historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 7. The mistress of life
Private wealth was so important because it could be taxed. Equally important
was the actual process of accumulation itself, since the greatest source
of public income in the Dutch Republic were taxes raised on the sales of consumer
goods and real-estate, and import and export duties. Transactions benefitted
the commonwealth: the more goods were sold and the richer the Dutch
became, the more income the Dutch public authorities had. 185 And this income
was necessary to pay for the military forces that protected the Dutch Republic
against its enemies and safeguarded its independence. 186 Furthermore, in the
Nederlantsche historie Boxhorn had praised the overseas empire the Dutch had
recently acquired during their war with Spain, claiming that its riches provided
the means to fight Spain. 187 For Boxhorn empire, trade, and the accumulation
of private wealth formed the nucleus of the power of the Dutch Republic.
If, then, Boxhorn would have followed the classical Republican theory of
moral decline he would have stumbled upon what at first sight seems be a
historical paradox: the primary causes behind the fall of the Roman Republic,
namely the acquisition of a large empire and the influx of enormous amounts
of wealth, were the same causes behind the strength of the Dutch Republic.
It is maybe to avoid this apparent paradox that Boxhorn omitted the classical
Republican theory in his political dissertations on the fall of the Roman
Republic. But the possibility that this paradox was turned into a comparison
carried an even greater risk: if empire, trade, and wealth had led to the downfall
of the Roman Republic, could they not also lead to the downfall of the
Dutch Republic? That the early modern Dutch at times felt uncomfortable
about their economic success and feared that their ‘excessive good fortune’
could lead to their own demise has been argued before. 188 The main commercial
rivals of the Dutch, the English, who portrayed their Dutch adversaries
as sly, greedy, and egocentric tradesmen whose only motive was gain, constantly
reminded the Dutch that empire and trade might have brought them
economic success, but at the cost of their old virtues. 189 To these two points we
parandis, partisque augendis, nihil certè facilè huic Reipublicae est defuturum.’
185 This is especially true for the province of Holland that paid for almost 60% of the Republic’s
expenditure. In the 1630s two-third of all the tax income of the province of Holland consisted of excise
taxes (accijns). De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 96-113, esp. pp. 102-3.
186 In this context Boxhorn frequently refers to Tacitus’s famous sententia that ‘tribes cannot be kept quiet
without troops. You cannot have troops without pay; and you cannot raise pay without taxation’. Tacitus,
The Histories, IV.74.1-2, p. 223. See, for example, Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, I.9, pp. 132-33, and I.10, p. 156.
187 Boxhorn, Nederlantsche historie, p. 6.
188 See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden
Age (Harper Perennial; London, 1 st ed. 1987, 2004), p. 326.
189 Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen, pp. 116-31, and Conal Condren, “Beyond the Republic:
Capability and the Ethics of Office”, in Hartman, Nieuwstraten and Reinders (eds.), Public Offices,
Personal Demands, pp. 237-51.
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