UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Masters of war: state, capital, and military enterprise in the Dutch cycle of accumulation (1600-1795) Brandon, P. Publication date 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Brandon, P. (2013). Masters of war: state, capital, and military enterprise in the Dutch cycle of accumulation (1600-1795). General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:25 Sep 2021 Chapter 5 The structural crisis of the federal-brokerage state The preceding chapters have shown that war did not lead to a transformation from brokerage practices to nationalization, but instead strengthened the federal-brokerage aspects of the Dutch Republican state. However, this tendency was reversed in dramatic fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. The crisis of the ancien régime also was the crisis of the particular state form that had accompanied the development of Dutch capitalism during the most successful part of its cycle of accumulation. No major area of the organization of warfare was left untouched by the revolutionary convulsions in which Dutch society was caught. But in contrast to France or Britain, where major attempts at financial and military reform preceded the age of revolutions and revolutionary war, it was the failure to implement such reforms that radicalized Dutch opposition movements. The current chapter is somewhat different than the three preceding it in that it will not examine the internal functioning of the institutions of the federal-brokerage state, but rather the way in which these institutions became subject to debate between reform-minded administrators and radical oppositionists. For readers familiar with the historiography of the late Republic it will not present a substantially new story, but it will provide a re-examination of familiar sources from a new angle: that of the interrelation between the development of the crisis of the old regime and the state form specific to the Dutch Republic. Thereby, this chapter completes the Gramscian theme introduced at the start of the book where the distinct structure of the early modern Dutch state was explained as the outcome of the historic bloc between a top layer of international merchants oriented on the 263 world market, and sections of the urban middle classes involved in highly localized systems of commodity production. Much time has passed since Huizinga could write that historians were ‘arrogant’ and ‘condescending’ about the eighteenth century. Few topics in early modern Dutch history have warranted so much attention among contemporary historians as the changes in political discourse during the last decades of the Republic. 1 Their contributions show how the second half of the eighteenth century saw a complete reshuffling of the terms of political debate. Long-established concepts such as Republicanism, the stadtholderate, federalism, aristocracy, and democracy all became defined, contested, and redefined in radically new ways. In the process the elements of consensus that had bound together conflicting sections of the Dutch ruling class and had formed an ideological basis for compromise on core issues of foreign, military, and economic policy dissipated. Latent contradictions between the seven provinces, between advocates and adversaries of the House of Orange, between regents and the urban lower classes, became the source for major crises. Three revolutionary moments marked the last fifty years of the ancien régime : the violent restoration of the stadtholderate of 1747, the failed Patriot Revolution of 1785-1787, and the Batavian Revolution of 1795-1798 that put an end to the old Republic. 2 None of them took place in isolation of international developments. Despite the fact that the eighty years after the Peace of Utrecht saw an almost complete reversal in the proportion of peace and war years compared to the eighty years that preceded it, each major crisis was connected to war. Mirroring the events of 1672 the failure of the stadtholderless regime to prepare effectively for French invasion in 1747 led to the widespread revolts that brought William IV to power. The Seven Years’ War between Britain and France (1757-1763), in which the Dutch Republic remained neutral, nevertheless brought to light the vulnerability of the Dutch empire to 1 The list is too long to enumerate. Some of the key contributions to the debate are C.H.E. de Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland, 1780-1848. Kritisch onderzoek van een historisch beeld en herwaardering van een periode (Heerlen 1965), I. Leonard Leeb, The ideological origins of the Batavian revolution. History and politics in the Dutch republic 1747-1800 (The Hague 1973), Simon Schama, Patriots and liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (New York 1977), E.H. Kossmann, ‘Volkssouvereiniteit aan het begin van het Nederlandse ancien régime ’, in: Idem, Politieke theorie en geschiedenis. Verspreide opstellen en voordrachten (Amsterdam 1987) 59-92, Idem, ‘Dutch republicanism’, in: ibid, 211-233, Wyger R.E. Velema, Enlightenment and conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The political thought of Elie Luzac (1721-1796) (Assen / Maastricht 1993), S.R.E. Klein, Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787) (Amsterdam 1995), N.C.F. van Sas, ‘De vaderlandse imperatief. Begripsverandering en politieke conjunctuur, 1763-1813’, in: Idem, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750-1900 (Amsterdam 2004) 97-128, Idem, ‘Talen van het vaderland. Over patriottisme en nationalisme’, in: ibid, 145-164, and Wyger R.E. Velema, Republicans. Essays on eighteenth-century Dutch political thought (Leiden / Boston 2007), from the motto of which Huizinga’s quotation is taken. 2 For a brief overview of events, see Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its rise, greatness, and fall 1477- 1806 (Oxford 1998) chapters 40-44. 264 especially British competition, leading to a sharp shift in political sympathies and connecting fears of Dutch economic decline to fierce Anglophobia. 3 The American Revolution inspired opposition against the stadtholderate, and the failure of the Dutch navy in the Fourth Anglo- Dutch War gave opposition its revolutionary edge. Counter-revolution could only be successful because of armed Prussian intervention in 1787, further tying the fate of the old order to international power relations. In 1795 French revolutionary armies gave the tottering regime its final push, sparking a native revolution that surpassed all preceding crises in thoroughness and radicalism. Focusing on the political process that finally resulted in the dismantling of the federal- brokerage state, this chapter will re-examine the main eighteenth-century contributions to the debate on the Dutch state form. It starts with tracing the development of reform ideologies from within the state itself (section 5.1), in order to then investigate the limits of these reform attempts in each of the areas of federal-brokerage organization that were examined in the previous chapters, as well as the rise of radical challenges outside the state. Section 5.2 examines the debates on merchant companies – mainly the VOC – as institutions for trade and warfare, section 5.3 the way in which the divisions between the five Admiralty Boards came to symbolize the defects of the existing state structure, and 5.4 the role of debates on the mercenary versus the citizens’ army in the radicalization of opposition movements between the failed Patriot Revolution of 1785-1787 and the Batavian Revolution of 1795. These sections will show that critique of the ancien régime and debates on the federal-brokerage state form became connected in complex ways. Rather than a linear transgression from the one to the other, a spectacular ‘reversal of positions’ took place in which the centralizing reformers of the existing state became the conservative defenders of the federal-brokerage state, and the ‘restorationist’ oppositionists became the radical modernizers of the post-1795 period. The final section examines the fate of the federal-brokerage state after the end of the Old Republic, and how its afterlife came to haunt the promulgators of a new order. 3 Niek van Sas, ‘Between the devil and the deep blue sea. The logic of neutrality’, in: Bob Moore and Henk van Nierop (eds), Colonical empires compared. Britain and the Netherlands, 1750-1850 (Aldershot/Burlington 2003) 33-46, and David Ormrod, The rise of commercial empires. England and the Netherlands in the age of Mercantilism, 1650-1770 (Cambridge 2003) 303-305. 265 5.1 The rise and limits of reform agendas The intensity of the crisis that overtook the Dutch state in the second half of the eighteenth century can only be understood against the background of the end of the Dutch cycle of accumulation. From the early eighteenth century onwards if not earlier it was clear to contemporaries that the Dutch Republic had lost much of its erstwhile dynamism. 4 The fall from its hegemonic position did not occur in the caricatured version popularized by eighteenth century oppositionists and long repeated in modern literature, in which the former dominant power of the world in one stroke became an impoverished state ruled by an incompetent and self-serving clique.