Amidst Unscrupulous Neighbours. Amsterdam Money and Foreign Interests in Dutch Patriotic Imagery

Imagining Global Amsterdam:History, Culture, and Geography in a World City

Edited by Marco de Waard

amsterdam university press

This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org)

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop

and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humani-

ties and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high

quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across

Europe.

Cover illustration: Photographer: TESS

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

Lay-out: Heymans & Vanhove, Goes

isbn 978 90 8964 367 4

e-isbn 978 90 4851 513 4 (pdf)

e-isbn 978 90 4851 799 2 (ePub)

nur 694

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)

M. de Waard / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of

this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced

in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact

the publisher.

45

3. Amidst Unscrupulous Neighbours: Amsterdam Money and Foreign Interests in Dutch Patriotic Imagery1

Dorothee Sturkenboom

Any discourse articulating the idea that other countries may profit from the con-tent of Dutch purses is bound to affect the Dutch: that much became clear in June 2005, when in a national consultative referendum a majority of Dutch citizens voted against the treaty that meant to establish a constitution for Europe. When Dutch media tried to explain the nationwide rejection afterwards, among the factors they highlighted were the economic arguments that had been deployed against a constitution – and against the European project more generally – in na-tional public debates during the previous months. Campaigners for a no-vote had booked success, the analysis went, by propagating the idea that due to a serious undervaluation of the old Dutch currency, the gulden, the Netherlands had been fleeced at the introduction of the euro. Moreover, as the largest net per capita contributor to the European Union, the Netherlands had allowed other member states to live at its expense. Lastly, because of the increasing economic integration of the Union, immigrants and companies from Eastern Europe were on the brink of ousting the Dutch from their own internal labour market, or so the charge went. Spurred by this analysis of the referendum’s outcome – whether accurate or not – Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende refused to endorse the long-term budget plans of the European Union on attending a top-level meeting in Brussels a few weeks later: the bottom line was that ‘Europe’ was too expensive for the Dutch tax payer. Together with Great Britain, which also refused to give the budget plans its consent, the Netherlands arguably caused the first political crisis about the European budget and European finances since the introduction of the euro as physical currency on 1 January 2002 (Giebels 2005; Halsema and Buitenweg 2005; van Praag 2005).

Today we know that while this may have been the first serious crisis the Euro-pean Union faced in the twenty-first century, it would not be the last. Obviously, reluctance to support other countries financially is not an exclusively Dutch phe-nomenon, nor should it be assumed that distrust of international cooperation expresses itself through economic protectionism alone. Since 2005 we have wit-nessed plenty of manifestations of population groups or entire electorates turning inwards in times of crisis, even when their political leaders leaned towards a more international orientation. Indeed, it is a fact to reckon with that people who live in globally integrated economies are not necessarily more cosmopolitan in out-

46 part i: historicizing global amsterdam

look. As several other contributions to this book point out, rather the contrary may hold true: in many contexts, globalization can be seen to lead to a resurgence of political and cultural nationalism(s) in new forms. What is more, over the past few decades political agitators have amply demonstrated that nationalist imagery that appeals to citizens’ economic interests can be an effective rallying point for mobilizing them for various other goals.

One might think that broad popular support for the kind of nation-centred arguments that I have mentioned was rare before the rise of modern mass media in the twentieth century, or even before the emergence of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth. In fact, the claim that the Dutch economy was at risk because of foreigners’ avid interest in Dutch money was popular as early as the eight-eenth century: in pamphlets, papers, plays, and prints, authors and artists related Dutch economic decline quite directly to the greediness of European neighbours, and they rallied against foreign interests for the sake of a stronger Dutch nation. Textual and visual references to the open coffer of an unsteady Dutch Republic, beleaguered by unscrupulous French, Germans, and Englishmen, cast the country as economically vulnerable and open to predation. The parallels with twenty-first century political-economic imagery seem obvious. Indeed, the images used by Dutch campaigners against a European Constitution in 2005 form just one case in point; the popular rhetoric surrounding the ‘Greek crisis’ that started in 2011 would seem to form another.

With historical parallels like these in mind, the present chapter offers a critical analysis of patriotic imagery deployed in Dutch political-economic discourse just over two centuries ago, paying special attention to the role played in it by the im-age of Amsterdam as one of the financial centres of the world. We will discover that, despite the passage of time, certain patterns have remained stubbornly the same: patriotic and nationalist imagery tends to be populated by distinct, popular ethnic and social stereotypes, which may remain remarkably constant over time. Specifically, we will focus on an eighteenth-century Amsterdam production of two cartoons and on a drama pamphlet in which Amsterdam money and foreign interests figure prominently. Published in 1780, on the eve of the fourth Anglo-Dutch War – declared by the British because of Amsterdam’s support for the in-surgent Americans across the Atlantic – those sources introduce us to the logic of ‘economic patriotism’, a mode of thinking that commonly gains influence when international economic processes are thought to be at the root of national prob-lems. In a previous essay, I discussed my triple source primarily in the light of this context of late-eighteenth-century economic patriotism (Sturkenboom 2008). At this place, in the framework of a collection on Amsterdam as a world city, the aim is rather different. The question that I shall address here is: what is the sym-bolic role and position of Amsterdam as a world city within the larger narrative about the Dutch nation presented by those eighteenth-century patriotic prints and the related drama pamphlet? Put differently, what do the articulations of the city of Amsterdam that I shall be looking at tell us about the way in which urban, national, and transnational (or European) frames of reference were related and held together in the consciousness of the Dutch civic population, in the period under discussion?

47amidst unscrupulous neighbours

The Amsterdam Coffer

For centuries, the Amsterdam merchant functioned as the embodiment of the Dutch commercial and entrepreneurial spirit, forming a highly iconic image that lent itself well for textual and visual representation. As is well-known, the image dates back to the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, when the Dutch Republic emerged as the leading commercial economy in the world and, for a period of some fifty years, surpassed all its neighbouring countries in economic, maritime, and military power (Israel 1995; de Vries and van der Woude 1997; Adams 2005). Amster-dam merchants had an active, indeed a defining role in this achievement (Lesger 2006).

Commerce requires the easy circulation of money, the availability of credit, and readiness to invest in adventurous enterprises where profit is not guaranteed (Spufford 1995). Hence seventeenth-century Amsterdam not only became home to many merchants; it also became the place to be for financiers, bankers, bro-kers, speculators, and other ‘paper money men’. It would remain so until the end of the eighteenth century, when London took over the leading role in internation-al finance, after the Republic had already lost its absolute primacy as a trading nation in the period before (opinions differ on the precise moment or timeframe of this shift). The so-called Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Bank of Amsterdam or, literally, Bank of Exchange) was founded by the city fathers of Amsterdam as early as 1609. It was widely known for its solidity, and it played an essential role in Amsterdam’s rise to eminence as the financial centre of the world (Spufford 1995, 306). Indeed, merchants from all over the world readily deposited money and bills in the bank in exchange for financial services that facilitated interna-tional trade and shipping. The bank became famous enough to be mentioned by numerous visitors in their travel accounts, impressed as they were by the bullion rumoured to be accumulated in its vault (Remarques d’un voyageur, 1728, 13; Pöllnitz 1734, 3:305; Temple 1673, 83-4, 194; Boussingault 1665, 110). Thanks to its stabilizing impact on exchange rates and its impressive solvency, the Bank of Amsterdam soon became the model for public banks in other countries, such as the Bank of England, which was founded in 1694 (van Nieuwkerk 2005, 112-13, 120, 138- 44).

Unlike the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, established in 1611, which had a separate and newly erected building in the city, the Bank of Exchange was housed in Amsterdam’s town hall, together with other municipal functions. When in the middle of the seventeenth century the municipality built a new town hall – known today as the (Royal) Palace on the Dam – the bank was moved into the new building as well. Because it lacked its own building to symbolize its impor-tance, a heavily loaded coffer, resting on a cart, became the bank’s iconic image. It referred to the business and financial transactions that were facilitated by the Bank of Amsterdam, and was widely recognized. Specifically, within this image it was the cart that came to form the defining component: such little wagons were in fact used frequently for the transport of money inside the town hall. The carts even had their own rail-track system, connecting the first floor with the cellar where the bank’s vault was located (van Nieuwkerk 2005, 118-25) (Figure 3.1).


The eighteenth-century drama pamphlet to be discussed in this chapter re-volves around this iconic image of coffer and cart, symbolizing the money ac-

cumulated in the Bank of Amsterdam. In addition, the same coffer and cart are also at the centre of the two graphic prints which preceded and inspired the writing of the pamphlet. Appealing as they are, the two cartoons have not gone unnoticed in the historiography of the Dutch ‘Patriottentijd’, the revolutionary era between 1780 and 1787 that forms the backdrop of these visual expressions of economic patriotism (Kloek 1987, 81; Fritschy 1988, 67; Lesger 2005a, 227; Koolhaas-Grosfeld 2010, 16-18). The ‘Patriottentijd’ was named after a group of reformists (the so-called Patriots) who fought for major changes in Dutch politics and economics in the hope to reverse the downward spiral of decline in which the Dutch Republic was perceived to be caught since losing its leading international position in the late seventeenth century. As contemporaries saw it, the decline was not only a matter of economics but also one of morals, culture, and politics: the idea was that wealth and luxury had corrupted the standards of behaviour, and that a process of moral degeneration had set in to which an increasingly oligarchic administration failed to provide a satisfactory response (Mijnhardt 1992; Sturkenboom 1998, 200-14). The Patriots and the Orangists, their more conservative political adversaries, got engaged in a true media war about the situation in the Dutch Republic, manifesting itself in a steady stream of political periodicals, pamphlets, prints, and other commentaries (Hanou 2002, 143-85; van Sas 2004, 195-223; Klein 1995). The two cartoons were unmistakably part of this war. Published without titles, but with elaborate legends that made their message of economic patriotism clear enough to the eighteenth-century public, they were dubbed ‘the first economic print’ and ‘the second economic print’ by a

3.1. Money Cart of the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange. Amsterdam Museum and Palace on the Dam. (Photo: C. van Nieuwkerk-de Vries).


contemporary when they were reprinted alongside twelve other political prints in the assemblage print ‘Algemeene Staatkundige Konstplaat van ’t Jaar 1780’ later in 1780 (Uitlegging, 24-5, 36-7).2

In the meantime the twin prints and their legends had also served as source of inspiration for the drama pamphlet Toneel-spel in twee afdeelingen (1780). We can deduce this from its lengthy title – typical for the eighteenth century – starting with ‘Play in two acts, in view of the two art plates dedicated to...’ and asserting, a bit further on, that this was ‘a piece, highly necessary to arrive at a true under-standing of the plates mentioned and of the Dutch interests [at stake]’. A piece of some forty-eight pages, written by a nameless author who identified himself later on in the title as ‘a Friend of the Fatherland’, the Toneel-spel was brought on the market by bookseller and publisher Dirk Schuurman, who ran his business at the Rokin in Amsterdam. Although presented as a theatre play, the text was probably never meant for performance on stage.3 In those politically turbulent years it was not unusual to style political pamphlets as dialogues or plays to make them more accessible for the reader (Worp 1907, 179-82). The author’s view of his country’s economic and social problems is represented by one of his characters, Petrus, a Dutch retail trader who functions as the author’s alter ego.

As we will shortly see, both the prints and the pamphlet offered – visually and textually – a captivating socio-political analysis of the dangers which contem-poraries believed were threatening the Dutch Republic, and more especially its economic security, in 1780. They tell of the schemes of unscrupulous foreigners who were after the hard-earned money of the people in the Dutch Republic, and they articulate Dutch responses to those foreigners and their perceived intentions. Significantly, in so doing, this late-eighteenth-century narrative also testifies to an internal Dutch divide. As I will argue, the creative use of particular stereotypes helped to frame the youngest generation of Amsterdam men of fortune – the former heroes of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ – as naïve and elitist traitors to their country, while at the same time, in an interesting twist, people from other parts of the Republic were depicted as true patriots who availed of much better judgment with regard to foreigners’ (predatory) motives and intentions. Thus Amsterdam and the Republic, the urban-cosmopolitan and the national, passive retention of wealth and active citizenship were placed in symbolic opposition to each other: a structure that organizes much of the plot of the dramatic play.

Picturing Dutch versus Foreign Interests

The drama pamphlet starts with a scene in which Petrus, the Dutch retail trader, offers his manufactures from Delft, Leiden, Hilversum, Hoorn, Haarlem, Gronin-gen, and Friesland to Klaas, who is described as ‘a rich young Hollander’ (Toneel-spel, 2). We can see the scene pictured at the right side of the first economic print with the young Dutchman seated on the Amsterdam coffer and cart, and Petrus in front of his stall with stockings, gloves, hats, cloth, baize, wallpaper, and – still in their packing – stoneware and carpets (Figure 3.2). Tellingly, however, cart and coffer are being pulled away from Petrus. In the play, Klaas rejects Petrus’s com-


modities because he thinks they are too plain. When asked why he himself, then, has donned a simple Dutch suit – in which, it is added, he resembles his father – he explains: ‘we used to see no difference, but now I notice very clearly that with my money I can obtain a much better standing than by buying from your stall’ (6). That is why he prefers to lend his money to an English banker. The banker, ominously called Master John Always Short, can hardly wait to take the money out of the coffer, as we can see in the print. In the play he poses as a friend to the

3.2. First economic print. (Stichting Atlas van Stolk Rotterdam, no. 4318).


Dutchman, promising a steady interest for the loan without the risks that come with investments in commercial or industrial ventures, and without the ‘worming and slaving’ which he declares are attendant on such economic investments (13). Klaas, who did not earn the money himself but who inherited it from his father, a virtuous merchant of the old school, is rather enchanted with the prospect of re-ceiving a guaranteed income without having to work. And so are his three female companions, depicted to the left of his coffer, who expect to get their share of his

3.2. First economic print. (Stichting Atlas van Stolk Rotterdam, no. 4318).


money if their combined attempts to persuade Klaas into an easy life of Luxury, Lechery, and Lust for Liquor – the vices they personify – would succeed.

This would be the life that we see depicted at the left side of the print, the morally questionable life that aristocratic elites are understood to lead in ‘the World of the Great … where people are banqueting, fornicating, and duelling’, as Petrus tells us in the play (in the legend of the print, playing cards are added to this negative list of ‘manners’ [22]). In the left corner a character called Charles Always Somewhat Foolish is making inviting gestures, but before Klaas can pass the broad archway and make a successful entry, he has to take off his simple suit and learn how to dress like a ‘born gentleman’ – as we see in the scene in the middle of the print (17). Here Jean Poli and other Frenchmen enter the picture. Better than anyone else they know how to dress for success – at least, that is the impression they succeed in making on the naïve Klaas. Hence the various ‘Modes de Paris’, the French fashions that Klaas has to make himself familiar with if he wishes to pass for a man of the world. Haughtiness and Foolishness, the two male figures who are pulling his chest in the direction of the archway, are certainly engaged in leading him to that goal. It does not deter Klaas that Foolish-ness is a jester while Haughtiness, pictured as a slightly effeminate Frenchman, may not be the ideal role model for a Dutch merchant’s son either. Encouraged by Foolishness and the other companions in vice, Klaas starts to behave like ‘a Man of Birth, which shows from the contempt he displays for factories and com-merce’ and his newly acquired taste for lust, liquor, and lechery – ‘matters that merchants and manufacturers do not understand’ (17).

It is up to Petrus, the embodiment here of Dutch level-headedness, to talk sense into Klaas, an undertaking in which he ultimately sadly fails. In the play he tries to explain to the naïve youngster that in the long run, one cannot make money without Diligence and Knowledge, the long-time friends of his respectable father. Furthermore, he draws Klaas’s attention to the smirking Fool’s mask, to the monkey with the French feathered hat, to Mr. Grub and his flourishing stall of earthenware and other English commodities that drive the Dutch out of the market thanks to Klaas’s ill-considered financial decisions, and finally to the Brit-ish privateers who attack Dutch ships in the Channel, proving that ‘ally’ England – alluded to as ‘Hostile Friend’ in legend and play – cannot be trusted (14). (We should recall, when considering this, that it was 1780, at the end of which year the British would indeed declare war on the Dutch for supporting the Americans in their War of Independence by smuggling contraband between the Caribbean Islands and North America). In spite of all these bad omens, Klaas refuses to listen. Though warned by Petrus, he cannot be bothered with the ramshackle state of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands – ‘the House of your Fa-ther’ – represented by the seven-pillared temple, visible in the background at the right side of the print (11). The construction, badly maintained by Carelessness, whom Klaas has chosen as his friend and servant, is on the brink of collapse. The Dutch Virgin has fled to its roof. Yet Klaas, misled by Carelessness, believes that the building will last his time. He flatly refuses to invest any of his money in the solid Dutch products from Petrus’s stall, dismissing them as ‘rags that are totally out of fashion’ (16-17). Because the young man intends to pose as a gentleman,


he then foolishly gets involved in a fatal duel and loses his life at the end of the first act. Petrus has no choice but to admit his defeat and to consider the liquida-tion of his business.

Up to this point, the unfolding narrative illustrates its moral by negative example, functioning somewhat like a cautionary tale. In the second act of the play and in the second economic print, however, the mise-en-scène has drastically changed (Figure 3.3). Again we find ourselves at the ‘free Dutch seaside’, a long-standing symbol of Dutch liberty (Toneel-spel, 2; cf. Kempers 1995, 94). But this time the central character is not a foolish rich youngster who lends his ears too easily to foreigners, but a mature and honourable citizen who has heard of Petrus’s adver-sity and realizes that the country is at risk: if Petrus cannot continue his trade in products from the Dutch Republic, ‘what then should the poor inhabitants do? What will become of the countryman? What are the craftsman and artist to do?’ (23). He therefore promises Petrus to provide the money withheld by Klaas and to contact his like-minded friends in Haarlem and Hoorn.

A bit later in the play, this same Burgerhart – the name literally means ‘Citi-zen’s Heart’ – is confronted with a line of foreigners, full of flattery, trying to win his friendship because they are in need of his money. Alongside Master John Al-ways Short, here cast as an evil genius who tries to sell Burgerhart English bonds, we hear and see a bowing Frenchman (Jean Poli), an eager Spaniard (Don Sebas-tian), and a subservient German (Squire Hans). They all have spectacular new plans for investments and promise the highest profits to the Dutchman if he will buy their shares in German gold mines, in a Spanish channel to be delved near the city of Murcia, or in French governmental debts. For well-informed insiders, these were all easily recognizable as risky investments – to say the least – since the French government had recently gone bankrupt, similar channel construction projects in Spain had been unsuccessful, and the German gold and silver mines were clearly past their prime.

Unlike Klaas, however, Burgerhart sees what the foreigners are up to and bluntly rejects all their proposals, thus stepping into the role of the model eco-nomic patriot. He makes clear that he prefers to invest his capital in ‘the rather better gold mines’ of the Republic, that is, in the various industrial, agricultural, and reclamation projects with which three of his industrious Dutch fellow citi-zens in the middle of the picture plan to reanimate the Dutch economy – though, of course, only after Burgerhart has submitted their business plans to some close scrutiny, because he is a prudent man (39).4 The flourishing merchant fleet in the background of the print, led by the figure of Mercury, the god of commerce, visu-ally represents the belief that Dutch commerce will also benefit in the end from Burgerhart’s wise policy. Moreover, thanks to this citizen’s example, demonstrat-ing the bold decisions, patriotism, and spirit of enterprise that are required, the flock of stray compatriots will come to its senses and recommit itself to the com-mon good of the Dutch Republic. Reason, the female figure at the head of the procession, armed with the attributes of the goddess Athens, is to lead them back to the temple of the Republic that is no longer in a state of ruin but in the process of renovation. The Dutch Virgin has already returned, and gesticulates to other


Dutch citizens that they should join her inside the building. In the skies above, more allegorical figures – representing Devoutness, Truth, Love, Perseverance, and Fidelity – are waiting for the moment they can return home.

However, one of the Dutchmen present is still not entirely convinced: ‘but do we not run the risk, you think, that the foreigners, upon noticing that we are no longer willing to help them, will take away with force what we do not wish

3.3. Second economic print. (Stichting Atlas van Stolk Rotterdam, no. 4322).


to give them readily’? (43-4). In a marvellous display of wishful thinking, allud-ing to the symbolic scene in the front, Petrus then assures his fellow citizen that under such circumstances the Dutch lion would easily chase off the English dog: the anxious dog is hardly able to fight off the French cock, let alone the much more awe-inspiring lion. The lion, all skin and bones, may have gone through a rough time but he is in charge again – or so Petrus confidently claims. And if

3.3. Second economic print. (Stichting Atlas van Stolk Rotterdam, no. 4322).


this prospect still does not persuade other well-to-do Dutchmen to invest their money in Dutch projects, then obviously their ‘eyesight, with moving among foreigners and considering their goods, has gone bad’ (42). Therefore, they need an aid to clarify their vision. Hence the box at the left, which contains a large number of ‘economic eyeglasses’, free to try for any man of fortune who suffers from myopia.

The Patriots’ Economic Eyeglasses

Tellingly, the pair of spectacles called ‘economic eyeglasses’ by the playwright, following the inscription on the box, was referred to as ‘native eyeglasses’ in the original legend of the print. The revision underlines the close semantic relation-ship that existed between the Dutch words ‘economisch’ and ‘inlands’: to view something from an ‘economic perspective’ was just another way of saying that one was viewing it from a domestic, that is, a native or national perspective. The Dutch word ‘vaderlands’ (meaning both national and patriotic) was another near synonym in this semantic field, virtually interchangeable with the terms men-tioned above (Krol 1991, 237-40; Kloek 1987, 85, 88, 90).

Given their patriotically charged meaning, it is no surprise that the same words return in the names of the reformist societies set up by eighteenth-cen-tury economic patriots, such as the Vaderlandsche Maatschappy van Redery en Koophandel (National Society of Shipping and Commerce) at Hoorn and the Oeconomische Tak der Hollandsche Maatschappy der Wetenschappen (Eco-nomic Branch of the Holland Society of Sciences) at Haarlem, both founded in 1777. Haarlem and Hoorn were cities in the province of Holland that had suffered greatly from the national decline in trade and industry. The proclaimed goal of these societies was to develop and discuss plans to counter the enormous problem of unemployment both on a local and on a national level (Sturkenboom 2008, 106-9; van den Eerenbeemt 1977, 98-113; Bierens de Haan 1952). Thus, when Burgerhart talked about the help he knew he could expect from his ‘loyal brothers at Haarlem and Hoorn’, he was referring to those initiatives (23-4). The affinity was even more clearly expressed in the legends of the cartoons: they were officially dedicated to the members of the societies in the two cities.

The metaphor of the ‘economic eyeglasses’ was therefore a very apt find by the nameless artist(s) behind the prints and the play. Yet it was not entirely novel. The same metaphor had been popular in Dutch pamphlets since 1600 (Meijer Drees 2006). And two years before, in 1778, another Dutch author, writing un-der the pseudonym Doctor Schasz, had made use of ‘economic eye drops’ in The Verdrukte Wildeman (The Oppressed Savage), a political play published by Gisbert Timon van Paddenburg in Utrecht. In terms of its characters, theme, and plot, moreover, the Toneel-spel shows a remarkable resemblance to Schasz’s De geplaagde Hollander. Of de lastige nabuur vertoond in vier bedrijven (The Tor-mented Dutchman, or, The Difficult Neighbour Presented in Four Acts) published in 1779. Apparently our anonymous ‘Friend of the Fatherland’ tried to capitalize on Schasz’s ideas and popularity. The last part of the Toneel-spel’s title underlines


this: it asserts that the text was written ‘in the taste of the astute Count of Nassau la Leck and Mr. Schatz [sic] in a fluent and attractive style’. This definitely sounds as a sales stunt, because in the years prior to 1780 both the Count of Nassau la Leck – an actual historical figure – and Mr. Schasz had started to establish a name as authors of political letters and entertaining plays in the same patriotic vein of which the Toneel-spel is an example. The complicated history of the pen name Doctor Schasz demonstrates his enormous appeal to the public: invented by the Dutch patriotic author Pieter ’t Hoen (1744-1828) who was using it in the years 1778-80, the pen name was later adopted by another famous Dutch hack, Gerrit Paape (1752-1803) (van Vliet 2003, 193-6; Theeuwen 2001; Kloek 2001).

It does not seem over-imaginative to suppose that publisher Schuurman and his play-writing buddy, too, tried to cash in on the success of the two economic prints: after all, they may well have been the talk of the town following their publication in large folio format in 1780. The fact that the cartoons were incor-porated and reproduced in the assemblage print published later that year can be seen as evidence of their impact and commercial success. Guesswork at the iden-tity of the anonymous pamphleteer, meanwhile, directs us to the person of Nico-laas François Hoefnagel (1735-84), a hack who linked his career to the Patriots’ cause when their reformist campaign began to gather momentum.5 Hoefnagel published numerous political and political-economic pamphlets with publisher Dirk Schuurman, including some more drama pamphlets (Hanou 1973). He also wrote more than one national plan of reform, including the Plan ter verbetering van Neêrlands Zee-weezen (Plan for Improvement of the Dutch Sea System) that figured prominently in the Toneel-spel, where it was abundantly praised (30-1). At the time, Hoefnagel lived in Amsterdam, though he had not been born or raised there and remained a relative outsider to the city. He would later move to Utrecht, where conditions for patriotic hacks like him were even better. Having started his career as a painter, and occasionally still publishing political pictures in 1782, Hoefnagel also comes in view as the possible designer of the two car-toons, which were published without initials or other references that would give away the identity of the draughtsman. However, since Hoefnagel’s talents as a graphic artist seem to have been limited, whereas the cartoons definitely testify to a great talent for drawing, we may not want to put our money on this possibility (Hanou 1972-3, 69-70; Hanou 2004).

Whatever the identity of the artistic double talent or the collective behind the prints and drama pamphlet, it is obvious that we should see them as patriotic contributions to a political-economic debate that was shot through with cultural nationalism – even though the main reason for producing the cartoons and the play may have been the livelihood of their creator(s). What concerns us here is the way in which the ‘economic eyeglasses’ of the Patriots influenced their ideas about Amsterdam as a world city, and more particularly their ideas about the people with money – rich burghers and urbanites – living in this metropolis.


Metropolis versus Country

To understand the function and symbolic meaning of Amsterdam in the patriotic imagery that is under discussion here, we will need to look behind the surface of text and prints. After all, except for the coffer and cart in the first economic print, symbolizing the money accumulated in the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange, Amsterdam is nowhere explicitly mentioned – even though its economic and fi-nancial role and cosmopolitan climate can be assumed to form an important part of the context. Amsterdam is also conspicuously absent from the second print and from the second act of the play. The coffer in the second economic print is not placed on wheels, and does therefore not represent Amsterdam money. This is not a coincidence, as I will argue later on: its absence here is as meaningful as its presence would have been. To understand this we first need to take a brief look at the economic situation at the time.

As we have seen, the first economic print and the first act of the play are clearly set against the symbolic background of Amsterdam as a centre of global finance and banking. This is hardly surprising, as in the Netherlands most capital was accumulated in the province of Holland, and within Holland in Amsterdam (van Zandvliet 2006, xxiii-xxv). In smaller quantities money and credit were available elsewhere as well, but Amsterdam was the dominant capital market (Spufford 1995, 307-8). Foreign governments such as the British, French, Aus-trian, and Swedish knew that this was the place where they could obtain loans to finance their wars and industries; likewise, stockbrokers knew that this was the city to trade their securities, and entrepreneurs knew that the chances to find shareholders for mutual funds were nowhere as substantial as here (van Nieuw-kerk 2005, 67-83).

Amsterdam had already been known for its low and therefore attractive inter-est rates in the seventeenth century, and the availability of capital only further in-creased in the eighteenth. Forced by global economic developments, Amsterdam merchant families had begun to combine their traditional activities in commodi-ties trade and shipping with specialized services such as commission trading, and with more passive investments in foreign government debts or securities in order to secure their profits. In effect, since the second half of the seventeenth century the city’s merchants had started to act more and more as international bankers, brokers, and financiers. To be sure, in the eighteenth century they were still active in import and export, too. Yet, owing to several internal and external factors, the demand for Dutch home manufacture dropped dramatically in the second half of that century. For Amsterdam merchants those domestic industrial products were no longer an interesting or rational investment (Jonker and Sluyterman 2000, 118-24; Lesger 2005a and 2005b; Spufford 1995, 305 and 327-8).

Clearly, this major shift in economic activity is at the basis of some of the anxieties articulated in the prints and the play – including the anxiety over the marketability of Dutch home manufacture with which the play opens. Critics, mistaking cause and effect at the time, blamed the perceived economic downfall of the Republic on precisely this development (Lesger 2005a, 226). They declared that the once hard-working merchants had become idle and rootless rentiers,


unwilling to invest in the Dutch economy. The ‘monied interest’ of the Amster-dam elite no longer coincided with the interests of the country but – as radical commentators argued – with foreign interests (Fritschy 1988, 66). As Karl Marx would later comment in a little-known study, published by one of his daughters after his death: ‘Its fatherland had begun to lie there where the best interest for its capital was paid’ (Marx 1969, 93).

It is not difficult to see how the character of Klaas, a man of leisure who preferred to live off his passive investments, embodied this development. His obvious lack of interest in the condition of his own country, his inclination to spend his money on fashionable luxury products imported from abroad, and his willingness to associate with foreign financiers looking for loans, threatened to ruin the Republic. In the play Petrus even called Klaas a ‘traitor’ of his fatherland, an accusation that followed upon a reference to the ‘degenerate’ nature of Klaas (Toneel-spel, 20). Klaas behaved as a very weak man, giving in to the tempta-tions of a wealthy life, emulating the nobility abroad, and thus exemplifying the degenerating effects of luxury on the morality of Dutchmen. His moral failure was the sorry consequence of what the more radical among the economic patriots believed to be the typically selfish and short-sighted attitude of the mercantile re-gent aristocracy.6 In that sense, Klaas may not only have represented the financial elite of Amsterdam, he also stood for that larger part of the Dutch population that had an international and cosmopolitan outlook and was open to the charge of neglecting the interests of the rest of their country. This group may have been represented by the group of stray compatriots in the second print and in the second act of the play. In contrast to Klaas, these citizens are pictured as having regained their clarity of perception and sense of judgment, and as having learned to distinguish more clearly between Dutch and foreign interests.

It is worth pointing out that when the list of characters in the play introduced Klaas as ‘a rich young Hollander’, this sharply contrasted with the introduc-tion of Burgerhart as ‘a rich honourable Netherlander’ (2; italics added). While Amsterdam and Holland were (and still are) often used as a pars pro toto for the entire country, clearly that was not the case here. The message was that one needed the national orientation of a Burgerhart to help the country reinvent itself as a superpower. Interestingly, this national orientation was presented as a vision rather broader than the cosmopolitan orientation of the elite, which – paradoxi-cally – was denounced here as more narrow-minded and restricted in vision. The wider range of Burgerhart’s vision was demonstrated in his interest in various land reclamation, agricultural, and industrial projects, planned for other parts of the Dutch Republic: the playwright mentions, for instance, the reclamation of heathland near Amersfoort, the empoldering of the Haarlemmermeer, support for the porcelain factories in Delft, and the manufacturing of high-quality knives in Den Bosch and Schagen (26-31).

We can now finally understand why the coffer in the second print was not positioned on a cart resembling those that were used in the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange: the investment capital envisioned to rescue the Dutch economy was not likely to come from Amsterdam, and had to be raised in other parts of the Netherlands, or so the economic cartoonist imagined. The symbolic dissociation


from the city of Amsterdam in the second print – underlined by the drama in the play – thus reveals an anti-metropolitan and anti-cosmopolitan strand in the ar-gument, which suggests that a significant fault line running through the political-economic discourse considered in this chapter turned on the distinction between capital city and country, Amsterdam and the provinces, as competing centres of ‘true’ patriotism.

Amsterdam Money and the Transnational Imagination

Again, there is an interesting parallel to be drawn with today’s political imagery, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, in which the cosmopolitan elites living in the larger cities are denounced for their political myopia – or even for a deficient sense of political reality – by the rest of the country. Other parallels include the stereotypical way in which foreign countries and their citizens were depicted. In the drama pamphlet, the foreigners looking for investors were fitted out with ‘barbed hands’, and they were consistently referred to as ‘parasites’, ‘birds of prey’, or ‘bloodsuckers’ to underline their allegedly predatory nature (Toneel-spel, 4, 24, 33, 43). In the second economic print, the proud representation of the Republic as a superior lion sharply contrasted with the rude representation of England and France as, respectively, a submissive bulldog and an overly arrogant cock. This imagery was in keeping with a long-standing iconographic tradition to depict countries as animals. Interestingly, other states, such as England and Spain, also used the heraldic symbol of the lion in reference to themselves, while using the frog to depict the boggy Netherlands. In turn, the Dutch represented the Spanish as gluttonous swine (Kempers 1995; van Sas 1995, 157). This tradi-tion is still not entirely extinct, as the recent use of the acronym ‘PIGS’ for Por-tugal, Italy, Greece and Spain (or ‘PIIGS’, with an extra I for Ireland) underlines: financial analysts and political commentators resort to such rhetoric to group countries together on the basis of rough similarities in the management of their government debts, and because of a general expectation that they are all equally unable to maintain the monetary standards required to keep the euro solvent.

At the same time, ironically, the discourse and imagery of economic patriot-ism could hardly be seen as something typically or exclusively Dutch. The dis-putes that were held in the Dutch Republic – over private materialism versus communal interests, and over the moral explanations that might account for a state’s economic and political ‘decline’ – recurred in various forms elsewhere, for instance in London and Hamburg (Pocock 1985, 108-9; Aaslestad 2007, 589-91; Lindemann 2008; van Sas 1992, 119). Time and again, complaints about how local interests were losing out in the context of a global economy used similar stereotypes: the scheming and shady foreigner, the selfish and short-sighted elite, and the sane and sensible citizen as the only one who sees clearly and behaves responsibly. Even today, this type of rhetoric and imagery is used to influence the public, not only in Dutch public debates but also in books like Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century by British journalist Anthony Sampson (van Nieuwkerk 2005, 187). The obvious paradox at work here ena-


bles us to put this nationalist imagery in a transnational perspective: it appears that even in their cultural imagination, nations are much less unique than their patriotic and nationalist leaders would like us to believe. Just as the theme of migrating money underlying this imagery, those stereotypes seem to migrate from one country to another.

One last irony should not be lost here: the money accumulated in the cof-fers of the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange was in fact only partially Dutch. After all, merchants from all over the world had made deposits in the bank, and even the profits made by Dutch merchants had their origins across the globe. One wonders, therefore, whether the socio-political narrative told by the cartoons and the play was not a rather creative reversal of what others might perceive as reality: indeed, what was framed as Amsterdam money to be lost to foreigners in the first print, was actually global money to be claimed for a rejuvenation cure of the Dutch economy in the second print. Clearly, such a ‘resistant reading’ of the scenario played out by the international cast of characters who circled the Amsterdam coffer is quite different from what the eighteenth-century cartoon-ist and playwright must have had in mind. Yet it does underline the relativity of perspective and, indeed, the striking reversibility of the positive and negative connotations articulated in their patriotic statements – dependent as those con-notations ultimately are on the urban, national, and transnational vantage points that lend them weight.

Notes

1 This chapter has its origins in a joint writing project with Henk Reitsma, my former office mate at VU University Amsterdam. I wish to express my thanks for the different ways in which he has contributed to my knowledge on this subject over the years.

2 The two prints have been preserved in the national print collections Atlas van Stolk in Rot-terdam (as no. 4318 and no. 4322) and Atlas van Frederik Muller in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (as no. 4367 and no. 4370). The assemblage print is archived as no. 4329 in the Atlas van Stolk and reproduced in van Sas (1995, 147-50).

3 I am indebted to Henk Gras and Klaartje Groot for checking the archival sources containing the playing lists of the theatres in Rotterdam and Amsterdam (1774-1811). The play also remains unmentioned in the playing lists published by Bordewijk (2005) and in Ruitenbeek (2002).

4 The reference to gold mines was an allusion to an economic essay, titled ‘Hollands Goud-mijn’, that was written in response to an essay competition organized by the Oeconomische Tak der Hollandsche Maatschappy der Wetenschappen (Economic Branch of the Holland Society of Sciences) in 1771 (Bierens de Haan 1952, 2-3).

5 I owe this hypothesis to Henk Reitsma. Ton Jongenelen, who is presently writing a double biography of Klaas Hoefnagel and Willem Ockerse, another Dutch commercial writer, con-firmed the validity of the hypothesis to me (email, 20 Feb. 2008).

6 In fact, the relationship between the Patriots and the mercantile regent aristocracy was more complex. Many merchant regents supported the Patriots or were Patriots themselves (van Sas 1992, 93, 106-10).


Works Cited

Aaslestad, Katherine. ‘Republican Traditions: Patriotism, Gender, and War in Hamburg, 1770-1815’. European History Quarterly 37.4 (2007): 582-602.

Adams, Julia. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005.

Bierens de Haan, J. Van Oeconomische Tak tot Nederlandsche Maatschappij voor Nijverheid en Handel, 1777-1952. Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1952.

Bordewijk, Paul, ed. Wat geeft die Comedie toch een bemoeijing! De Leidse schouwburg 1705-2005. Amsterdam: Boom, 2005.

Boussingault, Adam. La guide universelle de tous les Pays Bas, ou des dix-sept provinces qui fait voir au voyageur tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau, de plus rare, de plus antique, & de plus curieux. De plus les fortifications de plusieurs villes, & leur distance, avec deux guides tres-exactes des chemins. Les moeurs et les coutumes d’apresent des Pays-Bas. Une description tres-curieuse, & tres-particuliere de la ville de Paris. Paris: Clousier, 1665.

de Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Fail-ure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 1997.

Fritschy, W. ‘De patriottenbeweging in Nederland. Een verzetsbeweging tegen een financiële oligarchie?’ 1787. De Nederlandse revolutie? Ed. Th. S. M. van der Zee, J. G. M. M. Rosendaal, and P. G. B. Thissen. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1988. 52-69.

Giebels, Robert. ‘Ja-campagne werd dubbele nee-campagne’. NRC Handelsblad 31 May 2005.

Halsema, Femke, and Kathalijne Buitenweg. ‘U wilt toch ook geen Europese su-permarkt?’ NRC Handelsblad 9 June 2005.

Hanou, A. J. ‘Een 18e-eeuws broodschrijver: Nicolaas François Hoefnagel (1735-84)’. Spektator. Tijdschrift voor Neerlandistiek 2 (1972-3): 62-81, 535-48.

—. ‘Bibliografie Nicolaas Hoefnagel (1735-1784)’. Documentatieblad Achttiende Eeuw 18 and 21 (1973): 21-43 and 15-38.

—. Nederlandse literatuur van de Verlichting (1670-1830). Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002.

—. ‘Een dood van Klaas Hoefnagel’. Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Cam-po Weyerman 27 (2004): 35-6.

Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Jonker, Joost, and Keetie Sluyterman. At Home on the World Markets: Dutch International Trading Companies from the 16th Century until the Present. The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 2000.

Kempers, Bram. ‘Assemblage van de Nederlandse leeuw. Politieke symboliek in heraldiek en verhalende prenten van de zestiende eeuw’. Openbaring en be-drog. De afbeelding als historische bron in de Lage Landen. Ed. Bram Kem-pers. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1995. 60-100.

Klein, Stephan. Patriots Republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787). Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1995.


Kloek, Joost. ‘Letteren en landsbelang’. Voor vaderland en vrijheid. De revolutie van de patriotten. Ed. F. Grijzenhout, W. W. Mijnhardt, and N. C. F. van Sas. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987. 81-97.

—. ‘De onbekende werkelijkheid van Doctor Schasz, of: de enigma-variaties van Gerrit Paape’. Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 24 (2001): 163-70.

Koolhaas-Grosfeld, Eveline. De ontdekking van de Nederlander in boeken en prenten rond 1800. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2010.

Krol, Ellen. ‘Over “den Meridiaan des huisschelyken levens” in Sara Burgerhart’. Spektator 20 (1991): 237-44.

Lesger, Clé. ‘Stagnatie en stabiliteit. De economie tussen 1730 en 1795’. Ge-schiedenis van Amsterdam. Zelfbewuste stadstaat, 1650-1813. Ed. Willem Frijhoff and Maarten Prak. Amsterdam: SUN, 2005a. 219-65.

—. ‘Vertraagde groei. De economie tussen 1650 en 1730’. Geschiedenis van Am-sterdam. Zelfbewuste stadstaat 1650-1813. Ed. Willem Frijhoff and Maarten Prak. Amsterdam: SUN, 2005b. 21-87.

—. The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial Expansion, and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries, c.1550-1630. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

Lindemann, Mary. ‘The Anxious Merchant, the Bold Speculator, and the Mali-cious Bankrupt: Doing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg’. The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists. Ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 161-82.

Marx, Karl. Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. 1899. Lon-don: International Publishers, 1969.

Meijer Drees, Marijke. ‘Brilmetaforiek in vroegmoderne pamfletten’. Het lange leven van het pamflet. Boekhistorische, iconografische, literaire en politieke aspecten van pamfletten 1600-1900. Ed. José de Kruif, Marijke Meijer Drees, and Jeroen Salman. Hilversum: Verloren, 2006. 129-42.

Mijnhardt, Wijnand W. ‘The Dutch Enlightenment: Humanism, Nationalism, and Decline’. The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, En-lightenment and Revolution. Ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijn-hardt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992. 197-223.

Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Pöllnitz, Charles-Louis de. Memoires de Charles-Louis Baron de Pöllnitz, conte-nant les observations qu’il a faites dans ses voyages, et le caractere des person-nes qui composent les principales Cours de l’Europe. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Liège: Demen, 1734.

Remarques d’un voyageur sur la Hollande, l’Allemagne, l’Italie, l’Espagne, le Portugal, l’Afrique, le Bresil, & quelques Isles de la Méditerranée. Contenant une idée exacte de leur gouvernement, de leur commerce, de leurs forces, & de leurs moeurs, & les caracteres de plusieurs personnes illustres qui vivent actuellement. The Hague: De Merville, 1728.

Ruitenbeek, Henny. Kijkcijfers: de Amsterdamse schouwburg 1814-1841. Hil-versum: Verloren, 2002.


Spufford, Peter. ‘Access to Credit and Capital in the Commercial Centres of Eu-rope’. A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective. Ed. Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 303-37.

Sturkenboom, Dorothee. Spectators van hartstocht. Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende eeuw. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998.

—. ‘Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century’. The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capi-talists. Ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 99-122.

Temple, Sir William. Observations upon the United Provinces of the Nether-lands. London: Gellibrand, 1673.

Theeuwen, Peet. ‘Een fictieve broodschrijver: Pieter ’t Hoen en het vroege oeuvre van J. A. Schasz M.D’. Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyer-man 24 (2001): 89-104.

Toneel-spel in twee afdeelingen, ziende op de twee konstplaaten, toegewyd aan alle de leden van de loffelyke Vaderlandsche Maatschappy te Hoorn, en van den Oeconomischen Tak der Hollandsche Maatschappy te Haarlem. Waar in alle de persoonen, in de gemelde plaaten voorkomende, spreekende ingevoerd worden. Zynde een werkje, ten hoogste noodzakelyk, om een waar denk-beeld van gemelde plaaten en Neêrlands belangen te krygen. Als mede van de konstplaat, tot tytel voerende: De Tyd geeft Verandering. Door een Vriend des Vaderlands in de smaak der schrandere Graave van Nassau la Leck en de Heere Schatz in een vloeibare en aangenaame styl geschreeven. Amsterdam: Dirk Schuurman, 1780.

Uitlegging van de algemeene staatkundige konstplaat van A° 1780. N.p.: n.p., 1780.

van den Eerenbeemt, H. F. J. M. Armoede en arbeidsdwang. Werkinrichtin-gen voor ‘onnutte’ Nederlanders in de Republiek, 1760-1795. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977.

van Nieuwkerk, Marius. Hollands gouden glorie. De financiële kracht van Nederland door de eeuwen heen. Haarlem: Becht, 2005.

van Praag, B. M. S. ‘Harde taal kabinet over onze bijdrage is een gotspe’. NRC Handelsblad 15 June 2005.

van Sas, N. C. F. ‘The Patriot Revolution: New Perspectives’. The Dutch Repub-lic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992. 91-120.

—. ‘Eigen en vreemd. Internationale verhoudingen en prentcultuur rond 1800’. Openbaring en bedrog. De afbeelding als historische bron in de Lage Landen. Ed. Bram Kempers. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1995. 147-68.

—. De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750-1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004.

van Vliet, Rietje. ‘1756-1757: Elie Luzac geeft de republikeinse Cato’s letters uit. Met een bijlage over Lodewijk Dodo graaf Nassau la Leck’. Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 26 (2003): 181-96.


van Zandvliet, Kees. De 250 rijksten van de Gouden Eeuw. Kapitaal, macht, familie en levensstijl. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum en Nieuw Amsterdam, 2006.

Worp, J. A. Geschiedenis van het drama en van het tooneel in Nederland. Vol. 2. Rotterdam: Langerveld, 1907.

Amidst Unscrupulous Neighbours. Amsterdam Money and Foreign Interests in Dutch Patriotic Imagery

Documents