The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (14 page)

The decisive weapons for this ascendancy were not those employed by intrepid explorers or warriors; rather, they lay in the more mundane arts of bankers, merchants, and skilled artisans.
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It was not Spain, with its brave soldiers and intrepid missionaries, that garnered the commercial fruits of empire, but Antwerp and the other commercially oriented cities of the Netherlands.
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Had the Hapsburg ruler Charles V accepted the principle of tolerance, Spain, through control of these cities, may still have dominated the rising European urban economy. Instead, the regime’s desire to impose Catholicism turned its productive and heavily Protestant northern cities into, as one Spanish general put it, “the graveyard of Europe.”

The Great Revolt of 1572, when large portions of the Netherlands rose up against Spain, represented the critical turning point. The Spanish commander, the Duke of Alba, waged a merciless campaign against the Protestants. Although the northern part of the Netherlands resisted successfully, the south remained under Catholic control.

Alba’s war had disastrous effects on Spain’s commercial prospects. The predominantly Protestant merchant classes now fled those areas under Spanish control. Antwerp, sacked by Spanish troops in 1576, declined, while much of its talent, money, and business acumen shifted to the newly independent cities of the north.
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At the end of the war with Spain, Amsterdam emerged the most important of the newly independent Protestant cities. In contrast with most contemporary European cities, Amsterdam was dominated not by aristocrats or priests, but by profit-seeking merchants and tradesmen. The quintessential Dutchman was described by one seventeenth-century British writer as “Nick Frog,” the “son of the mud, who worships Mammon.”
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Amsterdam was barely more than a fishing village in the thirteenth century, until its residents began methodically to expand their trading capabilities by extending their canal system. As the city grew, it slowly strengthened its security perimeter, guarded against fire by mandating brick construction, and took measures to improve sanitation.
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Other Dutch commercial centers such as Leiden and Rotterdam also took steps to improve their ability to trade with the world. With their vast fleet of 1,800 seagoing vessels, the entrepreneurs of the great Dutch cities soon seemed to be poking their noses everywhere. In the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and the newly discovered Americas, they usually bested their rivals at the critical game of buying low and selling high.

With half its people located in towns and cities by the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands had become the most urbanized society in Europe.
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Amsterdam, Holland’s primary city, was something new and yet remarkably familiar: a dense modern city noteworthy not so much for its heroic statues and great boulevards, churches, or palaces as for its teeming alleys, bustling wharves, and clean and comfortable residences. Having won at great cost their independence, the Amsterdammers did not seek out military adventures to become a new Rome. They simply wanted to carry out their trade with minimum interference.
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The Amsterdammers’ Calvinist faith also helped bolster a civic culture centered around trade and commerce. Calvinist pastors expunged the old Catholic laws against usury and cast away the age-old prejudices against capitalist enterprise. Indeed, the Hollanders saw their material success as further proof of God’s sanction. “Amsterdam,” noted a popular seventeenth-century Dutch history, “has risen through the hand of God to the peak of prosperity and greatness.”
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Like ancient Alexandria, Cairo at its height, and Venice in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam owed much of its commercial success to the presence of a vast diversity of people. The city boasted fully functioning Catholic, Huguenot, Jewish, Lutheran, and Mennonite religious institutions as well as the dominant Dutch Reformed Church; those outside the officially sanctioned religious consensus comprised roughly one in four city residents. “The miracle of toleration was to be found,” observed the French historian Fernand Braudel, “wherever the community of trade convened.”
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The combination of commercial vitality and a diverse population created a climate ideal for bold new innovations in art, technology, and philosophy. In contrast, in Spain, complained Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor-general, “one cannot possess any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism.”
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The Dutch cities not only permitted open inquiry and innovation, but nurtured them in their universities, scientific societies, and publishing concerns.

This progressive spirit proved critical to the cities’ success. Initially, Dutch trade was heavily dependent on commodities such as wine, timber, sugar, and chemicals. By the seventeenth century, however, the Dutch applied innovative techniques to move more decisively into the “rich trades”—dyes, glazes, ceramics, linen, fine furniture, and tapestries. Dutch entrepreneurs also exported engineering services, industrial expertise, and technology to a vast array of countries throughout Europe and even as far away as Mexico.
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Holland’s expanding middle class proved critical to its development as a major cultural center. Dutch artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were frequently the sons of skilled craftspeople—designers of tapestries, fur cutters, goldsmiths, and the like. These artists received support largely from the local merchant and manufacturing elites. Art became a way to achieve not only fame but also money. Rembrandt, as a fashionable portrait painter, made far more than a university professor.
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The democratization of culture was evident in other European cities. Technological improvements had made books increasingly accessible to the masses; by the 1530s, in France a copy of the New Testament became affordable even to a laborer. Old barriers were breaking down; Jews, such as Spinoza, and women now were able to engage in intellectual and cultural dialogue. The French author Louise Labé exhorted women: “The honor that knowledge will give us will be entirely ours, and it will not be taken from us by the thief ’s skill . . . or by the passage of time.”
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Nowhere was this new spirit more evident than in London. During the Elizabethan period in the late sixteenth century, London evolved into a brilliant showcase for everything from drama to intense scientific and theological debate. Long forbidden or frightening, knowledge was now regarded as a supreme value.
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Soon London began surpassing Amsterdam in both intellectual achievement and commercial vigor. By the late seventeenth century, the Dutch were clearly losing their once inimitable boldness and tenacity. Dutch capitalists—like those in Venice before them—now often opted to become
rentiers,
investors in land and stock, rather than initiate new ventures.

Interested primarily in short-term financial gain—epitomized by the famous tulip mania of 1636–1637—the Dutch elites lacked the moral resolve to defend some of their key overseas holdings, most portentously their fledgling colony of New Netherland. One early explorer rightly identified the colony’s settlement at New Amsterdam as “a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world.” Surrounded by rivers and bays that opened to the sea, the tiny colony of barely one thousand souls represented an almost unparalleled opportunity for the expansion of Dutch enterprise.

But faced with the need to ward off intrusions from the surrounding English colonies, Dutch business interests balked at spending the funds needed to defend the tiny colony. What mattered more to them was to keep hold of Suriname, isolated, easy to defend, and also rich in “commodities” like sugar. In 1664, with barely a fight, they surrendered New Netherland to the British, who quickly renamed the capital city New York.
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Barely a decade after New Amsterdam became New York, London was ready to assume the role as the world capitalist capital.
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This shift may have proven inevitable in the long run. Like the Italian city-states before them, the Dutch cities were constrained by a lack of resources and people. In contrast, London could draw on Britain’s far larger population for settlers, soldiers, and sailors. Britain also possessed critical raw materials such as coal, iron, and tin. Even under the most enlightened administration, these factors likely would have forced the Dutch cities to accept secondary position behind London.
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London’s emergence rested on its ability to marry the advantages of a great capital city with the commercial abilities of the Dutch trading centers or Italian city-states. From the fourteenth century on, London had attracted an ever greater portion of the country’s young and ambitious of all classes. Even as older centers such as Winchester and Lincoln declined, London’s population and economy expanded rapidly.

As in the Netherlands, the triumph of Protestantism accelerated London’s commercial growth. Henry VIII’s sale of church lands, roughly one-sixth of the kingdom, enriched both the state and the property-owning classes, including merchants and artisans. Upstarts rising from middle and working classes—some aspiring to join the aristocracy—constituted an essential component of what the historian F.R.H. Du Boulay would dub “an age of ambition.”
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Geography had made the British seafaring people. Now the irrepressible desire to “better” their station propelled individual Britons toward long-distance trade.
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Britain’s successful imperial thrust ultimately gave it control of possessions from the coast of China to the wilds of North America. Arguably the most critical was the gradual takeover of India and its vast trade. In 1601, Britain’s revenues were less than a tenth of Mogul India’s; within two hundred years, the relationship was totally reversed in England’s favor.
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This venturesome spirit reflected a great surge in national ambition and purpose. “Unbounded Thames,” Alexander Pope predicted in 1712, “shall flow for all mankind.”
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In the sixteenth century, London itself grew from 60,000 to nearly 225,000 souls. Rebuilt on a grand scale after the great fire of 1666, it would soon grow into Europe’s largest city.
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By 1790, London’s population had swelled to almost 900,000 people, more than four times that of Amsterdam.
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Seeing a vast new realm of opportunities, Italian, Dutch, and German merchants and bankers increasingly gravitated to the British capital.
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Of the seventeen leading London-based merchant banks to survive into the twentieth century, fifteen could trace their origins to various immigrants, many to this early period. The city also benefited from the migration of entrepreneurs and skilled laborers seeking religious freedom from such places as Flanders, Germany, and France.
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London’s rise was not only greater in degree, but also markedly different in character from that of imperial rivals such as Paris, Madrid, Vienna, or St. Petersburg. Like London, these great capitals boasted grand cathedrals, palaces, and parks, expressions of their national greatness. But only London created the vital economic institutions essential to the control and administration of an ever expanding world economy. It also acquired that critical sense of moral purpose underpinning great cities since the earliest times. Like imperial Rome at its height, London prepared to both lead the world and improve it.
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PART FIVE

THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ANGLO -AMERICAN URBAN REVOLUTION

London’s commercial and imperial ascendancy laid the foundation for the next critical shift in the evolution of cities, one driven by a revolution in manufacturing technology. Although industry had been an important component in urban life from Mesopotamian times, in the late eighteenth century Britain would pioneer the creation of a new kind of city, one tied primarily to the mass production of goods.

Many natural factors favored Britain’s early industrial emergence, such as closeness to the Atlantic, the convenient rivers for power and transport, and later on ample coal resources. More important still, Britain enjoyed a social and political climate ideal for the growth of manufacturing endeavors. Unified for much of its history, it suffered neither the pervasive fragmentation of power that bedeviled Italy nor France’s tumultuous upheavals. Britain’s shift to a new economic paradigm also benefited from the elimination of both the Catholic hierarchy and its vast estates, which broke the “stratified Christian co-operative” of the Middle Ages.
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This created an ideal climate for early innovators rising up from the old artisan class, men such as Richard Arkwright, who developed the “spinning jenny” in 1768. Aristocracy remained powerful in Britain, but men of property, no matter what their ancestry, enjoyed a wider latitude to build enterprises than in most other European countries, much less than in the more constricted East.

Finally, Britain’s advent as the world’s dominant empire unlocked both vast sources of raw materials and new markets outside Europe. “The dawn of the era of capitalist production,” in Karl Marx’s phrase, coincided with the consolidation of empire. Capital from imperial ventures— cotton, tobacco, slaves—provided much of the financing needed for the island’s headlong leap forward into the industrial frontier.
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