that they are one of the most important peoples in the origins of modern progress. Much of what we now associate with 17th- and 18th-Century Britain actually arose in the Netherlands and Flanders (and before that in Northern Italy).

Not sure whether you heard, but I recently published a book about the origins of progress, where I go into a little detail on the Dutch Republic and other other Commercial societies. You can check it out at:

https://frompovertytoprogress.com/books/

I also recently launched a YouTube channel on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/@FromPovertyToProgress

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A great book about the Dutch Republic is:

First Modern Economy by Jan de Fries

He was actually a professor of mine in the distant past.

You can read a summary of the book here:

https://techratchet.com/2020/04/12/book-summary-first-modern-economy-dutch-economy-1500-1815-by-jan-de-vries/

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I am not sure whether Substack notified you, but I cross-posted this article yesterday. It is part of my series of cross-posting what I believe to be the best progress-related articles.

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I had not been notified! Thank you Michael, that’s very kind of you

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Sure thing. You deserved it!

I am trying to help the Progress Studies movement market itself as a group better, so we can all spend more time on research and writing and less time on marketing. Substack is a great platform to do that, but it requires cooperation among us.

By the way, I am also writing an extended series of posts on Progress Studies. I would love to get your feedback. I am planning roughly one article per day for the next few weeks.

Progress Studies only has a few trained academics, (I was a professor) so I think that we need to be thinking about the fundamentals for how we can establish Progress Studies as a real academic discipline. You wrote an excellent article on how to be a historian, so I am sure that you can give some important insight.

https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/t/progress-studies

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