(^446) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
under the burden of taxes, key industries had migrated to cheaper
lands, and businessmen had reinvested their fortunes in agriculture on
the mainland.^8 In Genoa, active merchants had become bankers to
Habsburg Spain. Both Venice and Florence were already taking on
the new role of tourist magnets, living on the wealth of erstwhile
competitors. In the aggregate, Holland was still wealthy, as Adam
Smith's impressions show, but estimates of income or product per head
1750-1870 have it going nowhere. Other, more active nations were
passing it by.^9 No absolute decline, then, but a long pause and a muta
tion.
Why this should have been so is a difficult but important historical
question. Some scholars cite mistakes of strategy: the Dutch stayed
with Indonesia and spices while the British and then the French bet on
India and textiles; or the Dutch mishandled their commercial ties with
China and thus lost out on the lucrative tea trade; or the Dutch, for this
and other reasons, lost ground in inter-Asian commerce. More per
suasive is the argument from catch-up and convergence: other centers,
advantaged by lower wages, learned to make the textiles and other
manufactures that had been a mainstay of Dutch exports and ship
ping, and having learned, shut their doors against imports. In a world
of mercantilist rivalry, navigation acts and protectionism were killing
the old workshop and chief middleman. No wonder the Dutch ex
ported capital: they could get more for it abroad than at home.
In the nineteenth century, the example of more successful industri-
alizers, Britain above all, but also the southern Netherlands (from 1815
actually part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, then from 1831 on,
independent Belgium), did not lead at first to a redefinition of Dutch
vocation. Perhaps the persistently higher price of labor discouraged
manufacturing, at least in the coastal provinces,^10 or the Dutch may
have had trouble abandoning ingrained habits and refiguring the op
portunities.^11
On this point, scholars have pointed to a Dutch distaste for moder
nity and high aversion to risk. One historian wrote:
In nearly all the industrial towns in our land one saw the owners of fac
tories and tmfieken rather give up the unequal struggle with a more dy
namic neighbour than adapt the new machine power to the increasingly
old-fashioned inherited means of production. Yes, many regarded the
smoke of the fuming steam engine as the hideous smoke from the pit of the
abyss.^12
nora
(Nora)
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