The Dutch compared to their neighbours in terms of GNP

There is no doubt that in the mid-seventeenth century, at the height of the economic, political and cultural influence of the Dutch Republic, the Netherlands was a very wealthy and very prosperous country indeed. In the early modern period, the Dutch were an economic success-story, with clear water between themselves and other nations. However, what happened next? The conventional wisdom is that the Republic's economy became less dynamic after 1650–70, and the ageing but still standard work on the economy of the Republic in the eighteenth century, by Johan de Vries, is entitled The economic decline of the Republic. Something seems to have gone wrong: instead of moving on from such a promising start to further economic glories in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of industrialization, the Netherlands floundered. Instead of forming a modern capitalist economy, the Dutch failed to graduate to modern industrial society. The Dutch economy was branded a failure, then, in the modern period. The doyen of Dutch economic historians of the previous generation, Peter Klein, pronounced that Dutch income per capita had probably not risen at all between 1700 and 1860, and although this was little more than an informed guess in 1973, it represented the general view.