Price - Dutch culture in the Golden Age

The cultural achievements of the Dutch Golden Age were extraordinary by any standards, but their context makes these achievements particularly intriguing, perhaps unlikely, and certainly unpredictable. Even the political turmoil and social upheavals which produced the Dutch state may also help to explain why its culture should have turned out to be so distinctive. The Dutch Republic was born in the course of the Revolt of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century and the subsequent Eighty Years War for independence from rule by Spain. However, the new state which emerged from this struggle was the unplanned result of what might be seen as its relative failure Spanish military strength brought the south of the Habsburg Netherlands back to obedience, leaving only a rather disparate group of provinces in the north to continue the struggle and achieve independence. Against all expectation this ill-assorted group of allies not only halted the Spanish advance but by 1609 had effectively created a new state, though one which both contemporaries and later historians have considered rather unusual if not bizarre in many respects.

There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the Dutch state and certainly its eventual borders were far from pre-determined. The separation of the southern provinces from the northern was largely a result of war, and of the Spanish armys ability to reconquer much of the south. Also, while the general shape of the new state was more or less established by the beginning of the seventeenth century, its definitive boundaries were uncertain until the final peace with Spain in 1648. The Dutch Republic had no natural geographical boundaries apart from the sea. In the east the frontier followed the line which had separated the Habsburg Netherlands from theneighbouring regions of the Holy Roman Empire on the eve of the Revolt, and this had been fixed by accidents of political history rather than by any natural barriers. Indeed, the northern Netherlands remained at least nominally a part of the empire until 1648. In the south the divide between the Republic and the Spanish Netherlands was in the end determined by military actions, with the Dutch state eventually managing to hold onto a strip of Flanders and the northern part of Brabant. There were also no very compelling historical links uniting the seven northern provinces which came to compose the core of the new state. Indeed, the eastern provinces had only been brought into the Habsburg Netherlands in the course of the early sixteenth century, Gelderland a bare twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolt. There was no pre-existing Dutch nation on which a state could be built, despite the assertions of later nationalist historians; rather the Dutch nation was the creation of the Dutch state and it took over two hundred years for a sense of national identity to prevail over provincial loyalties. There was, of course, a range of common elements which would prove sufficient in the long run to provide the foundations of a sense of a common identity for these rather disparate provinces. They had more or less a common language, though again standard Dutch was a seventeenth-century creation and the Fries language was also common in the northern-most regions, and all were clearly part of a broader Netherlands cultural area. However, it should be remembered that, on the eve of the Revolt, Holland and Zeeland were probably closer culturally to Flanders and Brabant than they were to the eastern provinces of the future Republic. Similarly, the sharp economic and social disparities between the most advanced provinces Holland in particular and the rest were already becoming apparent before the Revolt, though they were not yet as marked as they were to become in the course of the seventeenth century.