(^448) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
ture. Soon Dutch income, never far behind, converged with that of the
European leaders.^15
Britain succeeded Holland. In the seventeenth century, England ha
rassed and fought the United Provinces at every opportunity: hence a
tax on the export of unfinished woolens and Alderman Cockayne's
Project (1614-17) to take back from the Dutch the valuable dyeing and
finishing (unsuccessful);* two navigation acts, designed to hurt the
Dutch in their role as chief carriers and middlemen (they did); and a
pair of naval wars that displaced the Dutch as masters of the seas, ex
truded them from North America, and led indirectly to their contain
ment in India. Then the Dutch placed William of Orange on the
English throne (1688), and from then on, the two countries partnered
in war and peace; but the Dutch were the junior partners. In particu
lar, the Dutch were Britain's barrier to French territorial ambitions on
the Continent. So useful were they in this role that, once the takeover
by Revolutionary-Napoleonic France liquidated, the British gave back
(1815) to the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands its lost
colonies, including Indonesia (one major exception: Cape Colony in
South Africa). In the bargain came what is now Belgium, then a mosaic
of the Austrian Netherlands and sundry bishoprics and principalities.
The point was, Britain no longer had to fear Dutch economic rivalry.
Whatever the Dutch had done, the British now did bigger and better.
Josiah Child, London merchant, M.P., later governor of the East India
Company, and political arithmetician, saw the issue clearly in his New
Discourse of Trade (1668 and 1690):
The prodigious increase of the Netherlanders in their domestick and for
eign trade, riches, and multitude of shipping, is the envy of the present, and
may be the wonder of all future generations. And yet the means whereby
they have thus advanced themselves are... imitable by most other nations
but more easily by us of this kingdom of England.^16
Exactly. By Child's time, Holland was exporting capital to Britain,
while Britain led the way to modern industry and took over as the
world's premier mercantile and financial center.
- An estimate of 1614 figured that dyeing and dressing would add 50 to 100 percent
to the value of exports—see Supple, Crisis and Change, pp. 33-51. The scheme failed
because exporters of unfinished cloth (the company of Merchant Adventurers) had
their own clout and more money. And of course the Dutch fought the import of fin
ished cloth.