Dutch Golden Age
▶ Explore on the mapThe Dutch Golden Age spans roughly from the achievement of independence in 1588 to the disaster of 1672, when the Franco-Dutch War ended the republic's dominance. In those decades the Dutch Republic, a small union of provinces with few natural resources, led the world in trade, science and art. The republic's wealth rested on a merchant class that accepted risk and shared it through joint-stock companies. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, combined shipping, warfare and state-building, capturing the Portuguese spice trade in Asia and founding New Amsterdam on the Hudson. Ships from Amsterdam carried grain from the Baltic, salt from France and fish to the whole of northern Europe, while the port handled goods from Brazil, West Africa and Japan; the Amsterdam exchange and bank gave merchants credit. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and Ruisdael painted portraits, interiors and landscapes for a wealthy urban public, and Spinoza, Leeuwenhoek and Huygens worked in a republic that printed more books than any other. Tolerance drew refugees such as the Sephardic Jews and French Huguenots, though the Remonstrants were silenced at the Synod of Dort. The costs of war, the closing of the English market after 1651 and the year of disaster in 1672 brought the era to an end.