The Dutch Republic. Laboratory of the Scientific Revolution

Historians agree about the significance of the Scientific Revolution for the development of modern society; there is little agreement, however, as to the nature and the causes of this major shift in our perception of the natural world. In this article, it is argued that we may profit from studying this problem in the context of the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century, the Republic being in many ways a laboratory of modern life. In this article, three factors often mentioned as contributing to the new scientific themes are explored in the Dutch context. The first factor dealt with is the mingling of scholars and craftsmen; the second the role of the universities as centers of both teaching and research, and the third the congruence of scientific and mercantile values in the early modern Dutch trading communities. Historians have often portrayed the Dutch Republic as the first ‘bourgeois’ society. What they had in mind was an early example of a society dominated by the sort of middle class that emerged in most other European countries after the French and Industrial Revolutions. In this article, ‘bourgeois’ is perceived in a slightly different way. By looking at the ‘bourgeois’ as ‘citizens’ – often, but not necessarily, middle class in a social sense – the article paints a picture of a plethora of blossoming urban civic institutions. Such civic institutions also existed in other European countries. What set the Dutch Republic apart, however, and indeed made it an early example of a ‘bourgeois’ society, was the dominance of these civic institutions in the Republic’s socio-political life.


Introduction
While the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is widely acknowledged as one of the decisive transformations in world history, few historians of science would dare state this really was a revolution; or even that it was a revolution in science. The historical importance of the radical shift in our view of the natural world that occurred in the early modern period is not in dispute: but everything else is. The more we know about the Scientific Revolution, the less we feel sure that there really was a single movement in intellectual history that can be labelled as such. 1 The easiest way out would of be to stop using the term altogether. But this would not solve the problem: we would still face the need to analyse and explain the fundamental changes in the perception of the natural world in the early modern period. A better way to address the problem is to study these changes within a geographically restricted or 'national' context. Within the context of a specific cultural or political and institutional region, the 'span of control' is simply smaller than in Europe as a whole (assuming that the 'Scientific Revolution' was a European event). Knowledge is always produced locally and initially bears the stamp of its place of origin. Then gradually, on travelling to other places, this knowledge is stripped of its local peculiarities and is transformed into something universally valid, as it becomes set in mathematical formulae or is otherwise formalized. So restricting a study into the causes and the nature of the Scientific Revolution to a specific region is in full accordance with the way knowledge is generated. This restricted area is then treated as if it were some sort of laboratory, where developments can be studied that would otherwise escape our attention or that otherwise are too complicated to approach directly. I would like to outline here why it would be helpful to look at the seventeenth century Dutch Republic as such a laboratory of science. philosophers. 3 Mathematical practitioners and natural philosophers working in the footsteps of Simon Stevin were not so much occupied with articulating new theories, as with shaping new practices. Even Christiaan Huygens was above all a problem-solver rather than a natural philosopher with far-reaching ideas about the constitution of the natural world. However, now that science has come to be studied as a cultural activity -not just a set of theories, but also a set of practices -the Dutch tradition is no longer a sideshow phenomenon.
Because the historian's traditional bias for theory against practice has more or less disappeared, science as practised in the Dutch Republic can reclaim its rightful place in the history of science. The words and deeds of Dutch influence on the affairs in the Netherlands, but much of this influence was informal and indirect. Foreigners therefore often had difficulty figuring out who was really in charge in the Dutch Republic.
In religious affairs, the situation was as least as complicated. The Dutch Reformed church was not the state church, yet for many official positions adherence to the Reformed creed was essential. The Reformed church was regarded as the 'public church', protected and favoured by the state, but it had no monopoly. Unofficially, dissenting Protestants and even Catholics were allowed to practise their religion as long as they submitted to the secular authorities and did not give offence to the Reformed church.
In Article 13 of the Union of Utrecht, a defensive treaty of some provinces and cities concluded in 1579 and gradually seen as the constitution of the Republic, stipulated that people in the Dutch Republic would have freedom of conscience. This did not imply freedom to practice each and every religion, although in everyday life minorities had substantial freedom to practice their beliefs. They may sometimes have had to bribe the local authorities in order to be allowed to continue their worship, but most of the time these same authorities turned a deaf ear to Reformed preachers who railed against Catholics, Jews, Socinians or 'atheists'. Dissenting voices were tolerated: not out of principle, but simply on the very pragmatic grounds that civil order was best guaranteed by a policy of bending and accommodating. Likewise, freedom of the press was considerable. The provincial assemblies or city councils might issue a ban on certain books or pamphlets, but in practice hardly any measures were then taken to ensure that the prohibited books were really taken out of circulation. Moreover, there were several ways in which authors and printers could get around a ban, as long as they made sure not to endanger the social order. They knew that, in the end, the regents were much more worried about preserving this social order (an essentially secular concept) than in maintaining any True Faith.
No less confusing, at least for foreigners, was the social fabric of the country. The Dutch Republic was first and foremost a burgher society, where wealthy merchants dominated politics and social life. Of course, the nobility, though reduced in size and political power owing to the Revolt, had not been marginalized, and retained substantial influence. In the inland provinces, they were sometimes even in the majority in the provincial assemblies, and even in Holland -where there was only one vote for the nobility as against In the first half of the century, social mobility was high and it was only in the second half of the century that the wealthiest merchants and regents started to close ranks against newcomers. And even then, they never completely repudiated the norms and values that had inspired their ilk in the early days of the Republic. Manual work was never denunciated, as it was in more aristocratic societies, and ostentation was always something to be treated with caution. There is more than one story about foreigners who could not believe that a group of people dressed in simple black cloths and eating bread by the side of the road were actually the members of the States General, supposedly directing the affairs of this country.

The role of craft knowledge
What questions can we then profitably ask about the nature of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, in the context of the Dutch laboratory?  By 1650, the Dutch Republic had a well-developed university system.
All of these universities, however, were young and surprisingly modern.
The University of Leiden was only founded in 1575, and the province of  It is only during the second half of the seventeenth century that the fruitful interaction between the universities and the new science became less intense. In Leiden, this trend is partly disguised by the fact that, in 1675, the professor of mathematics Burchardus de Volder was allowed to teach experimental philosophy in his newly constructed laboratory. A few decades later, professor of medicine Hermann Boerhaave and his colleague in philosophy and mathematics Willem Jacob 's Gravesande acquired an international reputation for their efforts to disseminate Newtonian science all over Europe. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, however, practically nothing was done that deserves our attention, and even at Leiden involvement with the latest developments in science was mainly pedagogical, whereas in the first half of the century pedagogy and research had been more interwoven. This relative decline in scientific endeavour -if it is permissible to phrase it this way -partly reflects the general downward trend in the Dutch universities, at least as far as the enrolment of foreign students is concerned (which in itself was caused by the new stability in the countries of Central Europe). It also reflects -and this may be more significant -the rise of a new alternative for the universities as centres of scientific research -the scientific society.
Soon after the establishment of the Royal Society in London (1662) and the Académie des Sciences in Paris (1666) We can therefore conclude that a study of the universities in the Dutch Republic confirms that universities played a major role in the development of the new science, at least during the first phase of the Scientific Revolution.
Dutch universities differed in some respects from universities elsewhere.
Their remarkable openness to new developments, the importance given More interesting questions arise however as soon as we attempt to establish how exactly science and commerce are related. Did commerce favour particular scientific concepts, or did it generate a particular way of thinking that encouraged some sort of research while making other means of inquiry less attractive? There is indeed a long tradition in the historiography of early modern science that claims that commerce and industry were instrumental in producing the kind of science we associate with the Scientific Revolution.
As early as the 1930s, Soviet historian of science Boris Hessen shocked his colleagues by stating that the mathematical physics of Newton's Principia was a direct reflection of the capitalist mentality of the British ruling classes. 25 Not much credit was given to this claim, and nor was this the case with other variations on this crude historical materialism. Yet the idea that somehow the mentality of the commercial elite in early modern Europe shaped the basic outlook of the protagonists of the new science of the seventeenth century has proven too attractive to dismiss completely. Shifting the attention to the experimental method as the hallmark of modern science, Paolo Rossi This is a connection that is hard to deny. Commerce not only thrives on capital, but also on information; on knowledge that is at once reliable and useful. This information as such is not yet science, but it certainly is an important ingredient of this, and in disciplines such as botany and geography, information counted for much more than theories or hypotheses. concern was to know about individual plants, animals and objects, rather than understand the first principles on which the world is based. For them, science was first and foremost a matter of knowing facts, rather than causes. The new science, so Cook claims, was chiefly descriptive, rather than analytical; it was based on experience, accurate descriptions and broad observations: precisely the intellectual values that flourished in merchant circles and among those connected with their world, and even among court officials and kings who strove to promote the material welfare of their countries.
The affinity between the worlds of trade and science went even further.
The vast supply of new and fascinating objects from all over the world fuelled certain passions that previously had had an inferior, or even dubious, status.
In the new world of constantly novel commodities, curiosity and the desire for collecting things acquired a positive value, thereby elevating the passions in general to a status they had formerly lacked. Commerce taught that people were not driven by reason, but by passion, and the same applied to science.
Reasoning as such was insufficient for learning about the world; knowledge also relied on passion and desire: for instance the desire to collect and to possess. This gave the new science an inherently materialistic -or at least nonmetaphysical -quality.
If the link between commerce and science is going to be evident anywhere then, it will have to be in the Dutch Republic. the international relevance of dutch history The tulip was imported into the Netherlands from Turkey in the sixteenth century. During the course of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was gripped by a veritable rage: the tulip craze or tulip mania, which gave rise to an incredible wave of financial speculation on tulip bulbs: the bulbs were sold (on) before they had been received by the trader and an exclusive bulb could fetch as much as a canal-side house in Amsterdam.
After 1637 the tulip trade collapsed, seriously harming many buyers and sellers. Tulips remained popular, however, and even went on to become a national symbol of the Netherlands.
Jacob Marrel, Two Tulips, a Shell, a Butterfly and a Dragonfly, 1639.
BMGN.Opmaak.Special.indd 104 05-07-10 08:55 Secondly, I mean barriers in the social sense. The Dutch Republic was unique for the absence of the chasm that separated those who worked with their hands (the craftsmen) from those who worked with their minds (the scholars). In medieval Europe, these two groups possessed vastly different social status and maintained separate educational structures. The former could liken themselves to the aristocracy, the latter were usually seen as not much more than simple technicians. In Holland, however, this social divide had never been particularly prominent. Guilds were a relatively new phenomenon in the Dutch Republic, and certainly did not have the same power as in other countries. Therefore the Dutch Republic around 1600 was a perfect place for groups to mingle and learn from each other. Elsewhere, the new capitalist economy was breaking through the old divides just as well; almost everywhere in Western Europe, the society of orders was beginning to fragment under the pressure of new concepts of status and new forms of wealth. Yet the Dutch Republic was far ahead of the pack, and therefore offered an especially fertile ground for groups in between the scholars and the craftsmen, who disregarded the boundaries set by the old established groups.
Finally, I believe that the Dutch case is characterized by a lack of intellectual barriers. The institutional setting of the Scientific Revolution in the Dutch Republic was far from rigid. The university attracted students from many different countries and from surprisingly different social backgrounds. Ages. 2 Huizinga's interpretation was rooted in a discourse on the Dutch national character that first emerged in the late eighteenth century, but came into full