During much of the seventeenth century the Dutch dominated European and indeed world trade. The Dutch guilder was the dollar of the seventeenth century, a currency accepted around the globe. During that same period, the Dutch army and navy were much-feared combatants. Scientists working in the Dutch Republic were prominent participants in the Scientific Revolution. Dutch artists from this period, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, are household names even today. The history of the Dutch Golden Age is therefore of much more than local importance.

That history is often told in terms of exceptionalism; the Dutch were the odd man out in early modern Europe. Many historians have analyzed this Dutch exceptionalism in terms of modernity. The trouble, of course, is that “modernity” is such an all-embracing and therefore slippery concept. Nonetheless, the concept can be used, if it is disaggregated, if precise benchmarks are applied, and if a comparative perspective is used. This chapter will do exactly that. Rather than assuming beforehand that a society will modernize across-the-board, it will look at a variety of aspects: the economy, social developments, political structures, religious identities, and science, to see what – if anything – was modern about the Dutch Golden Age.

The First Modern Economy

Perhaps the most straightforward indicator of the modernity of any pre-modern economy is the distribution of its workforce. Traditional economies are characterized by high percentages of their populations working in agriculture; higher numbers in non-agricultural sectors such as industry and trade, are a sign of economic modernization. Table 1 clearly shows how substantial numbers of the Dutch workforce had moved to the towns and in the process exchanged their rural jobs for urban ones. This process, which already started during the Middle Ages, was at the same time cause and consequence of the Golden Age.

Estimates for various European economies between 1500 and 1800 suggest that the normal situation was one of stagnation. The Dutch economy, however, went through a spectacular phase of growth between circa 1580 and 1650; national income per capita increased by about 50 percent. All sectors of the economy – in Holland the economy grew by more than 1 percent per annum – contributed to these growth figures, albeit some more than others.