Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom

Author:Philipp Blom [Blom, Philipp]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

VIRTUE IN THE DROWNING CELL

Life in Amsterdam offers a perfect example of this pitiless dynamic, partly because its approach to the world seemed to be justified by its breathtaking success as the city expanded so rapidly, bursting with people and money, with self-confidence, possibility, innovation, and new wealth.

In a dizzying two generations, Amsterdam had grown from a provincial backwater to one of the centers of global trade and also of intellectual daring. Having laid the foundation of its stunning wealth by trading in Baltic grain, the merchant patricians of Amsterdam had soon conquered huge territories overseas in a campaign of militarized trading. This strategy proved successful beyond their wildest dreams, and it demonstrated the power of the new model of economic growth based on exploitation.

Trade with the Baltic seaports was particularly successful because the grain had been cultivated by serfs who received little or no payment, much like the indigenous plantation workers, slaves, and prisoners tending the fields and working in factories in Indonesia, Guyana, and Surinam, producing pepper, nutmeg, indigo, tea, coffee, tobacco, and other luxury items. The work of these unpaid or barely paid people underwrote palaces and cathedrals, parliaments and courthouses, theaters and universities, and armed forces, including those employed to force them to keep working.

Without apparent irony, Amsterdam’s Protestant city fathers insisted that only an industrious life could be pleasing in God’s eyes. Far from admiring the nobility in other, court-centered countries, the burghers despised aristocrats for their unproductive laziness. This attitude toward work as a good in itself was quite new in Europe, where not having to work had long been seen as a sign of wealth, or even nobility. In the new Protestant merchant cities, however, there was no place for idlers.

For those of the poor who were considered unacceptably idle, Amsterdam had its own special institution: the Rasphuis (literally: sawing house), a place symptomatic of the mentality of the growing city and its thrusting self-regard. The Rasphuis was a special kind of prison: half reform school, where indolent young men were taught the value and necessity of hard work, and half repository for lazy individuals too old to be reeducated. All inmates had to work to earn their keep. In a special workshop, they ground tropical woods to dust that would be used for dyeing fabrics. They were paid, but idling and other infractions were punished by a range of sanctions that included canings in front of a paying public, townspeople who looked on to satisfy their curiosity, and no doubt, too, to reinforce their own determination to keep doing an honest day’s work.

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