chapter 1 Origins and Formation of the ‘Tribunist’ Current (1900–14)

1 Religion, Capitalism and Colonial Empire: From the ‘Golden Age’ to the Decline

The Netherlands has been seen by some Marxists as the site of the first ‘bour- geois revolution’ in the sixteenth century. This revolution against ‘feudalism’ started with the insurrection of the Hondschoote weavers in 1566. Its outbreak was in fact the product of complex historical factors. The birth of the Netherlands as a union of seven provinces coincided with the Calvinist revolt against Spain and the Catholic Church. Riots (Beelden- storm) in which iconoclastic mobs destroyed images and statues in Catholic churches spread across the Low Countries. In reaction, Philip ii sent Spanish troops commanded by the Duke of Alva, which imposed a bloody reign of ter- ror. In 1568 began the Eighty Years’ War against Spain. During this conflict, the Prince of Orange William the Silent, as Stadtholder, played an important role as one of the leaders of the revolt for sixteen years. The war lasted until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. As the southern Catholic provinces reaffirmed their loy- alty to the Habsburg Empire, the Dutch northern provinces – Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Drenthe, Friesland and Groningen – avowed their determination to resist the absolutism of Philip ii, who refused to tolerate a Calvinist enclave in the Spanish Empire, not to mention a dangerous com- mercial rival on the oceans. In 1581, the Dutch provinces joined together in the Union of Utrecht (the name of an anti-Spanish alliance founded in 1579) and proclaimed their independence. When, in 1588, the English fleet, allied with the insurgents, destroyed the Spanish ‘Invincible Armada’, the Republic of the United Provinces was established. The Netherlands experienced their bourgeois golden age in the seventeenth century. Under their republican constitution (ruled by the De Witt brothers), the Netherlands seemed not only to be a strong motor of capitalist develop- ment, Amsterdam being the financial centre of Europe, but also a key centre of ‘Enlightened’ thought, under the banner of reason and religious tolerance. For example, Portuguese and Spanish Jews could settle in the country and practise their religion. The Dutch Republic made its first great strides in the shape of mercantile capital thanks to its far-away colonies, from South Africa to the West Indies

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004325937_003 12 chapter 1

(Brazil and North America), from Tasmania to Ceylon and Indonesia (the East Indies). The colonial companies were the jewels in the crown of Dutch capital: the West-India Company (West Indische Compagnie, or wic) and particularly the United East-India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or voc). The voc was created in 1602 as a joint-stock company, and it was granted a monopoly on trading ‘east of the Cape of Good Hope’. Led by a capitalist federal board of directors which became known as the Heeren xvii (‘the 17 Gentlemen’), the voc had the right to wage war and to conclude peace, and then to govern the territories that had become its trading-posts by force of arms. The eighteenth century, after the wars waged by the French king Louis xiv and the British commercial power, saw the decline of Dutch supremacy. The golden age of the United East-India Company in its exploitation of Indone- sia finished at the end of the eighteenth century. After the disastrous (Fourth) Anglo-Dutch War, the voc was pushed to bankruptcy. When the Netherlands were occupied by French troops in 1795 and the Batavian Republic was pro- claimed the new government abolished the voc. In 1796, the British troops completed their definitive conquest of Dutch Ceylon. The surviving voc ter- ritories, namely Indonesia, became the property of the Dutch state. The Batavian Republic survived until 1806, when Napoleon i transformed the seven provinces into the Kingdom of Holland, ruled by Louis Bonaparte. This was eventually incorporated into the French Empire in 1810. One year later, British troops occupied Java and its dependencies in the name of the British East-India Company. Nevertheless, after the fall of Napoleon and the 1815 Congress of Vienna, William Frederick of Orange became William i, King of the Netherlands (which included present-day Belgium and Luxembourg until 1830). Since the Netherlands had lost its Cape-Colony, Dutch authority over Java and its dependencies could be re-established. In 1824, the Netherlands-Commercial Company (Nederlandsche Handels Maatschappij, nhm) was established. King William i obtained, thanks to his own capital, a commercial monopoly over the exploitation of the colonies, most importantly Java. Mounting profits were accompanied by ‘indigenous’ revolts against forced labour and starvation: in Java, from 1825 to 1830, and in Sumatra until 1837. In 1830, the governor-general Van den Bosch introduced a régime of forced labour, the so-called ‘culture-system’ (cultuurstelsel), which required Javanese farmers to grow a certain number of crops for export (cof- fee, sugar, spices and indigo); these were sold exclusively through the nhm. Until 1870, the profits from this system of exploitation yielded large budget- surpluses for the Dutch state and an extra fortune for the King, who held shares in the nhm. State-capital drew enormous profits from the ‘culture-system’: 39