Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
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antonhowes.substack.com
The king of Travancore then used the captured Dutch commander, Eustachius De Lannoy, to modernize the armed forces [2].
Reading Wikipedia (“The Mukkuvars Played a major role in defeating the Dutch East India company entering into colachal port”, “As the Dutch approached the shore, the Travancore army had made a retreat, and the locals fled the area. It was not enough for the Dutch to bombard a place and then barge in. To continue the war they required fortifications, trenches, and make-shift sheds and storerooms.”, “On 5 August, a cannonball fired by the Travancore army fell into a barrel of gunpowder inside the Dutch garrison”), it looks like a failed invasion.
The naval one in the Taiwan straits.
As eloquently described by Mike Dash in "Batavia's Graveyard" most Dutch explorer ships had merchants, sailors, soldiers and civilians on board — ranked in that order. That is, not the captain but the bean counter would have final say on important matters.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128824.Batavia_s_Graveya...
Thanks for the link
I wouldn't necessarily romanticize the exploitative colonialism of European explorers.
This does not pass the comparison test. Many highly prosperous European countries of today (Scandinavian countries, Northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Ireland) didn't have massive overseas holdings, or only for a short time.
Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Russia, four huge empires that existed for centuries (one still extant) are on the poorer side of Europe. PT and ES got only moderately prosperous in the last two generations, after shedding their last colonial possessions.
Which is still much, much wealthier than most of colonized nations... except for Russia, due to the extreme political decline after the fall of the USSR.
>Many highly prosperous European countries of today didn't have massive overseas holdings, or only for a short time.
And I never said "colonies are needed for wealth". What is your point, exactly?
I think the point is that it's not this simple: "Even more so when the current economic prosperity of the colonizing countries is still very much derived from their past."
Poor countries that were colonized are definitely held back by it. The colonial powers left extremely extractive institutions that focused on funneling power and profits into small groups of people. When they left, those institutions and that culture stayed.
But isn't it difficult to say that Spain or Portugal's "wealth" today derives from colonial holdings years and years back? What did they extract that lasts today? In those 400 years, did they not spend most of their extracted silver and gold on things that are trivialities today (porcelain, tea, etc)? Or waste it buying arms during civil wars and dictatorships? I mean there was mass starvation during Franco's regime.
It seems to me likelier that their wealth comes from the things they have in common with prosperous countries that never were colonial powers (Taiwan, South Korea, etc). Educated populace, functioning capital markets, property rights, rule of law, etc.
Anecdotally, the Russo-Ukrainian war isn't the first opportunity when Russian soldiers marveled at the sight of flushing WCs; my ancestors saw the same in 1945 and 1968, on two occassions, when Russian soldiers could be met in Czechoslovak streets. In 1968, "we" hated them and pitied them at the same time; being a random Russian soldat was an unenviable position.
Most colonial wealth is long spent, on luxury and wars long forgotten. There may be some left in Britain, though they went broke over the two world wars, too. Otherwise, a few massive buildings are left standing (such as the colonial archive in Sevilla, impressive - I was there as a tourist), and refuse pits of former palaces are full of expensive wine bottles from the 18th century, but most of the contemporary wealthy class owes its riches to the industrial revolution and its aftereffects.
And that is why the current club of rich countries consists of a mix of former colonial powers, former non-colonial non-powers and former colonies. Places like Czechia, Poland, Ireland, Estonia, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Israel and Taiwan were actually subjugated by stronger empires for much of their modern existence.
As another commenter said, strong rule of law, relatively free trade, ability to attract qualified workforce and protection of wealth makes countries in the 21st century prosperous much more reliably than violent land grabs that may actually cost you wealth instead of making it.
However, reducing everything to "they exploited others for X years" strikes me as dishonest.
Some are born into wealth and don't accomplish anything. With others it's the exact opposite (but harder, duh). Could be just luck but I am not convinced. Take a look our neighboring Russia just across the Black Sea. By far the biggest country in the world, and yet their society sucks.
I would like to know what drives these things
Coincidence? I think not.
The so-called "civilizing mission" continues to this day, with glorification of Dutch ideas and ideals, even though those ideals indeed led to mass atrocities. Such atrocities were often cited as "necessary," in order to impose "improvement" upon the victims society.
This "civilizing mission" is often seen as worth it -- it includes many good ideas, after all. Even to this day, the respect for "civlizing" ideas remains, while the acknowledging of mass atrocities is often ignored, or covered up. Even worse, many of the people who committed atrocities are thought of as heroes.
Today there is human trafficking and slavery in pretty much every country on the globe, just more or less of it. And yet, nobody really lifts a finger to the point where we will be able to once and for all ban this out.
Reparation payments, which would be one way to deal with all this (because obviously you can't undo history) are opposed because the people that live here today do not see themselves as complicit even if they are the beneficiaries. Hardly any Western European country has clean hands, and I highly doubt we will ever be able to move on from this in a way that satisfies everybody.
Secondly of all the damage to local institutions we've done has often caused corruption to be normalized so much that reparations payments would merely enrich the ruling elite further. We can't just send over a few billion to soothe our conscience and hope everything will be OK. It's not really like everyone in the victim countries were innocent either, many tribes were all to happy to sell some of their rival to the westerners.
Not everyone has documentation to prove anything either, precisely because their ancestors were slaves.
Finally, how far are we going back? Do the Dutch have the right to claim reparations from German occupation? From Napoleonic occupation? From the descendants of the Romans?
I don't dispute that there is a debt of honor to help everyone on earth towards a more prosperous state, but reparation payments have so many issues that they might create more problems than they solve.
This is such an ignorant question. It completely erases the living people who are victims of colonialism right now. But whatever, apparently there were also atrocities hundreds of years ago that we can ignore too.
In what way are they erased?
I can feel sorry for Iraq, and Srebrenica. But not for something that didn’t even happen during my lifetime.
The Dutch Republic itself, as it existed in the 1600s, was created out of an extremely bloody revolution against the Spanish (the Eighty Years' War) - in which the Spanish committed quite a bit of genocide against Dutch cities too. Look into the Spanish Fury at Mechelen, for example. Despite being the recent victims of it, they went on to commit similar acts only decades later.
Genocide has been extremely common in pretty much all of history, and it is only quite recently that most societies have at least been pretending to be explicitly against it. We should definitely remember the atrocities that have been committed, but thinking of it as an explicit "victim vs villain" on a country-per-country base doesn't really help with that.
Pretty much every single country has committed atrocities, and pretty much every single country is able to commit them in the future. We in the Western world pretend to be all modern and civilized, but recent history in the Middle East has shown that we haven't learned a goddamn thing. Pulling down statues at home of long-dead oppressors isn't going to do shit if we just keep on committing the same crimes in the present without even batting an eye.
You've made a number of comments in this vein. Do you see it as apart from the cycle of the successful? Wherein we slowly relax the effort is took to make success. And then deny these efforts altogether, and create fantasies of what _really_ brought success.
Managing all this is tricky in the short term, difficult in the mid term and quite possibly impossible in the longer term if the sea level rise is more than anticipated when these defenses were built. And you can only raise them so much, if rivers no longer flow out then you'll end up flooded anyway.
The food is ok. It’s just that Dutch people seem to be a bit more utilitarian about food consumption (something I didn’t know until leaving the Netherlands).
I explained already: they are too tiny.
[1]: Dutch toilet: https://i0.wp.com/noplacelikeanywhere.com/wp-content/uploads...
[2]: American toilet: https://www.amazon.com/American-Standard-211AA-104-222-Toile...
The bathrooms are typically smaller as well. It can often be claustrophobic. (Although the bathrooms in France are the worst, I once couldn't even close the door because my legs were too long)
>It’s just that Dutch people seem to be a bit more utilitarian about food consumption (something I didn’t know until leaving the Netherlands).
Restaurant quality seemed poor during my time living there. Bitterballen is delicious the first time, afterwards its just grease food. Other than good cheese I can't seem to point to any particular Dutch foods that really stand out.
Hard to say without anything for scale. They look about the same size to me.
They're different models though. The standing one would be considered a bit old-fashioned here. New toilets don't touch the ground for easier cleaning of the floor. And the flush compartment will be hidden in the wall just because it looks nice.
Bitterballen are snacks, not a dish. If you're in a place that has bitterballen on the menu, you're not in a restaurant, you're in a cafe or a snack bar.
But yes, we do not have a haute cuisine culture. Traditional dutch dishes are mashes or stews (boerenkoolstamppot, hutspot, hachee, zuurkool met spek) or equally simple dishes based on local vegetables (witlofsalade, asperges met ham en ei, erwtensoep).
Exploration, or conquest, was not a goal. If it happened, it was just a means to an end.
Thing is, trade is the most profitable when you get monopoly contracts with suppliers, especially when those suppliers are the only (known) suppliers of $THING. How do you get a monopoly contract? You make the supplier an offer they can’t refuse. All that fighting and fort building was only to enforce monopoly contracts, not empire building. Basically, to make sure the Portuguese didn't get their hands on those spices, so the price could stay high.
Sometimes suppliers broke those deals and the Dutch took out the guns, and that’s what the soldiers came along for. Eg in the Travancore battles linked in another comment. They lost that one, but often they did not: For example, one day the people of the Banda islands, then the only source of nutmeg in the world, broke the monopoly deal they had made with the Dutch and sold nutmeg to the British too. The Dutch went in fully loaded, killed everybody (the entire archipelago population), and replaced them with Dutch settlers to farm the nutmeg. Problem solved, monopoly restored! No hard feelings, it’s just business.
So yes! I concur! There’s just so much to learn from the Dutch East India Company! Who cares about all the genocide, we even have a VC fund[0] named after them, that’s how proud we are.
The UK had their revolution in the 17th century, invited a Dutch king on the throne, and essentially copied all the best parts of Dutch practices. Basically, that's how they bootstrapped the British empire. The bank of England was created around the same time. Meanwhile the Dutch empire prospered for a while but fizzled out. Napoleon put an end to the republic. And after it's defeat, the British turned it into a monarchy.
I think we should explore this one. It's better to solve a problem permanently than to create an industry around solving it temporarily. I'd happily pay into a fund that rewards people for doing so if it meant fewer subscription-type relationships and more now-I'll-never-have-that-problem-ever-again moments.
Also: today's semiconductor fabs rely on Dutch equipment. Surely, they get a large share of the profits of biggest industry of recent times. I am curious: was the investment that made this possible somehow facilitated by the profitability of the Dutch East Indies Company? The past extends into the future...
After being founded on Tobacco money, Philips was successful in producing high quality lightbulbs. I think they're also comparable to companies like Sony/Samsung that started out as a place where cheap labor was available, and that gradually grew into more and more high tech and intellectual property.
I think that's also an interesting side note. Despite the Dutch as a country becoming super wealthy, historically the people in The Netherlands have always been poor, there always was a very large wealth gap. I'm not a historian but I think the closing of this wealth gap (in terms of living standards, not money per se) is something that started after WW2, could be wrong.
Countries by PPP per capita (131K vs 75K for US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
Countries by homicide rate (0.2 vs 6.5 in US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
PISA rankings by country (SG tops all categories, far above US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
Life expectancy by country (83 yrs vs 77 for US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Countries ranked by infrastructure quality (SG tops): https://www.statista.com/statistics/264753/ranking-of-countr...
Why would providing better education in America lead to people being welded into their apartment? Is freedom only possible with incompetwnt governance?
At least with ChatGPT you all sound so much more literate and well punctuated.