300 Chapter 16
lower shipping rates than their competitors. With the
founding of the East and West India companies, this
advantage became global. The axis of the spice trade
shifted from Lisbon to Amsterdam while Dutch skip-
pers took advantage of the delays occasioned by the
flotasystem and by a general shortage of Iberian ship-
ping to intrude upon the commerce of the Americas.
The profits from these sources generated investment
capital, and Amsterdam soon became Europe’s bank-
ing center as well as its commercial hub.
In these years, the modern city with its canals and
high, narrow townhouses took shape. For all its wealth
and beauty, however, Amsterdam was never more than
the largest of several towns that supported and at times
competed with each other in a variety of markets. The
Dutch republic was overwhelmingly urban. A network
of canals linked its cities and provided cheap, efficient
transportation. Agriculturally, though a few large es-
tates remained, most of the land was divided into rela-
tively small plots and cultivated intensively to grow
produce and dairy products for the nearby towns. Most
peasants were independent farmers and relatively pros-
perous. Pockets of urban misery existed, but no real in-
dustrial proletariat was evident outside the cloth towns
of Haarlem and Leiden. Dutch society was therefore
resolutely bourgeois. Hard work, thrift, and cleanliness
were valued; ostentation was suspect.
A series of extraordinary painters provide a vivid
picture of Dutch life in the seventeenth century. Jan
Vermeer (1632–75) portrayed bright, spotless interiorsIllustration 16.4
The Amsterdam Bourse, or Stock Exchange.This painting
by Job Berckheyde shows the Bourse as it was in the seventeenth
century. Though not the first such exchange in Europe, it was by
far the largest and most important of the early modern period.
Small shareholders and great capitalists traded shares in the East
India Company and many smaller enterprises.