Ancient Rome in Venice and the Dutch Republic

chapter 3 Commonwealths for Preservation and Increase: Ancient Rome in Venice and the Dutch Republic

Arthur Weststeijn

James Harrington, ranking high among the usual suspects of “classical republicanism”, made adamantly clear what an ideal polity should be like. In the introduction to his The Commonwealth of Oceana from 1656, he argued that commonwealths come in two sorts: either they are only “for preservation”, or they are also “for increase.” A year later, in The Prerogative of Popular Govern- ment, he specified his stance by heading Sparta, Carthage and Venice under the former category; the latter, “a government of citizens, where the commonwealth is both for increase and preservation”, included just one shining example: Rome.1 Harrington thus famously argued for an expansionist republic modelled on ancient Rome, a position that reveals the intimate connections between republicanism, as an ideology of active civic participation in politics, and imperialism, as an ideology of expansionist rule. Republican empires, or imperial republics for that matter, might seem to be almost oxymoronic, as becomes clear from the common usage to subdivide the history of ancient Rome into two distinct parts: the history of the Roman Republic, and the subsequent history of the Roman Empire. Clearly, the Romans themselves are the ones to blame for this confusing terminology. In Latin, both res publica (“commonwealth”, or simply, in modern terms, “state”) and imperium (originally the “right of command” or “authority” of individuals or states over others) are highly generic terms, which were used in ancient Rome and have been used ever since for a wide range of political entities.2 In early-modern Europe, the term “republic” generally referred to any kind of legitimate government, following the use of the term in Cicero, though at the same time, following Machiavelli, “republic” increasingly denoted a free state without a single ruler.3 “Empire”,

1 James Harrington, Political Works, ed. John Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 159–160, 446. 2 Cf. J.S. Richardson, “Imperium Romanum: Empire and the Language of Power,” The Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 1–9. 3 See James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38 (2010): 452–482.

Commonwealths for Preservation and Increase 63 meanwhile, generally stood for effective sovereignty, and only in the case of the Holy Roman Empire it was used to represent a concrete form of government.4 It might therefore be difficult to speak in any meaningful sense about early-modern “republican empires”, yet if we stick to the nowadays common terminology of non-monarchical states seeking to acquire large territories, one conclusion must be drawn: many republics in history were clearly imperialist, from ancient Rome to Harrington’s England under Cromwell, and from the French Revolutionary Republic to the contemporary Unites States of America. Modern scholarship on the history of political thought has accordingly paid the phenomenon of republican imperialism its due share. Following the tra- jectory set out by John Pocock, most of the attention in this context as well has gone to Renaissance Florence and seventeenth-century England, with Machiavelli and Harrington being the prototypical protagonists.5 It is striking, however, that very little attention has been drawn thus far to the two cases of early-modern commonwealths that actually proved to be (pace Harrington) both for preservation and for increase: Venice and the Dutch Republic. Indeed, whilst Machiavelli’s Florence and Harrington’s England soon failed in their republican and/or imperialist experiments, Venice and the Dutch Republic can serve as perhaps the best examples of the intricate relationship between non- monarchical and expansionist rule. Both republics originated as small territorial entities that for centuries maintained their independence amidst princely and monarchical competitors, and both acquired extensive colonial empires that resulted in prolonged periods of mercantile primacy.6 Yet until now we know very little about the ways in which early-modern Venetian and Dutch

4 James Muldoon, Empire and Order. The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (Basingstoke, 1999). 5 See esp. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); Armitage, “Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,” in Republicanism: a Shared Euro- pean Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), 2:29–46; J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Vol. 3: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge, 2003); and Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge, 2004). Cf. also Edward G. Andrew, Imperial Republics. Revolution, War, and Territorial Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution (Toronto, 2011), which does not live up to its title since it mainly focuses on monarchies. On imperial tendencies in early-modern political thought in general, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), and Sankar Muthu, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2012). 6 On the connected histories of Venice and the Dutch Republic, see the classic studies of Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: a Study of Seventeenth-Century Élites (London, 1974), and Eco Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen, 1980).