Georg Braun; Frans Hogenberg: Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Band 1, 1572 (Ausgabe Beschreibung vnd Contrafactur der vornembster Stät der Welt, Köln, 1582 [VD16-B7188]; Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
In This Issue
Amsterdam
A History of the World’s Most Liberal City
By Russell Shorto, ©2013
Published by Doubleday, Illustrated,
Hardcover 357 pages including Notes and Acknowledgements
Anyone who has read Shorto’s earlier book, The Island at the Center of the World, which is about Manhattan — and if you have not read it, you might want to consider doing so — will come to Amsterdam expecting history that has been impeccably researched, and told through far more than cold facts. There is most assuredly no shortage of the latter, but Shorto’s gifts include a keen eye for individual little stories that add a delicious depth to his writing, and thus to our understanding of times and events.
The term "liberal" may be off-putting to a prospective reader who equates it only to Amsterdam’s well-known coffee shops that sell marihuana and hashish, and its street-side windows featuring prostitutes who advertise their wares. Shorto ascribes those excesses to the Dutch tradition of gedogen, a term that translates roughly as "illegal but tolerated," or more accurately, perhaps, "if you don’t like it, look the other way."
But make no mistake, there is a great deal more to Mr. Shorto’s use of the word "liberalism." Let him speak for himself:
"What all uses of liberalism go back to is the centrality of the individual. In this sense – the sense I will employ in this book – the word describes a fault line between the modern and the medieval; it represents our break with the Middle Ages and from the philosophy that has knowledge and power centered on received wisdom from the Church and the monarchy."
From that statement, Shorto does a detailed and commendable job of giving the history of the city itself, and its break with the Church (Catholic). Following the horror of the Inquisition, Amsterdam and indeed all of Holland emerged as an entity known for tolerance of other faiths (including Catholicism), this in an intolerant age.
But four hundred years before that came the 11th and 12th century farmers, who looked at the marshy shores and decided that there must be way to control the water and increase the amount of land on which they could grow their crops. The reclaiming of marshland was a back-breaking, shovel-and-bucket process that resulted in heaped up dikes and channels to drain the water from the peaty soil. But as Shorto notes, when peat is dry, it begins to sink, and eventually it reaches a point once again below water level.
One can only imagine the frustrations of those medieval people as they worked out their systems of dikes and pumps in order to achieve a workable balance. It was an on-going battle that continues to this day, waged by trial and error and marked by scientific advances, and in the opinion of Russell Shorto, it is the battle against the water that created an "ethic of cooperation that created a society strong enough for it to impel, curiously, a commitment to value the individual…" So perhaps this is a working hypothesis to keep in mind as we explore the foundations of liberalism: individualism, as a theory and an ideal, is related to extreme conditions and, seemingly paradoxically, to the need to band together.
In recounting the political and economic history of Amsterdam, Shorto does enliven the facts with digressions involving the famous (think Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Anne Frank), but also with stories of people unfamiliar to the reader. It is this quality of research, that employs small observations to flesh out known historic facts, that make Amsterdam such a compelling, lively read: that, and just plain good writing. Not only do we find detailed descriptions of the first Dutch ships to sail to the East: we learn the names of those who sailed them, and whether or not they were able to purchase enough spices to convince their backers to send out more ships, all of which led to the founding of the Dutch East India Company (labeled VOC by the Dutch), and its companion, the Dutch West Indies Company. The leaders who initiated those voyages were instrumental in developing a whole new concept: allowing others to invest in their venture by buying shares in its prospects, which provided capital for its pursuit, and included sharing of the profits. Thus developed the world’s first Stock Market, and the beginning of capitalism.
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