Dutch Golden Age Essay

1238 Words3 Pages

The Dutch Golden Age, the current time period in the 17th century, can be defined as the time in which the Dutch are the most acclaimed in the world on the subjects of trade, science, military, and art. Presently, we are in the middle this era, 1649, indicating that the eighty years war ended last year which was the revolt of the seventeen provinces against the political and religious reign of Philip II of Spain. It is predicted that the rest of this century will continue in peacetime. Prominently, Calvinism is the state religion in the Dutch Republic but along with this, unity was far from attained because although the Netherlands s very tolerant compared to neighbouring areas, only Protestants obtained wealth and …show more content…

Along with this, due to its height of “intellectual tolerance”, the Dutch Republic attracts scientists and other forms of thinkers from all over Europe to gather and exchange their ideas. One very crucial feature out of all of this is the banking and the success of the stock exchange and the florin, which is an international currency. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the sense to deal with printed stocks and bonds. Although this was the first legitimate stock exchange, some people say that state loan stocks had been negotiable at a very early date in Venice, 1328. Shortly after the establishment of the Dutch East India Company was when equities began trading on a somewhat regular basis as a secondary market in order to trade its shares. Before this advancement, the market simply and primarily existed for the exchange of commodities. In the same year, the States General of the Netherlands graciously granted the VOC a 21-year charter over all the Dutch trade in Asia which, from these monopolistic terms, …show more content…

The first solution that was demonstrated by the Republic was to pass a minting ordinance, assigning only certain coins as lawful and legitimate and giving them specific values in the terms of florin. These efforts to solve the issue clearly did not work, however, they provided a very strong incentive for local governments to debase their coinage as a source of revenue. This gave the Dutch merchants that were trading in these areas an incentive to hold the devalued money which would have allowed them to release their trading debts with less precious metal and keep the money of the difference between what was needed to settle the original commitment and what was paid back. The short-term “losers” in this process were those who held the bills of exchange payable in florins and these people tended to be merchants based in distant cities explains the popularity of debasement as a revenue-raising strategy. However, the eventual losers were the Dutch merchants themselves because foreign creditors

Open Document