11 - The financial system of the United Provinces at the Peace of Münster

Summary

The United Provinces in the seventeenth century are remarkable from an economic point of view for two reasons. The first is that a small country of hardly 2 million, or 2 percent of the population of Europe and 0.4 percent of that of the world (McEvedy and Jones, vol. 18, p. 342), should have become, even if only for a short period – essentially in the second and third quarter of the century – the center of the international economy, the owner of by far the largest and the most efficient of the world's high-sea fleets, the most important staple market for commodities and for precious metals, the initiator of many advances in commercial and financial as well as in agricultural and manufacturing techniques, and the possessor of the strongest navy and of an important colonial empire, though to speak of a Dutch “hegemony” is an exaggeration. The second reason is that this episode constitutes the last case – Venice, Florence, Genova, Brugge, and Antwerp were earlier examples – of a single city being able to play such a role – Amsterdam with less than 200,000 inhabitants representing something like one-half of the economic power of the United Provinces (Barbour, p. 13, reiterated by Braudel, p. 145).