Comments by "Lynott Parris" (@DenUitvreter) on "Free Documentary - Engineering" channel.

  1. Anglocentric distortion. It was all about the European trade for the Dutch, the volumes and the number of ships were a 100 times bigger. That's were the saw middel and the modern capitalism with it's low interests and reliable money mattered. In the high riks high reward trade with gunships with the Far East even the English could compete. They seem to think European trade was replaced by global trade there, but they simply couldn't compete in the week in week out bulk shipping where the real money was. The VOC didn't start the Golden Age, it only payed it's first dividend in 1633, 60 years into the Dutch Golden Age. It was a niche market, the Ottoman's had blocked the silk road and the Portuguese enemy blocked Lisbon to the Dutch, so spices where hard to get hold of and prices soared. Dutch parliament got involved to fight the Portuguese enemy in the independence war. Only once established over there, the Dutch saw much more possibilities and profit was reinvested. The often very ordinary shareholders of the VOC from all over the Dutch Republic (it was also a nationalistic entreprise for the young nation state) couldn't wait for dividend that long, so the stock exchange came about and the carpenters and maids could cash in as the merchants rich enough to wait out the VOC's growth could buy their shares for generational wealth. Still it remained a tiny cherry on a huge cake, and the Dutch remained the world's greatest sea trader until the 1790s, thanks to it's dominance of the European trade.
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  2. Why should it be mentioned? The Dutch had an exceptional big part in the European trade and putting the modern into the modern early period and a tiny part of the slavetrade. They only gave up their objection to the transatlantic slavetrade in 1638 when they were already well past half their golden age. It was economicall irrelevant, only morally.
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