1649: Revolutionary Turnpike

This concluding chapter discusses how the Anglo-Dutch revolution of 1649–1702 stood at the centre of a succession of wider transformations which were agricultural, political, and commercial. All of these had their origins in the Netherlands before spreading to south-eastern England and across the Atlantic. Understanding their development and diffusion has required attention to religion, migration, and war as well as to economic, social, and cultural life. The result connected a series of unique local human environments, including the Dutch water world, the city of London, and the American frontier into a world-altering imperial system. By the later eighteenth century the Atlantic reorientation of the European economy had thrown the Baltic into relative decline, sparking the dramatic growth of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow while Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam stagnated.

Anglo-Dutch-American Enlightenment

This chapter studies cultural invention in light of the North-Western European cultural movement called Enlightenment. Enlightenment refers, in the first place, to a description by European intellectuals of what they took to be an advanced present state of moral and natural knowledge by comparison to that of the ancients. With related self-confidence, in the heyday of their empires, some described their culture as possessed of a dynamic modernity to be distinguished from the ‘oriental' lethargy and backwardness existing elsewhere. Yet Enlightenment also originated as European self-criticism. One context for that was the comparative perspective acquired by discovery of non-European cultures. In this and in other ways the origin of Enlightenment, including its ‘conviction that progress had become unstoppable', lies in the period when Renaissance and Reformation combined with printing and natural philosophy to establish the culture of the European North-West.

The Republic Was an Empire

This chapter deals with the circumstances leading to the first of three Anglo-Dutch wars. Beginning with a proposal for political union, the chapter addresses the growing animosity between the English and the Dutch through two major themes. In the first place, from the moment of its foundation the English republic was, and behaved like, an empire. Second, it was the product, as in the Netherlands, of a rebellion and fiscal/military revolution which built the state. More than its Dutch model, the English republic entailed a sharp, indeed spectacular, break with the past, accompanied by a revolutionary as well as an imperial ideology.

The First Industrial Revolution

This chapter concerns the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution involved the transformation of organic economies by means of a complex of changes which gave birth to the modern world. In Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere those economies were agricultural. Thus the chapter discusses the replacement of an economy 80 per cent of the output of which might have been agricultural by another in which manufacturing became the dominant sector. This involved a transition in the scale of manufacturing from artisanal to large-scale workshop and then factory production. In Britain, that entailed technological innovation, but it would not have been possible in the first place without prior sustained changes in the rest of the economy and society.