Meh, when you know english and have some basic knowledge of german (and the other way around), you can understand Dutch.
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Meh, when you know english and have some basic knowledge of german (and the other way around), you can understand Dutch.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Atomizing my sentences leads me to believe that you neither have the historical background to understand why I said what I said, nor did you actually understand my syntax.
That or you have an axe to grind on terminology. Either way, the Netherlands is still the genesis of the modern capitalist western nation-state.
edit: @Algeroth, that's how I plan to learn it in a year ;D
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Now you're changing the subject.
I never said you were. How you came to this response is pretty much in line with how you responded to the first part.Are you drunk?
I just thought I'd restate it for the benefit of the slower among us on the thread. I failed. Anyway, define the following terms: modern-(state), nation-state, capitalism and Western for the benefit of us all. That'll be the first step completed.
The guy's like one of the few people left on this forum who actually can talk about economics without looking like an idiot, and of those he's the only one with a background in economic history. I think he knows what he's talking about.
And he does have a point. The cult of the Dutch is one of the more annoying things about early modern history (hardly the "nobody's translated their history and nobody cares" thing you were going on about). The reaction to - or perhaps modification of - the dominant Roberts-Parker narrative for early modern European history, the so-called Military Revolution, shifted emphasis from Sweden to the Netherlands, and that is where it has stayed, greatly for the worse, in my opinion. But then again, I'm interested in that new transnational history fad.
There is no particular compelling argument that the Dutch republic was the "first" nation-state (France? England? Muscovy?), especially when the concept of a "nation" at the time was, uh, not the same as ours. Hell, the most traditional and widely-spread nationalism narrative is that it didn't exist in a recognizable form until the Enlightenment, and if any state were to be the first "nation-state" in Europe it would be France. Dutch identity was not exactly coherent with either language or religion during the Eighty Years' War and afterward: it was more of a political statement and the result of military battle lines.
The point about capitalism is even more in dispute, because, like Masada said, there's hardly any agreement on where "capitalism" in a recognizable form first existed. Some say the Low Countries, others say northern Italy, and you'll even get people who claim Song China or Sri Vijaya. (Neither of which, admittedly, can be mistaken for anything approaching "Western", to be fair. Poland, however, might, as might Italy.) There's no consensus.
And, honestly, claiming that anything is the "first true Western civilization as we know [it] today" has to sound ridiculous, even to you.
Finally, there's no point in making spurious claims about famous firsts and whatnot. You can say that the Dutch were important and relevant in early modern times without going off and calling them the first capitalists. It wouldn't have a pretension at objectivity, but that's overrated anyway.
Hm, I thought that Charles Tilly was responsible for this shift.
Tilly was an important person in shifting focus from Sweden (which Michael Roberts had initially emphasized back in the fifties) to the Dutch, yes, but as far as I'm aware he didn't actually have serious dialogue with the sixteenth/seventeenth century Military Revolutionary narrative himself, he was mostly a political historian.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Don't forget "capitalist state". That's the most ambiguous one of the lot.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
The guy's like one of the few people left on this forum who actually can talk about economics without looking like an idiot, and of those he's the only one with a background in economic history. I think he knows what he's talking about.
And he does have a point. The cult of the Dutch is one of the more annoying things about early modern history (hardly the "nobody's translated their history and nobody cares" thing you were going on about). The reaction to - or perhaps modification of - the dominant Roberts-Parker narrative for early modern European history, the so-called Military Revolution, shifted emphasis from Sweden to the Netherlands, and that is where it has stayed, greatly for the worse, in my opinion. But then again, I'm interested in that new transnational history fad.
There is no particular compelling argument that the Dutch republic was the "first" nation-state (France? England? Muscovy?), especially when the concept of a "nation" at the time was, uh, not the same as ours. Hell, the most traditional and widely-spread nationalism narrative is that it didn't exist in a recognizable form until the Enlightenment, and if any state were to be the first "nation-state" in Europe it would be France. Dutch identity was not exactly coherent with either language or religion during the Eighty Years' War and afterward: it was more of a political statement and the result of military battle lines.
The point about capitalism is even more in dispute, because, like Masada said, there's hardly any agreement on where "capitalism" in a recognizable form first existed. Some say the Low Countries, others say northern Italy, and you'll even get people who claim Song China or Sri Vijaya. (Neither of which, admittedly, can be mistaken for anything approaching "Western", to be fair. Poland, however, might, as might Italy.) There's no consensus.
And, honestly, claiming that anything is the "first true Western civilization as we know [it] today" has to sound ridiculous, even to you.
Finally, there's no point in making spurious claims about famous firsts and whatnot. You can say that the Dutch were important and relevant in early modern times without going off and calling them the first capitalists. It wouldn't have a pretension at objectivity, but that's overrated anyway.
See, you're atomizing too. There's a distinct lack of logical understanding in what I wrote. I never claimed they were the first nation-state. I never claimed they were the first capitalists. I never claimed they were the first modern state. If we want to unpack my statement, it would be going another direction. I understand these terms are contentious, fine, and I only dove into this to point out that the Dutch have a pretty unique claim to be called their own civilization. But contentious doesn't make them wrong.
Also, your first paragraph describes exactly my background and education, something I've done very well in, so I'm not sure your point. I seem to remember you grasping this while on Vicodin.
Traitorfish, for all your seeing things in gray, you should know better in this case.
I understand the claim should be read as: first modern-capitalist-nationstate-Western-whatsit. What you don't seem to get is that taking different piles of rubbish and putting them next to each other doesn't improve the smell. You should also realize that refusing the define those terms has made actual discussion of the claim impossible. This is quite apart from the total lack of evidence presented to support the claim.
So... back to those definitions?
So... back to those definitions?
I haven't seen much, if any, evidence to support this claim.Hygro said:
I must be quite stupid then. And I even have additional background in another Low German language.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I understand the claim should be read as: first modern-capitalist-nationstate-Western-whatsit. What you don't seem to get is that taking different piles of rubbish and putting them next to each other doesn't improve the smell. You should also realize that refusing the define those terms has made actual discussion of the claim impossible. This is quite apart from the total lack of evidence presented to support the claim.
So... back to those definitions?
I haven't seen much, if any, evidence to support this claim.
Well then you haven't read many of my longer posts. Not sure why you have a condescending emoticon after it, except to be a condescending dick. I've defined a lot of these terms elsewhere--obviously that doesn't count for this discussion so it's fair to ask them again. But you haven't exactly inspired much motivation to bother to give you what you're asking for. In fact, in what's about to be a quite long post, I'm still not going to define them.
There is of course no "lack of evidence to support the claim", and in fact I'm surprised this is even contentious or needed. Again, I literally popped in to point out that the Dutch have a reasonable claim on being considered a unique civilization that say, the Canadians (God bless them) don't.
Here's something to chew on: a Republican nation with probably the best turning point for modern banking and finance, with a social regulation that lead to investment and reinvestment for investments sake, drawing its army from its citizens rather than primarily subjects, vassals, or mercenaries, or whatever its enemies were doing. Now here's a big reason why the categories were grouped: they weren't the first to have banking, the first to have a modernish republican government, the first to have a nation of sorts, the first to have capitalism, the first to have a professional citizen army. They weren't the first to measure wealth in trade value of land. They weren't the first to establish trading routes non-mercantile profit. But they were among the firsts to do those things, and they were the first to tie it together. If you're missing any chunk of that, most particularly an economy of reinvestment, you aren't going to bring about the world we have today. The Dutch were fairly unique in their circumstances of having terrible land, the need of dykes, dense cities, and both the ability and need to fund highly efficient war machine that could fight off major powers like the Spanish. Many European societies had some elements, but again, no one tied it together like the Dutch had. And that system proved so superior, that they became quite the world power. The English, who followed them in being the major world power, had their whole financial system imported from the Dutch. The first bank of England was directly modeled on the UP bank, and lo and behold it was set up soon after William of Orange
Now you can guess, if you've gone down that route, I'm approaching this from an Arrighi take on modern history, and it can certainly be askew.
But, and this is more aimed at Dachs, that said it's awfully suspicious when we're taught in our world history surveys and then our later collegiate history courses that... ahoy, the crusades, and Instanbul not Constantinople and SPAIN! Spain took over the New World, and Portugal, who discovered beach volleyball in the Amazon and named the place Brazil. andthentheDutchruledtheworldforahundredyears AND THE ENGLISH! Oh the English, the sun never sets on the English, but the French! Oh ho those Frenchy French and... etc. Tell me why- soo we're learning every big empire and power, and every crucial turning point in the formation of the modern western world, (except that the Italian renaissance is always focused on its art and and classical revival rather than its massive contributions to political economy), and yet the Dutch seem to be mentioned primarily in the past tense for the units and sections of study that come after it. We have this massive turning point in history based on a very special collection of independently un-special traits and it's left out.
And then we're talking about philosophy and enlightenment and its all these brilliant
We know these pretty big things, the kind of things that would be bigger deals if they were originally from one of the countries with a more universally used academic language (English, French, German...) but there's just not a lot to say because there just wasn't enough of a Dutch perspective when the influential historical narrative was being written years later.
So yeah, if you need me to go deeper I certainly can. I don't want to. But I can if someone wants the history lesson.
Oh, by the way, if there's a large sphere of definitions for different terms, and they are grouped together, and then applied to a historical context that could fit those terms, it shouldn't be too hard to regress a reasonable narrative for what those terms are. Obviously there's room for needing definition but not anywhere near the extent that, Masada, you were demanding in the beginning.
Jumping in late, but have you made no adjustment to the Anglo-Saxons for that little business that happened in 1066, or when they set up a country across thousands of miles of ocean?
Hygro said:
I have. But nothing on this kind of subject matter that would suggest a good enough understanding of the subject to warrant the kind of leeway I give to Cheezy on the USSR/Marxism or Dachs on lots of stuff. On something like contemporary American politics? Sure. Buuut on a subject matter I know lots about, have a degree in and work in? I don't think so.
Hygro said:
inorite.
Hygro said:
I don't want to sound condescending but this is 101 stuff, which I'm familiar with. What I was interested in, was how on would defend that kind of claim. While I appreciate the neat summary I got, I'm still disappointed because that's not what the argument is about. (It would be if I had some idea of what you goals you were aiming at). You didn't address capitalism much at all. I think I'm meant to assume that banks, loans, etc are what make capitalism which isn't all that satisfactory. Traitorfish will I believe concur with this assessment, as would most scholars familiar with the subject. I have the same concerns about the use of 'modern' (used in the context of government and banking and finance), nation-state (not discussed at all) and Western (not mentioned). For something like nation-state, where room for debate is quite narrow, I might have been able to accept it if the evidence had been provided in this format. I wouldn't for Western, and I'm stumped on what modern means in this context, particularly the point at which we transition from pre-modern to modern. (I'm assuming here, of course, that you mean modern in terms of some kind of qualitative assessment of progress [oh look shares!] and not like 'close to the present'. I shouldn't have to be making assumptions like this)
Hygro said:
That kind of language ("turning point" and "modern") has fallen out of usage in history and economics with, I think, good reason. It just doesn't tell us much and inevitably ends up as a fight about those factors necessary for something to be 'modern' with the sides adopting the standards best suited to supporting their claims. It's zero sum and wholly unprofitable.
Hygro said:
You might want to clarify what "Social regulation" means, it's not a turn of phrase I've heard before. I'd also like to point out that chasing profits via investment was common. Private investment in productive assets? That's somewhat different, I guess. But even so, bottomry and respondentia arrangements were universal in Europe at the time.
I don't think that's all that accurate. The VOC, admittedly not the army, had to employ German/Catholic Portuguese/Eurasians and whoever the hell else they could get their hands on because the Dutch lower classes were not at all eager to sign up. While I do agree that the VOC was rather a great deal unhealthier than the army, I think the difference between the two and civilian life was sufficient that neither was an attractive prospect for well remunerated Dutchman. Dachs can provide more information on this, I think. I'm not sure how this is relevant to the question either.Hygro said:
Hygro said:
All of those terms have meaning outside of this historical context. You can't just decide to suspend meaning, force the evidence to fit the conclusion, and call it a day which is what you seem to want to be do here.
EDIT: Having said all of this, if you'd just said: the Dutch were cool because of the Wissenbank, how it become the fiscal model to emulate, and blah blah blah VOC, blah blah blah Republic, blah blah blah punching above weight, blah blah blah. If that had been the case, I would have at worst objected to any inaccuracies.
I'm also mystified by the effort put into defending this. I know you like the Dutch, but couldn't you have gone: "Good point, the claim is rather indefensible but there's still all these reasons to include them". I even gave you three options to extricate yourself from it.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
What do you mean by civilization
Here's something to chew on: a Republican nation with probably the best turning point for modern banking and finance, with a social regulation that lead to investment and reinvestment for investments sake, drawing its army from its citizens rather than primarily subjects, vassals, or mercenaries, or whatever its enemies were doing[...]the first to have a professional citizen army[..] The Dutch were fairly unique in their circumstances of having terrible land, the need of dykes, dense cities, and both the ability and need to fund highly efficient war machine that could fight off major powers like the Spanish. Many European societies had some elements, but again, no one tied it together like the Dutch had. And that system proved so superior, that they became quite the world power. The English, who followed them in being the major world power, had their whole financial system imported from the Dutch. The first bank of England was directly modeled on the UP bank, and lo and behold it was set up soon after William of Orangeconqueredwas invited to rule England.
A few things about the Dutch, and when you're talking about their army, I'm going to go ahead and assume you are referring to them during the 80 Years War as that's the only time when their army truly mattered in the grand scheme of European History.
The Dutch did not have a "professional" army at this time in the sense one would commonly associate with say, Friedrich II in Prussia. The Dutch assembled their armies, really, like everybody else did during that time period. In the early modern period mercenaries were the name of the game, but again, they didn't really operate in the way you'd imagine (hire several already assembled mercenary companies and compile that into an army). When you hire a captain, you are literally hiring a captain and paying him to recruit an army for you. This captain will assemble a number of Lieutenants who will go to an area in the country (or often other areas; this was a major part of the 30 Years War, and why it was particularly devastating to the region of Germany), and from there the Lieutenants will "recruit" locals into their armies. If this is what you mean by "citizen army", then the Dutch were really no different than the Spanish, French, Brandenburgers, Swedes, Bavarians, what have you.
What really set the Dutch apart militarily is the "Dutch Month". You see, this mercenary captains were charging their benefactors by the month for their services. I'm sure you know the Early Modern Economic systems at the disposal of potentates of the time were largely crap, and paying for armies usually involved borrowing and simply not paying troops. What the Dutch did was, rather than not pay their troops at all, they lengthened the time a month encompasses so there were only 9 payments which needed to be made in a year. Of course the captains wouldn't like this because it meant less money in their pockets and a crapton of angry soldiers milling around. But it worked. Why? Because the Dutch were so damned prompt in making those 9 payments a year. Captains were willing to settle for 9 sure payments a year because it was better than 15 payments that they would get 5 years later, and the other 30 they were owed being waived off. The surety of payments also meant the Dutch were much better than a lot of the other polities of the time at attracting these captains to help them. That is what made the Dutch so capable of fighting off the Spanish, not some inherently superior professional military arm or superior tactics. War in those times was seriously a matter of money, and the Dutch were particularly (although not exclusively) good at it.
As for the crap land comment: They may not have had the best farmland, but the Dutch were absolutely fantastically located at the crossroads of the mouth of the Baltic sealanes, the Channel, and the North Sea. A location they capitalized on for basically their entire history. Remember it wasn't the VOC that was the big Dutch Moneymaker; it was the herring-timber-grain trade in the Baltic.
While the Whig history is a major part of High School History, the Dutch get thrown into the mix too. Guess a "republic" valiantly fighting off a larger empire is too tempting for American textbooks. But yes, the Dutch really are quite overexposed in the grand scheme of history scholarship.
I too would like those definitions.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I'll start by saying I could be very wrong about the the differences in army formation in the 17th century Netherlands and will defer to both of you, particularly Owen, until I read more.
I don't really care about the Dutch that much like I've been looking for reasons to find them great, I'm just fascinated that they get so overlooked after I started learning a bit about them.
Yes those terms have meaning outside that context, but not to put the discussion in a circle but at least *I* thought its clear enough which meanings I was using once those different agents were put together. If I say hydrogen, you might think hindenburg. Or you might think the sun. Or you might think the smallest element. If I say oxygen, you might think a women's TV show. Or you might think the air we breathe. On their own, they could mean anything. But if I said hydrogen and oxygen together, you'd probably think water and I'd probably mean water. Does that metaphor make sense why I might think I didn't need to define terms and why I found atomizing the wrong way of approaching what I meant?
I want to address what I find two important points. One is you said "investment chasing profits"
The other is social regulation. It's Marx in origin but the real credit, IMO goes to Gramsci. If you've read anything about concepts like "Fordism" you'll understand the concept right away, otherwise you'll pick it up in a few quick seconds. In a nutshell, and more liberally speaking, it's that whatever the driving agent of social organization is, will shape very dramatically the rest of society. Its morals, its values, its norms, its fashions. So in the very early 20th century America, you have an economy based on innovation, immigration, and entrepreneurship which encouraged a social regulation, basically a system of society, that was diverse, free minded, etc. I'm being a bit loose here because my knowledge of the level of social conservatism in, say, 1895 (the gay 90s as they called it) is very limited. But when the economy conformed to Henry Ford's style of strict assembly manufacturing, society changed with it. Men, needed to be on their game in a factory with no room for error and no need for creativity, were discouraged from being liberal, loose animals and were encouraged to instead go home to a stable nuclear family every night with a wife to take care of him. Women in turn encouraged then to be very domestic and focused on their husbands. Drugs etc were out. And so forth.
It's a lot more interesting and credible when you read the actual works. In the case of discussing Fordism the argument was that the driving agent of social regulation was based around the primary mode of production in the economy. So it can be something fairly narrow have broad range effects.
A quick aside: the Italians were already engaged in profit seeking, investment, and insurance, loans, currency arbitrage, and the works. Hence my point about not being the first at many individual things, including the banking side... Ok anyway
Now I never claimed in that post, nor would I, that banking and loans = capitalism. I was making a point more that they were taking a modern-enough banking system and working it into a system of taking profits and seeking reinvestment. And herein is my second point I wanted to address and it gets us a lot closer to the definition of capitalism.
You said that "I'd also like to point out that chasing profits via investment was common". Yes, yes it was. And has been since forever. Now reverse it. Chasing investments via profits. You actually did reverse it in the following sentence, so you got it, but I want to hammer that distinction home. The thing that the Italians started, but then the Dutch did in a more advanced way was to keep investing for investing's sake. This is really, really weird in the context of history. Prior to the Dutch and the Italians, many people sought profits, traded, took loans sure, but did so so that they could buy some luxuries or acquire land to live like the gentry subsisting comfortably on agriculture. The accumulation of capital for its own sake was largely considered crazy, or immoral, or just weird. The Dutch had to economize to keep their dense populations fed, their armies efficient, and so forth.
I am here defining modern here as a capitalist nation state. I am defining a nation state very liberally, and as a political entity comprised of a people united into one state with some imagined shared identity in who they are as a people and why they share a state, rather than a bunch of people serving a lord and are only united with the other peasants a couple of counties over because they know its all politically under one feudal roof, and maybe speak the same language.
And I am defining capitalism as the organizing of society centered around the accumulation of capital.
So before the Dutch there was no unified country that practiced a political economy that so dominated the social sphere as to go in a completely different direction as the whole rest of history. A direction that quickly lead to the end of Malthusian economies and is the overarching social regulation today. How the business of government became business, or commerce, and protecting commerce. It's not that we owe it to the Dutch or anything jingoistic like that, it's that such a shift that came from aggregating all the right elements into one crazy new molecule lead to a pretty radically different world than the one we had. Exponential growth of economies and technologies? What? Whole revolutionary societies set up to protect... merchants? Liberalism can be a thing? (ignore Taoism for a second, it didn't become the dominant moral philosophy)
It's all pretty wild, and pretty revolutionary. Definitely had a lot of gradual steps leading up to it, and the revolution wasn't exactly fast by any means (decades, centuries....) So anyway, I've tabbed in and out of this reply a bazillion time so I maybe have left something out or gone on a tangent. I'm happy to field questions, arguments, or points of clarification.
@Owen, yeah, their lands were perfectly suited for trade. That's part of their story as a tiny swamp country becoming a dominant world commercial power.
Your frowney face was at who I am and what I study, my rolleyes was at your comment. These are not the same. Nice try on the hypocrisy accusation.
I don't really care about the Dutch that much like I've been looking for reasons to find them great, I'm just fascinated that they get so overlooked after I started learning a bit about them.
Yes those terms have meaning outside that context, but not to put the discussion in a circle but at least *I* thought its clear enough which meanings I was using once those different agents were put together. If I say hydrogen, you might think hindenburg. Or you might think the sun. Or you might think the smallest element. If I say oxygen, you might think a women's TV show. Or you might think the air we breathe. On their own, they could mean anything. But if I said hydrogen and oxygen together, you'd probably think water and I'd probably mean water. Does that metaphor make sense why I might think I didn't need to define terms and why I found atomizing the wrong way of approaching what I meant?
I want to address what I find two important points. One is you said "investment chasing profits"
The other is social regulation. It's Marx in origin but the real credit, IMO goes to Gramsci. If you've read anything about concepts like "Fordism" you'll understand the concept right away, otherwise you'll pick it up in a few quick seconds. In a nutshell, and more liberally speaking, it's that whatever the driving agent of social organization is, will shape very dramatically the rest of society. Its morals, its values, its norms, its fashions. So in the very early 20th century America, you have an economy based on innovation, immigration, and entrepreneurship which encouraged a social regulation, basically a system of society, that was diverse, free minded, etc. I'm being a bit loose here because my knowledge of the level of social conservatism in, say, 1895 (the gay 90s as they called it) is very limited. But when the economy conformed to Henry Ford's style of strict assembly manufacturing, society changed with it. Men, needed to be on their game in a factory with no room for error and no need for creativity, were discouraged from being liberal, loose animals and were encouraged to instead go home to a stable nuclear family every night with a wife to take care of him. Women in turn encouraged then to be very domestic and focused on their husbands. Drugs etc were out. And so forth.
It's a lot more interesting and credible when you read the actual works. In the case of discussing Fordism the argument was that the driving agent of social regulation was based around the primary mode of production in the economy. So it can be something fairly narrow have broad range effects.
A quick aside: the Italians were already engaged in profit seeking, investment, and insurance, loans, currency arbitrage, and the works. Hence my point about not being the first at many individual things, including the banking side... Ok anyway
Now I never claimed in that post, nor would I, that banking and loans = capitalism. I was making a point more that they were taking a modern-enough banking system and working it into a system of taking profits and seeking reinvestment. And herein is my second point I wanted to address and it gets us a lot closer to the definition of capitalism.
You said that "I'd also like to point out that chasing profits via investment was common". Yes, yes it was. And has been since forever. Now reverse it. Chasing investments via profits. You actually did reverse it in the following sentence, so you got it, but I want to hammer that distinction home. The thing that the Italians started, but then the Dutch did in a more advanced way was to keep investing for investing's sake. This is really, really weird in the context of history. Prior to the Dutch and the Italians, many people sought profits, traded, took loans sure, but did so so that they could buy some luxuries or acquire land to live like the gentry subsisting comfortably on agriculture. The accumulation of capital for its own sake was largely considered crazy, or immoral, or just weird. The Dutch had to economize to keep their dense populations fed, their armies efficient, and so forth.
I am here defining modern here as a capitalist nation state. I am defining a nation state very liberally, and as a political entity comprised of a people united into one state with some imagined shared identity in who they are as a people and why they share a state, rather than a bunch of people serving a lord and are only united with the other peasants a couple of counties over because they know its all politically under one feudal roof, and maybe speak the same language.
And I am defining capitalism as the organizing of society centered around the accumulation of capital.
So before the Dutch there was no unified country that practiced a political economy that so dominated the social sphere as to go in a completely different direction as the whole rest of history. A direction that quickly lead to the end of Malthusian economies and is the overarching social regulation today. How the business of government became business, or commerce, and protecting commerce. It's not that we owe it to the Dutch or anything jingoistic like that, it's that such a shift that came from aggregating all the right elements into one crazy new molecule lead to a pretty radically different world than the one we had. Exponential growth of economies and technologies? What? Whole revolutionary societies set up to protect... merchants? Liberalism can be a thing? (ignore Taoism for a second, it didn't become the dominant moral philosophy)
It's all pretty wild, and pretty revolutionary. Definitely had a lot of gradual steps leading up to it, and the revolution wasn't exactly fast by any means (decades, centuries....) So anyway, I've tabbed in and out of this reply a bazillion time so I maybe have left something out or gone on a tangent. I'm happy to field questions, arguments, or points of clarification.
@Owen, yeah, their lands were perfectly suited for trade. That's part of their story as a tiny swamp country becoming a dominant world commercial power.
Great, some definitions. The question now is why Venice and Genoa weren't the first modern-capitalist-nationstate-Western-whatsit. Both were imagined communities, and neither was notable for being lolfuedal (whatever that means) and both had a 'culture' (I loathe this word) of profits based-finance and (re-)investment. So, for that matter, did the say Bremen, Hamburg and Novgorod. All of which predate the Dutch Republic as viable vehicles for the claim.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Venice and Genoa... and Florence... and Milan were definitely capitalist states before the UP. However it is late, not just in the hour but in my interest in continuing this conversation at this time. Adieu.
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