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foreign currencies and of minting coins of fixed weight and value and of allowing checks to be drawn on the Bank to provide credit and loans and of assuring the reliability of deposit, the Bank soon attracted a flow of money from every country, while its florins became the most desired currency. The regular listing of prices on the stock market printed and distributed by the Bank was an innovation for which the world may—or may not—thank Amsterdam.
    In 1648, when the Dutch gained independence from Spain, they had risen to riches and power despite the energies absorbed in the prolonged revolt and the damages suffered to war-torn countryside and cities and the impoverishment caused by expenditure on arms and armies and by the emigration of so many men of substance. Through extraordinary enterprise and force of necessity and confidence gained in their ordeal, they had expanded their commerce and shipping until they had more than half the trade of Europe in their hands, and had access to ports on every foreign shore from the East Indies to Africa, from Brazil to the Caribbean and to New Amsterdam in North America. In the Ottoman Empire they had a concession to trade throughout Turkish dominions given by the Turks as a slap at Spain, which had beaten them at the Battle of Lepanto. More than three-quarters of the world’s carrying trade in timber and grain from the Baltic, salt from France, fabrics from their own cities, spices from the East and sugar from the West Indieswas shipped in Dutch bottoms. By the time of independence in 1648, they were, according to historians’ estimate, the greatest trading nation in the world. They were said to have10,000 ships at sea, carrying an international traffic estimated at a thousand million francs a year, a figure doubtless exaggerated by foreign mariners to shame their own governments into stronger competition.
    Around 1634, eight years after they bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians, the Dutch entered the Caribbean with the capture of St. Eustatius and St. Maarten and of Curaçao and Surinam on the Spanish Main. Sugar was a treasure greater than the spices, attracting the eager predators of every nation. The sudden delight of sweetening on the tongue as a regular article of diet and sweetener of other foods raised high the real-estate value of the West Indies. Nations came rushing, each to seize the coveted prize of an island where the tall canes grew. Planters became rich. In later years, William Pitt, as Prime Minister, saw, when driving through Weymouth, a planter’s carriage with horses and fittings handsomer than his own. “Sugar, eh? All
that
from sugar!” Pitt exclaimed on being told the owner was a West Indian planter.
    The heavy canes had to be cut, carted to mills, subjected to double and treble sets of rollers—worked, of course, by hand—to extract the juice, which was transferred to boilers for reduction to crystals, refined through several boilings for whitening and packed in molds to shape the loaves, or left dark for the unrefined product, then finally shipped to waiting markets. Because the local Caribs of the region sickened and died in the labor of the plantations, sturdier black labor was brought from Africa, forming in itself the lucrative slave trade.
    In the midst of their extraordinary maritime and business enterprise, the Dutch were engaged in an upheaval against the rule of Spain, causing, it might be thought, one or the other, either economic expansion or revolutionary energy, to have weakened the other. Instead, both developments moved ahead parallel with one another.
    The Revolt of the Netherlands was not a movement of national sentiment, which hardly existed, nor of political ideology. Although the issue partook initially of the 16th century’s general conflict of Protestant versus Catholic erupting out of the breakaway of the reformed church from Rome, the motivating sentiment in the Netherlands was hatred of Spanish tyranny. Forces and