CHAPTER II - THE GROWTH OF OVERSEAS COMMERCE AND EUROPEAN MANUFACTURE

Summary

The half century which ended at the Treaty of Utrecht had been a formative and decisive period in the history of world trade. An analysis of the structure of seaborne commerce in the mid-seventeenth century would have revealed that it was preponderantly European in character and that a large part of the total volume was handled by the Dutch. The prosperity of Amsterdam derived primarily from the exchange of bulk commodities from northern Europe—timber, naval stores, and corn—against the produce of southern and western Europe—the salt of Biscay, the wool and silver of Spain, the herrings caught by Dutch fishermen off the British coasts, the wines and textiles of the Mediterranean. On the firm foundation of these bulk trades the Dutch had built up a vast entrepôt trade, served by a merchant fleet which was calculated in one contemporary estimate to be double that of England and nine times that of France. To this entrepôt were drawn other commodities—the cloths of England and France in particular—as well as an increasing flow of colonial wares—the spices brought from the East by the Dutch East India Company, and the tobacco, sugar and dyes of the Caribbean. Throughout the century an economic organisation was steadily built up to deal with the unprecedented scope and variety of the entrepôt trade. The Bourse, a central banking system, and a money-market together constituted its financial apparatus. The merchants themselves were divided into broad groups corresponding to the nature of their operations. The so-called ‘Second-Hand’ merchants specialised in dealings in imported goods which they stored until they were sold, sorted and graded them, or arranged for them to be processed or refined by local industries.