Amsterdam

What was Amsterdam like around 1715?

Amsterdam grew rich after 1585, when Spain retook Antwerp and much of that city’s trade, money and people moved north. By the mid-1600s Amsterdam was the trading and financial centre of the world, lending money to kings and emperors. Historians call the years from about 1580 to 1670 the Dutch Golden Age.

By the time Silver & Sails begins, the peak had passed. During the 1700s London and Hamburg overtook Amsterdam in trade. But in 1715 the change was slow. Amsterdam’s quays were still crowded, and industries that worked colonial goods, such as sugar refining, kept doing well for decades.

Why was Amsterdam called the warehouse of Europe?

Amsterdam’s merchants bought goods from one part of the world, stored and often processed them, and sold them on to another. Dutch traders called the Baltic grain trade their “mother trade”, because it was the oldest and biggest and fed all the others. Grain and timber from the Baltic came to Amsterdam on ships like the fluyt and went on to England, Spain and Portugal.

Colonial goods followed the same pattern:

• Sugar. After Antwerp, Amsterdam became Europe’s leading sugar refiner. It had about 3 refineries around 1605 and about 50 by 1662. See sugar.
• Tobacco. Cutting and preparing tobacco was a major Amsterdam industry.
• Many flags. Dutch merchants did not only buy from Dutch colonies. They bought large amounts of sugar and tobacco from the French and English islands too.

How did Amsterdam become the money market of Europe?

In 1607 the city approved a bourse, a building where merchants met to trade, and in 1609 it opened the Exchange Bank, in Dutch the Wisselbank. It kept accounts in a reliable “bank money”, backed by coin and precious metal. Merchants paid one another by moving money between accounts, and bills of exchange, paper promises to pay used in trade, had to be settled through the bank. Deposits grew from under a million guilders in 1611 to over 16 million by 1700.

The bank was owned by the city, not by private shareholders. It did not lend to ordinary customers, though it did lend heavily to the Dutch East India Company. By the late 1600s its bank money was trusted far beyond the Dutch Republic.

How was Amsterdam linked to the Caribbean?

The Dutch West India Company, or WIC, was chartered in 1621 to trade with Africa and the Americas. It had five regional branches, called chambers, and Amsterdam’s was the most powerful, with 8 of the 19 seats on the company’s board.

The company’s island of Curaçao, off Venezuela, was a hub for smuggling. Spanish law banned trade with foreigners, but Venezuelan growers sold cacao and tobacco to traders from Curaçao, who were mostly small Sephardic Jewish merchants or sailors of African descent. Enslaved dock workers loaded the cacao onto ships for the Netherlands. From Willemstad it went to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam merchants sold it across Europe, even back to Spain. In 1728 Spain set up the Caracas Company, partly to stop this trade.

On the coast of South America lay Suriname. A Dutch fleet captured it from the English in 1667, and in the peace that year the Dutch kept it while England kept New Amsterdam, today’s New York. From 1683 Suriname was run by the Society of Suriname, owned in equal thirds by the city of Amsterdam, the WIC and the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family. Its sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, who made up most of the colony’s people.

What part did Amsterdam play in the slave trade?

Amsterdam was involved in slavery and the slave trade from the late 1500s until the 1800s. The WIC held the Dutch monopoly on carrying captive Africans across the Atlantic until 1730, when the trade was opened to private merchants, many of them from Zeeland.

One ship shows how close this was to the city. The Leusden was built in Amsterdam in 1719 as a slave ship and owned by the WIC’s Amsterdam chamber. Between 1721 and 1738 it made ten slaving voyages from West Africa to St Eustatius, Berbice and Suriname. On its last voyage, on New Year’s Day 1738, it ran aground in a storm at the mouth of the Marowijne River in Suriname. The crew shut the hatches on the captives below, and the historian Leo Balai estimates that about 664 people died. Only 16 people survived (one record says 14), and they were sold in Paramaribo.

On 1 July 2021, the day the Netherlands marks the end of slavery, Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema apologised for the part the city’s rulers played in it.

Were there Black people in Amsterdam around 1700?

Yes. Amsterdam historian Mark Ponte has traced a small Black community in the 1600s around the Jodenbreestraat, the street where the painter Rembrandt lived, through church registers of baptisms and marriages. Some had come from Brazil or Angola, and some had served the WIC or the Dutch army.

One of them, Franciscus Thomas, gave his birthplace as “Sierra Liona in Africa”. In February 1698 he married Truijtje Hendricx in the Oude Kerk, the city’s oldest church, and he worked as a cloth finisher, a skilled job in the textile trade.

What were Amsterdam’s shipyards and collectors like?

Amsterdam was a city of ships. In 1656 its Admiralty, the board that ran this part of the Dutch navy, built a huge naval storehouse designed by Daniël Stalpaert; it is now the National Maritime Museum. Nearby, the Dutch East India Company ran its biggest shipyard on the island of Oostenburg. About 1,300 shipwrights, smiths, sailmakers and other workers lived around it, and it built about half of all the company’s shipping, measured by tonnage.

Ships also brought strange animals, shells and plants. The apothecary Albertus Seba opened a shop near the harbour around 1700 and asked sailors and ship surgeons to bring him specimens. His collection became so famous that the Russian tsar Peter the Great bought it, in 1716 or 1717 by different accounts.