I’ve started to do some general reading about the history of the Netherlands. I’m particularly interested in learning about the emerging nation in the late 16th and early 17th century during a period when modernity, slavery, academia, and the prison co-existed.
I’m doing this because I’m in the early stages of a possible project on the late 16th century origins of Leiden’s prison. The Netherlands was a pioneer in creating a “house of correction” designed to terrify vagrants and other subverters of mercantile capitalism into industrious labor. Leiden was among the first Dutch cities to create a workhouse-prison, a model that was emulated throughout Europe, an early precursor of the 19th century penitentiary-as-factory. Dignitaries and writers from England, France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia came to take notes.
An internet search tells me that a good place to start is Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. First published in 1987, it was reprinted in 1997. No changes or preface to the 2nd edition, so I assume that a decade later the author is happy with his first effort. Schama is a biggie in the UK: a public, university-based intellectual who is popular via his BBC pop-history programs. His name trumps the title on the book’s cover.
From what I know of his work, I don’t like his culture-centric approach to “national character.” But I’m a learner reading this book for basic information, so I’ll try to put a hold on critique. At first, I succeed.
I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome. The first chapter describes in some detail Amsterdam’s Tughuis, also known as the Raspuis (Saw-House), where, from 1595, a regime of forced labor backed up by punishments of exquisite cruelty were carried out “in dead earnest.” (p. 19) Women were held in the Spinhuis where, from 1597, “vagrants, whores and thieves,” in Schama’s words, “were sent for stiff doses of improvement at loom and wheel.” The Spinhuis’ motto, etched in the entrance, expresses its catch-22 creed: “I exact no vengeance for wrong but force you to be good.” (p. 16)
Schama’s last chapter returns to the same theme with which he begins the book: describing how houses of correction were intended to “dissolve the stain of vagrancy” and turn the idle poor into productive workers. (p. 582) There’s also a coda on early 18th century campaigns against “unnatural practices” and “homosexual witchhunts.” (p. 605)
The rest of the book catalogues in exhausting and often amusing detail how the Netherland emerges as a nation, and the particularities of Dutchness: from the rise of a consuming bourgeoisie to marriage and family life, the arts, and everyday cultural habits. The opening and closing chapters on the harshness of prison regimes and moral panics about sexuality no doubt signal that the country’s 17th century embarrassment of riches came at a price, but Schama offers no insights about the significance or insignificance of the houses of correction to the country’s textile industry or to shaping a capitalist labor force or to constructing the boundaries of citizenship. Without analysis, the vivid descriptions of punishment, prostitution, and penal regimes have a titillating quality, the stuff of entertainment.
As for the material riches that Schama describes in prurient excess, one might expect a book written in 1987 and reprinted in 1997 to at least make a connection between Dutch involvement in the slave trade of some half a million black bodies from Africa to the Americas – an investment that began in the same decade as the Spinhuis – and, say, the “Dutch hankering for confections and delicacies,” with more than fifty sugar refineries operating in Amsterdam alone by the 1640s. (p. 165) But there’s nothing, not even rhetorical speculation.
Prostitution gets thirteen pages in The Embarrassment of Riches, but slavery, Africa, Brazil, and Suriname don’t even make it into the index. “Wonderfully inclusive” and “history on the grand scale” read blurbs on the back cover. “Extraordinarily exclusive” and “history with blinders” is more accurate.