Amsterdam prospered as A banking center even when it decreased as a manufacturing and trade center. At the end of the 18th century, Europe no longer wanted Dutch fabrics or Dutch fish, and no longer needed Dutch ships. In 1783, a group of Dutch merchants sent a gift from salty sand to George Washington, requesting their support and, presumable, looking for a new market. Washington replied that the herring was “undoubtedly a taller than its own taste,” but that the United States had many fish. What remained in demand was all the money that the Dutch had earned from trade. The merchants and princes of Europe went to Amsterdam to negotiate loans. The following year, 1784, the incipient US government joined them, borrowing 2 million florines.
But prosperity concentrated more and more in the hands of an elite. Amsterdam, and their satellites, no longer needed so many workers. The population of Holland Real shrunk in the 18th century, even as much of Europe experienced a population boom.
Moreover, Amsterdam’s preeminence as a financial center did not survive for a long time at the end of his hegemony as the European trade center. In the apogee of the city as a commercial port, financial currencies were shook. The trade was the main event; Only the indelible show of the Tulipan bubble in the 1630s was just a secondary show. But as the city’s economy became more dependent on finance, it becomes more vulnerable. A historian has calculated that by 1782, half or the capital of Amsterdam had lent foreigners. Instead of financing its own development, Amsterdam opted for other countries, and began to lose many of those bets. A culminating blow occurred in August 1788, when the French government of King Louis XVI, on the verge of collapse, did not become its Betts. As Amsterdam’s economic power decreased, so did his political autonomy. Duration The last two decades of the 18th century, the Dutch state descended to the civil struggle and suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the British and the French. In 1810, Napoleon attached Holland to his empire.
Braudel focused on the long execution of the story precisely because he hears because to make too much pain or short -term setbacks. It was an approach that said he developed for Mintain his duration of equanimity in the five years that he spent in German camps in prisoners of war, World War II, refusing to do too much of “daily misery” or the last remains of news. And in his opinion, what was more significantly about Amsterdam’s life after hegemony was not turbulence immediately after, but the long -term resistance of the Dutch economy. Amsterdam never fell so far, and what Braudel wrote remains true in 1979: “It is still today one of the high highs of world capitalism.”
The arch of the history of London is very similar. It is not a city that someone thinks sorry. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands have many problems, of course, but each one remains among the most prosperous nations of the earth. However, it is important to keep in mind that Amsterdam was lucky to give its supremacy to a city and a nation, which shared many of its basic values. In fact, Braudel notes that Amsterdam lost his supremacy in part because some of the richest Dutch merchants preferred to live in London, a Protestant capitalist city considered as funnier. London, in turn, gave in to a city and society that even shared his language.
