Satellite image of the Noordoostpolder. Wikicommons. NASA"s World Wind. Some rights rserved.In his seminal interpretation of Dutch culture in its Golden Age, entitled The Embarrassment of Riches, the British historian Simon Schama characterizes The Netherlands in the seventeenth century as a ‘confederacy of towns and provinces’, which, as a state, ‘drew power from federalism when absolutist centralization was the norm.’ And whereas the great powers of that era – Spain, France, Britain – had ‘broken apart in domestic upheavals’, the Dutch had been ‘ingenious at sustaining the minimal consensus needed to contain discord well within the bounds of civil war.’
This puzzled contemporary foreign observers, who dismissed Dutch federalism as governmental ‘chaos’, but who also gnashed their teeth seeing that, in spite of this chaos, the Dutch enjoyed far greater wealth and prosperity than they themselves did. They could understand, and therefore accept to some extent, that this affluence was the result of Dutch business acumen. But that the dexterity of the Dutch traders could thrive so exceptionally well in a political system that, from their point of view, verged on anarchy was completely incomprehensible to them.
