Koen Stapelbroek

Dutch decline as a European phenomenon

It is well known that the commercial and political decline of the United Provinces in the eighteenth century was discussed throughout Europe. The aim of this introductory article and this special issue on ‘Dutch Decline in Eighteenth-Century Europe’ at large is to take a first few steps towards developing a new understanding of these discussions. Rather than to attempt to provide an inventory of which foreign writers reflected on the Dutch case and analyse their judgements, the purpose of this introduction is to establish the nature of this interest in the light of the changing dynamics of interstate political and trade relations. Consisting of two parts (each divided in two sections), this introductory article is an attempt to bring together into the same frame, one, the concerns that moved major and lesser figures to discuss the Dutch case and, two, the wealth of economic history studies that have addressed the notion of Dutch decline. In order to eventually make these historiographies mutually productive, it is argued that the idea of ‘intrinsic power’ needs to be recognised not primarily as related to an idea of ‘relative’ (as opposed to ‘absolute’) decline, but in a slightly different fashion. The way in which Dutch political writers increasingly came to understand the predicament of their state and ultimately aligned themselves with their European counterparts was precisely through the concept of ‘intrinsic power’, understood as a comparative notion that referred to the ramifications of political shifts for the capacity of the Dutch Republic to maintain itself on the international scene.

Political Economy, Patriotism and the Rise of Societies

One of the most prominent and geographically widespread phenomena in the eighteenth century was the rise of societies that aimed at improoing the economic basis of European states. Traces of this deoelopment were left in a wide oariety of contemporary sources. These societies called themseloes improoing societies, patriotic societies, agricultural societies and economic societies, among other labels that were used. Not only did these institutions differ semantically, their characters, self-declared missions and attributed functions were shaped by local and national political and socio-economic history. Gioen this oariety, how and why would one attempt to treat these economic societies in a unified way?

The Devaluation Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Following the Succession Wars of the early eighteenth-century, political economists across Italy discussed a range of possible reforms. Among the issues drawing most attention was the complicated problem whether devaluation policies were appropriate means for boosting economic growth. Not only did the issue raise moral and juridical questions, it also triggered profound historical reflections on the evolution of « commercial societies » out of feudal systems. This article places a number of Italian mid-eighteenth-century ideas of money in their original context of political and intellectual challenges and attempts to draw some of the main dividing lines in this debate.

Adriaan Kluit's statistics and the future of the Dutch state from a European perspective

This article discusses the early history of academic statistics in the Netherlands in relation to the reform challenges of the Dutch state. Statistics, before it developed into a predominantly quantitative social science, was adopted around 1800 by Adriaan Kluit as a method for shaping and articulating his political vision. Kluits politics, the article suggests, echoed the specific outlook on the ‘intrinsic power’ of the Dutch Republic as a trading state that was developed during William IVs stadholderate in the mid eighteenth century. Through the ideas of later writers and statesmen who had trained as statisticians this same approach to envisaging the Dutch future in international trade and politics was carried over into nineteenth-century Dutch political economy and constitutional reform.

Commercial reform against the tide: Reapproaching the eighteenth-century decline of the republics of Venice and the United Provinces

The emergence of ‘civilized monarchies’, reformed European territorial states that had turned commercial, created major challenges to the old trade republics of Venice and the United Provinces. Would they perish and cease to exist, which seemed a logical corollary to the recent history of their decline, or might they be reconstituted and integrated into a new interstate system? Rather than to approach this question from the perspective of the history of political thought, which offers a range of rival outlooks on this issue, the present article treats the issue more from the inside and thus connects theories about decline to their concrete manifestations and experiences; from the spheres of diplomatic tensions over unpaid debts, publishing networks and the oscillation of consular and maritime law reform between Venice and the Dutch Republic.

Preserving the Neapolitan state: Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani on commercial society and planning economic growth

Both Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani devised strategies for Neapolitan economic development, which they realised was essential for preserving its recently acquired independent statehood. In order to avoid any socially disruptive effects they considered how economic processes changed the human mind. Both thinkers grounded their political visions on foreign trade on highly sophisticated ideas of the nature of self-interest. In spite of the similar characters of their projects, the political thought of Genovesi and Galiani has never been subject to serious comparison. Instead the two thinkers have tended to be portrayed as opposite characters with highly divergent political leanings. It is argued here that this view is historically questionable and itself a product of a distorting canonisation process that was set in motion in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ironically, comparing the moral philosophies and economic ideas of Genovesi and Galiani, a picture emerges that inverts the myth that started at the end of the eighteenth century and that until this day has determined accounts of the early Neapolitan Enlightenment.

Neutrality and Trade in the Dutch Republic (1775–1783): Preludes to a Piecemeal Revolution

Comparing the geographical characteristics and the political, economic and social history of America and the European continent, eighteenth-century political thinkers emphasized their great differences. Mostly, eighteenth-century writers stressed that history since the fall of the Roman Empire had created conditions that placed a heavy burden on European states and blocked any chance to further develop economic growth and generate legal and social change. In the words of Ferdinando Galiani, writing in 1776, ‘the time has come for the total downfall of Europe and for the transmigration to America. Here everything falls into decay: religion, laws, the arts, sciences; and everything will be newly built in America.’1 Still, since European power struggles and interstate economic rivalry were played out on a global scale (of which the modern history of America itself was a product), American state-building and the general redesign of modernity that writers like Galiani alluded to would have to directly engage with these constraints.

‘The problem of the republics’: Venturi’s republicanism reconsidered

The Italian historian Franco Venturi (1914–1994) has remained famous among contemporary historians for his agenda setting work on ‘the republican tradition’ and the fate and legacy of early-modern republics in the construction of modern Europe in the late eighteenth-century. In order to re-assess and define in an international company one major dimension of Venturi’s lasting impact on historical scholarship, Manuela Albertone organised a two-day meeting held in Naples at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in September 2004, entitled – as is the resulting publication based on the revised conference presentations – Il repubblicanesimo moderno: L’idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi. The contributors to the volume consist of two groups: historians from the Anglo-Saxon, or in any case non-Italian, world who directly or indirectly have had to do with the ideas of Franco Venturi as a historian of the Enlightenment and as a designated early ‘theorist’ of republicanism; and Italian academics, whose personal contacts with Venturi generally date back to earlier moments in his career. Virtually all the contributors are senior established historians, the majority of whom are eminently well-placed to critically review the historiography of the last decades and asses Venturi’s lasting influence. On the nonItalian side the most important event is their memory of the publication of his 1969 Cambridge Trevelyan lectures as Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971), while the Italians are more familiar with Venturi’s own motives and personality and his entire oeuvre, and consider his ideas from his personal and intellectual contexts and interactions from the 1930s onwards – the points of return being (particularly in Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s and Silvia Berti’s contributions) Venturi’s famous programmatic essays of 1953 and 1960 on La circolazione delle idee and L’illuminismo nel settecento europeo as well as his early essays in Giustizia e Libertà and his works on Diderot, Herder, Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco and Boulanger. Although the theme of Il Repubblicanesimo Moderno (the title emphasises a contrast with ancient as well as any universal republicanism) and the focus on Venturi’s ideas about republics may suggest a shared perspective, there is something of a gap between the approaches followed by the ‘foreign’ and the Italian interpretations of Venturi’s legacy. The first tend to consider Venturi’s legacy in relation to the debate about republicanism of the last decade and tend to bring in their own academic agendas. The British, American, Swiss, Polish and Dutch authors find Venturi’s work admirable, though sometimes complain that its messages are difficult to grasp – where it may be noted that the same inaccessibility also makes Venturi’s ideas mouldable and thus easier for other foreign contributors to align with or oppose to their own views. The Italian authors take a different line and see the entire project of Venturi’s magnum opus Settecento riformatore (not just the middle volumes that have not Italy’s antichi stati, but Europe – including Turkey, Greece and Russia – and the United States as their subject) as well as the Cambridge lectures of 1969 in relation to Venturi’s personality and French and Russian experiences and reconstruct the political meaning of his entire oeuvre through tracing its gestation in his early works and in his discussion with Italian historians; from the correspondence between Venturi and Aldo Garosci, Alessandro Gallante Garrone, Leo Valiani and Delio Cantimori to the roundtable discussions about new volumes of Settecento riformatore held in 1985 at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin – which until this day forms the home base of Venturi’s pupils as well as his books – and in September 1989 in Venice. Thus, the approaches of the contributors make up a varied picture of Venturi’s geographically twofold legacy. A variation that ends up fitting remarkably well with the mission of the volume to renew our ‘reading of his entire work’ starting from ‘the presence that the idea of republic enjoyed in Franco Venturi’s intellectual and historiographical itinerary’. History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 281–288

Trade and Treaties: Balancing the Interstate System

This chapter sets up the main narrative of the book as a history of the relation between the practice of the conclusion of commercial treaties and theoretical reflection on the political-economic ordering potential of commercial treaties in the light of the problem of ‘jealousy of trade’. The argument explains the main tensions, distinctions and conceptual oppositions involved in the dynamic of the rise, fall and re-rise of commercial treaties as the chosen instruments by politicians and writers for preserving a general European peace along with a system of trade development adhered to by all European states. The ‘arch’ thus set up connects the ideas of a great number of political writers from the time of the Peace of Westphalia to the Napoleonic Wars. The chapter identifies the constant conceptual reference points and shifting outlooks onto how commercial treaties might regulate European trade competition. The gradual replacement of ‘privilege’ with the principle of ‘equality’ explains the succession of three stages in the life-cycle of commercial treaties as instruments shaping the balance of power through the balance of trade. All of the commercial treaties that were concluded in the long eighteenth century were both connected to the main political events, conflicts and schemes of the time and to the political writings of a range of authors from Saint-Pierre and Bolingbroke to Adam Smith and beyond. Seen in this light, the subject of commercial treaties provides an opportunity for the creation of new paradigm for thinking about the political economy of the international order in the eighteenth century.

The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time. The work focuses on commercial treaties as an index of the challenges of eighteenth-century European politics, shaping a new understanding of these challenges and of how they were confronted at the time in theory and diplomatic practice. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the time of the Napoleonic wars bilateral commercial treaties were concluded not only at the end of large-scale wars accompanying peace settlements, but also independently with the aim to prevent or contain war through controlling the balance of trade between states. Commercial treaties were also understood by major political writers across Europe as practical manifestations of the wider intellectual problem of devising a system of interstate trade in which the principles of reciprocity and equality were combined to produce sustainable peaceful economic development.