A revolta holandesa foi a primeira revolução burguesa da Europa.

No final do século XVI, os Países Baixos revoltaram-se contra o domínio espanhol numa luta que durou décadas e que deu origem à República Holandesa. Embora a faísca inicial da revolta tenha sido religiosa, ela ajudou a pavimentar o caminho para a ascensão do capitalismo.

Entrevista com

Pepijn Brandon

Jacobin

Antonis Aloisius Emanuël van Bedaff (1787–1829), A recepção de Guilherme de Orange e dos mendigos do mar pelo prefeito Van der Werf e pelo conselho municipal de Leiden, após o Cerco de Leiden em 1574.

Entrevista por

Daniel Finn

A Revolta Holandesa do século XVI derrotou a monarquia espanhola, a grande superpotência europeia da época. Embora talvez não seja tão lembrada quanto a Guerra Civil Inglesa ou a Revolução Francesa, foi um momento decisivo na história da Europa moderna.

Criou a República Holandesa, o estado mais agressivamente comercial da Europa durante o século XVII, e ajudou a moldar o desenvolvimento do capitalismo europeu. Mas também havia outras correntes em jogo na luta contra o domínio espanhol, à medida que as classes populares se mobilizavam e impulsionavam a revolta, desempenhando um papel crucial em seu sucesso.

Pepijn Brandon, professor de história econômica e social global na Universidade Livre de Amsterdã e autor de Guerra, Capital e o Estado Holandês (1588-1795), conversou com a Jacobin sobre a Revolta Holandesa.

Esta é uma transcrição editada de uma entrevista do podcast Long Reads. Você pode ouvir a entrevista em duas partes aqui e aqui.

Daniel Finn

Qual era o contexto social e o sistema de governo político nos Países Baixos durante o período que antecedeu a Revolta Holandesa?

Pepijn Brandon

Estamos falando de uma revolta que ocorreu na segunda metade do século XVI. Ela abrangeu uma área chamada Países Baixos, composta por dezessete províncias diferentes, cada uma com seus próprios sistemas sociais e de governo político. Era dividida em dois territórios: os Países Baixos do Norte, que coincidiam mais ou menos com o que hoje é a Holanda, e os Países Baixos do Sul, que coincidiam mais ou menos com a Bélgica moderna.

Essa revolta se desenvolveu ao longo de várias décadas. Começou como uma revolta clássica e terminou mais na forma de uma guerra convencional, que levou à formação de um estado independente nas províncias do norte, que se tornou a República Holandesa, enquanto a revolta nos Países Baixos do Sul foi derrotada e essa área permaneceu parte do Império Habsburgo.

Essas dezessete províncias só haviam sido unificadas sob o domínio dos Habsburgos na década de 1540. Elas eram, em muitos aspectos, uma parte essencial das ambições imperiais da monarquia Habsburga, embora o núcleo do império fosse a Península Ibérica. Esta era a área mais urbanizada da Europa do século XVI. Essas províncias, ou pelo menos as costeiras, eram extremamente voltadas para o comércio e muito ricas.

Para um estado absolutista como a monarquia Habsburga, que tinha ambições imperiais enormes e estava envolvido em guerras contínuas por toda a Europa, a receita tributária dessas províncias comerciais era fundamental. Os Habsburgos experimentaram várias maneiras de obter um controle político mais firme sobre as províncias, o que facilitaria a cobrança de impostos. Eles também queriam evitar o tipo de turbulência que então se espalhava pela Europa, em parte religiosa e em parte política, com rebeliões locais que buscavam estabelecer novos estados, muitas vezes se cruzando com a Reforma Protestante.

A Revolta Holandesa começou como uma revolta clássica e terminou mais na forma de uma guerra convencional, que levou à formação de um estado independente.

Antuérpia, a cidade comercial mais importante do sul dos Países Baixos, tinha cem mil habitantes, o que a tornava uma cidade muito grande para o século XVI. Era um centro para o comércio europeu, bem como para importantes rotas comerciais fora da Europa, especialmente no Atlântico. Para dar apenas um exemplo, Antuérpia tornou-se o principal centro do comércio europeu de açúcar no século XVI, distribuindo o açúcar produzido nas plantações portuguesas no Brasil.

Esse papel econômico conferiu a essas províncias enorme importância, mas também lhes deu um senso de autoestima que levou ao surgimento de vários movimentos de oposição que buscavam fortalecer a autonomia local das elites holandesas. Isso criou uma mistura explosiva, especialmente quando se cruzou com a ascensão de movimentos religiosos de oposição.

Essa situação chegou ao auge na década de 1560. Primeiro, surgiram extensas fissuras dentro do aparato estatal, com oposições se formando tanto entre a alta quanto a baixa nobreza, frequentemente com apoio substancial das ricas elites mercantis urbanas. Essas fissuras então se transformaram em rupturas completas quando pessoas das classes mais baixas aproveitaram a oportunidade para reivindicar seus próprios direitos — especialmente o fim da perseguição religiosa.

Daniel Finn

É justo dizer que a revolta foi motivada principalmente pela religião, pelo menos em seus estágios iniciais?

Pepijn Brandon

Em certo sentido, sim, e em certo sentido, não. Este tem sido um ponto de controvérsia desde a época da própria revolta: se foi uma revolta primordialmente religiosa ou uma revolta pela independência política. Houve debates acirrados sobre essa questão até os dias atuais.

A historiografia holandesa tradicional tem sido classicamente dividida em duas correntes, que estavam ligadas a duas narrativas principais que a nação contou sobre si mesma desde o século XIX. Uma versão conservadora da historiografia afirmava que esta foi uma revolta religiosa. Esse era o ponto de vista dos historiadores protestantes.

Por outro lado, havia historiadores que eram frequentemente igualmente conservadores e nacionalistas, mas que diziam: "não, o principal motor foi a liberdade". "Liberdade", nesse sentido, tem um aspecto complexo, de duas faces. Quando as pessoas do século XVI se referiam à liberdade, queriam dizer autonomia ou algo muito particularista. Eles se referiam às “nossas antigas liberdades” — os privilégios de uma cidade que lhe garantiam certas liberdades contra a nobreza ou contra um monarca. Esse foi, sem dúvida, um elemento importante na revolta.

Contudo, liberdade também pode significar a liberdade da nação contra uma potência estrangeira — neste caso, a Espanha. Essa se tornou uma perspectiva muito importante para os nacionalistas do século XIX, que afirmavam: “aqui está uma revolta travada pela liberdade que é a base da nossa nação”. Mas, no início da revolta, ninguém esperava que o resultado fosse uma nação independente, e ninguém definiria liberdade nesse sentido. Interpretar o termo “liberdade” como sinônimo de independência nacional é um anacronismo.

Apenas um punhado de historiadores radicais da Revolta Holandesa, à semelhança de grande parte da historiografia marxista do século XX, afirmaram que o principal motor foi econômico. Argumentaram que a revolta eclodiu como uma revolta das classes mais baixas, impulsionada pelos altos preços dos grãos e pela fome aguda. Essa foi a tese de Erich Kuttner, um refugiado judeu alemão na Holanda que escreveu um livro intitulado "Ano da Fome de 1566" enquanto se escondia dos nazistas.

O livro foi publicado postumamente porque Kuttner foi capturado pelos nazistas e assassinado no campo de concentração de Mauthausen. Ele apresentou um argumento sólido de que razões econômicas, principalmente a pobreza urbana, foram o que levou à eclosão da revolta. Essa interpretação gerou muita discussão, incluindo ataques virulentos a Kuttner. Embora marginal, continua a influenciar o pensamento sobre a revolta.

A eclosão da revolta não pode ser vista isoladamente da intervenção das classes mais baixas na vida política.

Na minha opinião, a eclosão da revolta não pode ser vista isoladamente da intervenção das classes mais baixas na vida política, e a religião foi um fator muito importante para essa intervenção, assim como as circunstâncias materiais. A tese de Kuttner ainda tem muito valor, mas ele representava uma abordagem bastante mecanicista-materialista da política da rebelião, que era prevalente entre os historiadores marxistas na década de 1930.

A abordagem mecanicista propunha uma oposição nítida entre as motivações ideais, que eram religiosas, e as motivações reais, que eram econômicas e relacionadas aos preços dos grãos e à fome. Esse tipo de análise tende a desmaterializar o papel da Igreja na política do século XVI. Um ataque à Igreja não era um motivo puramente teórico ou idealista, algo indefinido, por assim dizer — era um ataque a uma das principais estruturas de poder por trás do Estado do século XVI.

De muitas maneiras, a Igreja era a estrutura de poder com a qual as pessoas se deparavam mais diretamente em seu cotidiano. Elas tinham que se ajoelhar diante de um padre todos os domingos. Isso era um fato concreto, algo que impactava diretamente a vida das pessoas. A Igreja Católica era uma instituição incrivelmente rica, e grande parte da raiva expressa em panfletos populares e nos discursos de pessoas que participaram da rebelião e foram levadas a julgamento era direcionada contra a riqueza da Igreja e seu materialismo grosseiro.

É nesse ponto que um levante contra a desigualdade pode se ligar a motivações religiosas profundamente sentidas. Estamos falando de uma revolta que passou por várias fases. A primeira fase foi uma onda de fúria iconoclasta que eclodiu em 1566 e continuou em 1567. As igrejas católicas eram adornadas com estátuas de santos, imagens de Cristo, etc. A religião protestante se voltou contra isso, e pessoas, em sua maioria das classes mais baixas, começaram a invadir igrejas e a destruir as imagens.

Essa rebelião já vinha crescendo na forma de resistência cotidiana em pequena escala muito antes dessa fúria iconoclasta eclodir. Realizei uma extensa pesquisa sobre os estágios imediatamente anteriores à revolta na cidade têxtil de Leiden, no norte da Holanda. Uma das descobertas mais fascinantes que fiz foi o fenômeno generalizado de pessoas se levantando nas igrejas, caminhando até a frente, pegando a hóstia do padre, jogando-a no chão e pisoteando-a, gritando: “Se este é o seu Deus, por que ele não intervém?”.

De muitas maneiras, a Igreja era a estrutura de poder com a qual as pessoas se deparavam mais diretamente em seu cotidiano.

A crítica à prática católica da hóstia fazia parte do ataque contra a ideia de uma Igreja materialista que pressupunha a presença de Deus nos objetos e nas riquezas terrenas. Isso ocorria em um contexto no qual a Igreja Católica estava onipresente e pessoas eram queimadas na fogueira por resistirem a ela. Nesse contexto, tratava-se de uma forma incrivelmente corajosa de ação direta, que acontecia em larga escala.

Em conclusão, acredito que a religião foi crucial para o início da revolta. No entanto, a religião em uma sociedade profundamente religiosa, onde a Igreja faz parte do Estado, não é uma questão puramente teórica. Faz parte de uma estrutura que molda a vida das pessoas e contra a qual elas se rebelam.

Daniel Finn

What political and military character did the revolt assume?

Pepijn Brandon

It’s useful to summarize the main stages of this revolt. It started with the wave of iconoclasm in which tens of thousands of people participated. The Spanish state then responded to the revolt, although the higher nobility in much of the Low Countries had already turned against the rebels and tried to suppress them.

For the extremely devout Catholic monarch, Philip II, that was not enough. He sent an army headed by a strongman figure, the Duke of Alba, one of the hard-line traditionalists among the Spanish nobility. Much of the higher Dutch nobility thought they could compromise with Alba, especially because they had already shown that they were not on the side of this rebellion.

But one leading nobleman, William of Orange, fled from the Southern Netherlands to Germany. From there, at various points, he tried to restart the revolt by military means. Those attempts failed until there was a lucky strike by the smaller, sea-based guerrilla bands known as the Sea Beggars in 1572, which sparked off urban uprisings in the Northern Netherlands, especially in the provinces of Holland and Zealand.

Those rebellions gave the revolt a military foothold that led to years of struggle pitting William’s small ragtag bands, plus most of the main towns of Holland and Zealand, against the armies of Philip II. There was a long period of warfare until a new wave of rebellions in the southern provinces in 1576 led to the unification of most of the Netherlands on the side of the revolt.

Existia uma relação muito complexa entre o lado militar da revolta e os fatores políticos locais, que frequentemente variavam de cidade para cidade.

Throughout this period, there was a very complex relationship between the military side of the revolt and local political factors, often varying from city to city. Most of the main northern cities joined the revolt, but the two wealthiest cities of Holland and Zealand, Middelburg and Amsterdam, refused to join it until the late 1570s, because their elites were very dependent on trade within the Spanish empire.

After the unification of 1576, you had what was perhaps the most radical phase of the revolt, with a series of uprisings and takeovers by urban artisans and the middle classes in important cities in the Southern Netherlands, notably Ghent. Those cities faced a massive counterattack by the Spanish army and defecting members of the southern nobility who thought things had gone too far. The ultimate outcome was the defeat of the revolt in the south combined with its military consolidation in the north.

This led to the formation of a federal state in the Northern Netherlands, with a great deal of local particularism, but with a united army and navy. William of Orange played a major role in countering the earlier, more spontaneous way of fighting. The way that the army had been organized, with the influence of lower-rank soldiers and the participation of urban civil guards in the fighting, had combined with demands for political influence from the urban middle classes.

William replaced that with a general push for what was seen as military professionalization. By the 1580s, you had a situation where the independence of the northern provinces was consolidated, but the struggle became less of a political or religious revolt against the central authorities and more of a purely military struggle between a newly independent Dutch state and the Habsburg Empire.
Daniel Finn

What was the attitude of European powers such as France and England that were rivals of the Spanish crown?


Pepijn Brandon

Throughout the course of this struggle, for all the different parties involved, the revolt was enmeshed in European politics. As it progressed and the independent Dutch state got off the ground, it also became enmeshed in world politics and colonial politics. The revolt represented a shift within the balance of power in Europe — a balance that was already tenuous to begin with.

For the adversaries of the Habsburgs, this seemed to represent a golden opportunity that they wanted to grasp, but without sharing any of the republican zeal that developed as part of the revolt. There was a similar ambivalence when it came to the leaders of the revolt as well. William partly fought for his own dynastic ambitions, and his commitment to the revolt also rested on the idea of restoring the House of Orange, which was an important house within the European feudal power structure.

For a long time, William was ambivalent about whether these ambitions could be fulfilled within the framework of a return to Habsburg rule with a clear agreement on the autonomy and local rights of urban magistrates and the higher nobility. When that proved impossible, he considered the best option for the revolt to be aligning itself closely with a foreign house that could bring another state into the war against the Habsburgs.

There were two main episodes on this front. The first, when Wiliam was still alive, was an attempt to align the Dutch revolt with a French noble house that was closely related to the crown, the House of Anjou. The Duke of Anjou was brought in as a replacement sovereign for the Low Countries. Later, there was a similar attempt to align the Dutch provinces that were then still independent with the English crown by inviting the Duke of Leicester to act as the head of the Dutch armies and the central figure within the Dutch states.

O poder das cidades foi fundamental para o sucesso da revolta — a riqueza urbana foi crucial para financiar a profissionalização do exército.

But at this point you see some of the developments in the revolt’s social content as well. It would be wrong to say that anyone planned this as an urban, bourgeois revolution with the aim of independence for a merchant-dominated state. No one would have thought of the aims of the revolt in those terms during the 1560s. By the late 1570s and early 1580s, however, that objective had clearly been put on the table.

The power of cities was central to the success of the revolt — city wealth was crucial in funding the professionalization of the army. Those urban merchant elites were quite willing to accept a figurehead ruler from outside if that helped them fight the war against Spain and its armies. But they were very reluctant to give up the independence and political sway that they had gained by that point.

The ambitious high nobles from France or England who were invited to the Netherlands expected that they would play the role of a substitute king within the Dutch provinces, on a level footing with other kings and princes in the rest of Europe. They didn’t expect to be treated like officials who had to carry out the decisions made by urban upstarts. That created enormous social and political tensions, which led to the rapid failure of the two attempts involving the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Leicester.

After the second failure, which resulted in an episode of major political turmoil, the estates-general in the northern provinces decided they could go it alone: “We don’t need that kind of alliance, and if we do make alliances, we’ll do it as an independent state or republic.” That was when the Dutch Republic was founded, at a moment of great confidence that they could wage war at the level of a major European state.
Daniel Finn

Were there any movements among the popular classes during the revolt that were similar to those which later emerged during the English and French revolutions — the Levellers, the sans-culottes, the enragés?
Pepijn Brandon

This is a very important question, especially because the standard answer in the historiography of the Dutch Revolt is a blunt no. In a certain sense, that is correct, because you did not have sustained and unified political movements of the lower classes at the level that you later saw in the English Civil War or the French Revolution. Nor did you have the development of proto-communist programs like those of the Diggers or the conspiracy of Gracchus Babeuf.

On the other hand, lower-class rebellion was absolutely fundamental in elevating the various oppositional movements that existed in the Low Countries during the early 1560s to the level of outright revolt. It was also instrumental in creating the new phase of the revolt in 1572 when the attempts by William to relaunch the revolt from above as a purely military, princely-led affair had failed. The capture of a small town in southern Holland by guerrilla bands turned into a province-wide revolt because ordinary people went into the streets in town after town and forced their magistrates to proclaim that they were with William.

A rebelião das classes mais baixas foi absolutamente fundamental para elevar os vários movimentos de oposição ao nível de revolta declarada.

These were crucial episodes, and the pattern was repeated several times in the 1570s and ’80s, with popular rebellion proving to be decisive in the continuation of the revolt. The military struggle in the first phase took the form of Spanish efforts to recapture the rebellious cities. It was not regular warfare that defended the cities against the professional, well-trained Spanish armies — it was the total mobilization of the population, often including women.

There was also the element of religiously infused expectations that the rebellion would result in the creation of a new Jerusalem, a society in which people could have a say. The revolt was connected to what has often been called the Popular Reformation. The Reformation was a complex, multi-class phenomenon. There was a princely Reformation that was quite conservative in its outlook, but there was also, especially in the first half of the sixteenth century, the so-called Anabaptist movements that have often been described as proto-communists.

The Anabaptists believed that the return of Christ was around the corner and that it would lead to a society that was more equal and more just for the lower classes. Those millenarian sects also told lower-class people that they could play a role in interpreting scripture and preaching the word to their fellow artisans. That left a deep imprint. In my studies of Leiden, even in the 1560s, I found that the majority of people who were being persecuted as religious dissenters were not Calvinists, but were in fact associated with Anabaptism in some shape or form.

At the same time, we should remember that Anabaptism had gone through a radical, confrontational phase in the 1530s that reached a high point with the capture of a German city called Münster, largely by Dutch Anabaptists who had gone there to establish the new Jerusalem. That religious rebellion was crushed mercilessly. Even today, if you go to Münster, the church still has the cages hanging in which the bodies of the revolt’s leaders were displayed after they were executed.

Anabaptism in the Low Countries went through a series of crises after that defeat. The result was a turn away from the world toward spiritualism and pacifism. As an organized force, it hardly played any role in the revolt because revolts were no longer encouraged in that line of thinking. But the chiliastic ideas encouraged by Anabaptism were still present during the early stages of the revolt.

Overall, you had two elements. You had the importance of lower-class rebellion, which was very much concentrated in particular towns rather than assuming the form of a national movement. There was no Dutch equivalent of Paris where lower-class rebellion could become the focal point of the nation because of its sheer weight and size. Then you had the remnants of radical ideas rather than the formation of a new ideology that could bind together these forms of lower-class rebellion.
Daniel Finn

During the fourteenth century, Flanders had experienced the most sustained wave of popular rebellion anywhere in Europe. Did that leave behind any legacy for the revolt of the sixteenth century?
Pepijn Brandon

It certainly did. In some ways, it had a decisive influence when it came to the unfolding of the revolt in the south. After the reunification of the provinces on the side of the revolt in 1576, there was a phase of radicalization that ran in opposite directions in the Southern Netherlands.

On the one hand, you had a radicalization of the Counter-Reformation and of counterrevolution. The Southern Netherlands were an area where feudalism had much deeper social roots than in the north. Much of the nobility thought that the power of the cities and the influence of merchants on politics had gone too far and that it was better to align with the Habsburg monarchy and with the most conservative variants of Catholicism.

O sul dos Países Baixos era uma região onde o feudalismo tinha raízes sociais muito mais profundas do que no norte.

On the other hand, there was a wave of urban uprisings leading to the formation of revolutionary dictatorships in the classical sense of that word. Militant artisans and their craft guilds took control over city governments, beginning in Ghent. There were complex alignments with members of the lower nobility and with people from the lower classes. But the tradition of the urban middle class taking control of the city in defense of their autonomy is one that goes back to the fourteenth century.

My dear colleague from Belgium, Jan Dumolyn, has written very convincingly about this long-running sequence of battles for urban autonomy against the nobility. You could describe those battles as the rumblings of a newly confident bourgeoisie or premonitions of shifting social relations in Europe. This phenomenon was not sealed off from the Dutch Revolt.

The last outburst of that tradition before the revolt came in 1540, when Ghent went through a major uprising. The Hapsburg king Charles V laid siege to the city and severely punished its population after defeating the revolt. Resentment was still lingering, and the tradition was still very much alive when the revolt broke out two decades later.

In many ways, we can see the militant phase of the revolt in the south during the late 1570s and early 1580s as a continuation of that tradition. The irony is that this inheritance created a form of radicalism that far surpassed what existed in the northern provinces while, at the same time, it also carried with it medieval legacies that hindered the success of these revolts on a larger territorial scale. One of those legacies was an intense urban particularism.

The rulers of Ghent fought for the city and for its control over the countryside and the provincial states. Several large cities that underwent similar uprisings also had a strong focus on their own interests, so there was very little possibility of creating a united front against the forces of the noble counterrevolution. The strength of the urban revolts in some ways inhibited the rise of state structures that could counter the might of the Spanish armies and thus left these towns to be defeated one by one.

In contrast, while there was also a lot of urban particularism in the Northern Netherlands, especially in Holland, the fact that those towns were all relatively small and weak gave them a much stronger impetus to work together than was the case for the proud and powerful ancient cities of Flanders and Brabant. It was the combination of individual weakness and collective strength on the part of the towns in Holland that compelled them to form a coherent, provincial whole opposing the encroachment of Spanish troops.
Daniel Finn

What kind of state and society was the Dutch Republic that emerged from the revolt?
Pepijn Brandon

That question brings us right to the heart of the old debates about whether or not we can speak of “bourgeois revolutions.” I have been influenced a lot by my late friend, Neil Davidson. As many people have rightly said, if you imagine a bourgeois or capitalist revolution as a moment when the rich and wealthy go into the streets and make a revolution to establish their state, there has never been such a phenomenon in history. But then the argument from Neil and others is that the bourgeois nature of these revolts lies in their outcomes.

The Dutch Revolt in many ways illustrates that point very well. I don’t think anyone doubts that the Dutch state emerging from the revolt was Europe’s most commercially oriented state at the time. Merchant capitalists had an overbearing influence within the state and made arrangements to organize many of its tasks, including aspects of warfare and colonial conquest, as public–private ventures for which they expected to see a return in the form of profits. This was a state that self-consciously identified the interests of the state with the interests of trade.

Now, whether that alone is enough to define this as a capitalist state is a matter for further discussion. But the revolt created merchant power within the state and urban power on an unprecedented scale. The independent power of those social groups would never have been possible within the confines of an absolutist, monarchical, feudal state. In that sense, the revolt broke new terrain.

O Estado holandês que emergiu da revolta era o Estado mais voltado para o comércio na Europa na época.

We’re often trained to see these moments in terms of purely national trajectories. First we look at the basic social and economic structure within the confines of a particular national territory, identifying the elements of capitalist development, then we try to connect the revolt with those elements, before finally asking whether the outcome matches our criteria of a capitalist state and a capitalist society.

I think that is a limiting perspective. We need to have a longer-term approach to this question, where you see the development of important political, social, and economic fissures within feudal society over the course of centuries, which creates the space for experiments in new forms of statehood and social organization that might initially be tried out on a local scale. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, that can translate into the politics of an entire state like the Dutch Republic.

At the same time, it’s not a complete break with earlier practices. The urban particularism of the previous age is largely retained but combined with new elements, especially an orientation toward world trade and empire that is entirely novel. I would see what have been described as the classical bourgeois revolutions, from the English Civil War to the American and French revolutions and up to the American Civil War, as a long, drawn-out struggle for different forms of social organization, which in the end culminates in international capitalism.


Daniel Finn

Looking at Dutch history in particular against that wider European and North American backdrop, what role would you say the revolt played in the development of Dutch capitalism?
Pepijn Brandon

I don’t think anyone would see these events as harbingers of capitalist development in their own right. It’s in the very nature of capitalism as a privatized market relationship that it develops largely outside of the state. In many parts of the world, it developed at the point where the role of money and commerce no longer merely consisted of regulating trade between disparate areas but also became connected to localized systems of production that were fully commercialized. People’s labor and the buying and selling of land were now mediated through the market.

The telling of that story is often exclusively attached to England, but I don’t believe that is correct. Relations of that kind developed in many places, including the late medieval Low Countries, but they were enmeshed within a political structure that still only favored the protection of trade and commerce up to a certain point, subject to the political motivations of the nobility and the monarchical state.

A Revolta Holandesa criou um Estado que tinha a acumulação de riqueza através do comércio e da competição inscrita na sua própria essência.

The importance of the Dutch Revolt is that in an already highly commercialized area, it created a state that had the accumulation of wealth through trade and competition inscribed in its very being. That was an enormously accelerating factor, as can be seen in two outgrowths of the revolt that both occurred at the moment when it changed from being a revolution shaped by spontaneous uprisings from below to become a struggle waged by a state with a regular army funded through urban taxation and loans by wealthy merchants.

First of all, the ongoing warfare became a major factor in the dispossession of independent commercial peasants in the peripheral provinces. They were being driven off the land because they could not sustain themselves as peasant households when their crops were being destroyed and they could not go to the towns to sell anything. One of the major weapons of war was inundation, where part of the land was flooded, and it took years for it to be suitable for agriculture again.

Those independent peasants went bankrupt on a massive scale, and their land was bought up by the same urban elites that were funding the Dutch armies. I would say this was a classical form of original accumulation, although it’s not one that Karl Marx discusses in Capital. Dutch agriculture was already commercial, but it now became organized on a much grander scale, with local tenant farmers who paid rent to urban elites.

The second outgrowth is that this newly confident state with its own army and navy began to challenge Habsburg power. It needed approximately a decade to secure the outer borders of the new state. But once it had done that, it started to bring the war to where it really counted and where it could really hurt the Iberian powers, namely their colonial empires. The war of independence rapidly developed into a war for empire as well, first in Asia and then in the Atlantic world, making the Dutch Republic the major world power of the seventeenth century.

I see parallels here with the Irish campaigns of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange. Again, a process of bourgeois consolidation immediately turned into empire-building at the same time that the elements of the revolts that came from below were either incorporated or smashed. I also see similar patterns in the French revolution with Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns. This turn to military expansion is a crucial but understudied dimension of bourgeois revolutions.
Daniel Finn

Following on from that last point, how did the Dutch colonial empire take shape during and after the revolts? How important were the colonies for the future economic development of the Netherlands?
Pepijn Brandon

The colonial ventures took shape relatively early. By 1588, the Dutch had renounced all the attempts to find a foreign ruler to act as the head of state. The Spanish Crown launched a major attempt to crush the revolt for good by sending a giant fleet to reconquer the Netherlands and wage war against England. For various reasons, the armada proved to be a miserable failure, which opened the way for the newly established Dutch navy to bring the war to the seas and the major trade routes of the Iberians.

Em 1588, os holandeses já haviam renunciado a todas as tentativas de encontrar um governante estrangeiro para atuar como chefe de Estado.

By the 1590s, there were various private initiatives to gain a foothold in the Asian trade and to capture several islands along the West African coast, including slave-trading and sugar-producing islands. The state swung behind these initiatives because it recognized that this was a major opportunity to fund their own state through colonial ventures and to undermine the funding of the Spanish state, which relied heavily on silver imports and other forms of trade with the Atlantic world.

The Dutch forces launched a concerted attack on the Iberian strongholds outside Europe. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, with the Dutch West India company emerging at a later stage in 1621. Both companies became important contenders for power in the Indian Ocean and in the Atlantic, and both started to acquire important colonies, often by genocidal means and intersecting with the slave trade in which the Dutch became a major participant.

That brought an important injection of wealth, which contributed further to the wealth of the big urban merchants. They often funneled the money back into new colonial enterprises, or into European trade, or into local commercial agriculture. While the Dutch were conquering colonies abroad, there was also a craze for land reclamation within the Low Countries, which added substantially to the stock of arable land. To an important extent, this was also funded by the spoils of colonial ventures.

The circulation of capital from colonial initiatives back into the home economy and vice versa became an essential aspect of the surge in capitalism in and around the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It was a new phenomenon that was greatly assisted by the creation of an independent state through the revolt.
Daniel Finn

How would you situate the revolt in relation to what later happened in England, France, or the American colonies, and what implications does it have for the wider concept of bourgeois revolution?
Pepijn Brandon

The concept of bourgeois revolution is a difficult one with all sorts of problematic connotations, but I would still want to rescue it — I think there is something valuable there. There were various crises within Europe’s old order during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But those crises did not turn in a capitalist direction in and of themselves.

The fact that a number of states emerged with capitalist interests at their heart became an important factor in bringing about this transition. Those states all came out of major convulsions, wars, and revolutions. But the question is, how did they evolve out of these events? On this point, I would take a somewhat unorthodox approach. Although I mentioned Neil Davidson in particular, there are many others who have taken an unorthodox approach to this question as well.

What we have to think about is the relationship between forces operating from below and from above in these revolutions: the role of popular risings on the one hand, war and empire on the other. There is a strong tradition of historiography from the left that distinguishes between the first phase of classical bourgeois revolutions, ranging all the way from the German Peasants’ War to the French revolution, and later developments such as the Italian risorgimento, the Meiji restoration in Japan, and the Bismarckian transformation of the German state.

This tradition presents the first set of bourgeois revolutions as revolutions from below and the second set as revolutions from above. There is also a strong association between the bourgeois revolution and the democratic revolution. I find this to be anachronistic in so many ways, and it grants the bourgeoisie too much historically.

O conceito de revolução burguesa é complexo e carrega todo tipo de conotações problemáticas, mas mesmo assim eu gostaria de resgatá-lo.

There was no case where the outcome of these events was a democratic state in any meaningful sense of the term. They were ruling-class states, created from the top down, with at best a limited element of democracy. There was a democratic urge that could be seen in the uprisings from below, but it’s hard to see democracy as the defining program (except in a very general sense that the people should have a say in how they’re governed, which is important in its own right).

But the immense fissures within the feudal order, the divisions within these states, and the conditions of permanent warfare created openings in which mass rebellions could erupt from below — partly driven by the desire to achieve a say in the field of politics, partly by religion, partly by socioeconomic motives — and have a major impact on political life. You can see these revolts littered through European history in many different moments.

At certain moments, they coalesced into rebellions that were national, semi-national, or region-wide. In what are usually described as the classical bourgeois revolutions, these rebellions developed into major challenges to the existing state. Very often, the bourgeois element was not part of the rebellion or revolution itself, but rather involved partly riding that wave and partly suppressing it. The moment where you could identify a real bourgeois turn was the moment when a new state was consolidated, which meant shutting down the influence from below on this process of rebellion.

To some extent, the bourgeois element is the counterrevolution within the revolution. It preserves the shell of the revolution but transforms it into something qualitatively different, and the defeat of popular mobilization is a crucial part of that transformation. Very often, the emergency that allows for the curtailment or smashing of popular rebellion takes the form of external war, at which point the state comes into its own.

We can see this pattern in the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. To be provocative, one could even say that there is an element of this in the Haitian Revolution as well, which goes from a very radical stage to a period of internal and external consolidation.

If we want to see the Dutch Revolt as a bourgeois revolution, it must be in this sense. It starts as a disparate series of revolts and opposition movements from different social classes, but it later coalesces into a state controlled by merchant elites with a very ambitious agenda for reshaping the world, both internally within the Low Countries and externally in terms of empire-building.
Daniel Finn

What was the general significance of the Dutch Revolt and the Dutch Republic that came out of it for the history of capitalism and the international state system leading up to the present day?

Pepijn Brandon

In the period that followed the revolt, there was a very strong Dutch presence in European politics and the European economy that had an enduring impact on the world. This was in combination with developments elsewhere — it’s not that everything emanated from this small region of Europe.

It became a stepping stone for the consolidation of bourgeois rule in England in the most direct sense, since the monarch who was brought in to carry out this task was William of Orange, the great-grandson of the Dutch Revolt’s main leader. But more broadly, the Dutch Republic provided a model of how a commercial state could be organized, one to which people in the seventeenth century referred.

It showed that a commercial state of that kind could be militarily strong and successful. It introduced new forms of colonization, in the sense that colonization became an enterprise for profit rather than the aggrandizement of a monarchal state. By the 1650s, you have tracts arguing for the creation of slave-based plantation colonies, based on calculations about the rate of return on investment. This had a big influence on the thinking of other statesmen in the rest of Europe and changed the rules of the game, both for colonizers and for the colonized.

No período que se seguiu à revolta, houve uma presença holandesa muito forte na política e na economia europeias.

Não podemos aqui abordar os principais debates entre figuras como Robert Brenner, Immanuel Wallerstein e Giovanni Arrighi sobre o principal motor do desenvolvimento capitalista. Mas o que se criou na República Holandesa foi uma nova dinâmica em que a receita colonial era reinvestida no capitalismo agrário e vice-versa. Isso gerou novos padrões de acumulação, trazendo enorme riqueza à República Holandesa e tornando-a um centro financeiro na Europa.

Mesmo quando perdeu sua posição de destaque entre os estados europeus, continuou sendo a sede de importantes empresas coloniais e firmas financeiras que financiaram empreendimentos fora da República Holandesa, incluindo os esforços de industrialização da Grã-Bretanha, bem como seus projetos de colonização no Caribe. Houve alguns momentos cruciais na história mundial para os quais a República Holandesa contribuiu significativamente, para o bem ou para o mal — eu diria para o mal.

Há também a parte suprimida e esquecida da Revolta Holandesa, que é o aspecto da rebelião popular que remodelou a política europeia. Historicamente, os progressistas tenderam a celebrar esses eventos observando que a ordem atual não foi criada por meio de uma história de progressões pacíficas: na verdade, a rebelião popular redesenhou o mapa do mundo. Esse aspecto permanece importante, mas precisa estar atrelado a uma compreensão precisa da relação entre a rebelião popular e os Estados que emergiram desses eventos.

Existe uma poderosa tradição radical de reflexão sobre essas revoluções que merece ser resgatada. Mencionei anteriormente a obra de Erich Kuttner, que foi muito perspicaz ao enxergar a rebelião independente da classe baixa como um dos principais motores desses eventos, apesar de alguns problemas em sua tese. A obra de Kuttner se encaixa em uma pequena tradição de trabalhos que surgiu na década de 1930, um tanto distante da corrente principal da escrita marxista da época, que era muito influenciada pela ideia da revolução burguesa como uma revolução democrática.

Contra essa noção, havia uma corrente secundária de obras históricas que ainda são muito importantes. Essas obras enfatizaram o fato de que a rebelião das classes mais baixas impulsionou essas revoltas e que o papel da burguesia consistia em surfar nessa onda e reprimi-la simultaneamente. Além de Kuttner, podemos mencionar também o livro de Daniel Guérin sobre a Revolução Francesa e, claro, Os Jacobinos Negros, de C. L. R. James. Para James, foram as massas em Saint-Domingue e Paris que atuaram como os principais atores contra as forças da reação feudal e a burguesia com seu Estado recém-formado.

Obras como essas, provenientes de áreas mais críticas e marginais da historiografia marxista, contêm insights cruciais sobre o radicalismo desses momentos de revolta. Elas nos ajudam a dissociar esse radicalismo da natureza repressiva dos Estados que emergiram das rebeliões.

Este é um debate importante atualmente quando se analisa a Guerra da Independência Americana no século XVIII, em que alguns autores argumentam que devemos considerar esses eventos como puramente reacionários. Penso que esse argumento se apega ao momento de contrarrevolução dentro de uma revolução. O que essa visão omite é o fato de que a própria revolução não foi feita pelas pessoas que posteriormente consolidaram seu poder sobre o Estado.

Os primeiros levantes foram momentos de verdadeiro radicalismo, com visões muito diferentes do que o futuro poderia reservar. Resgatar esses momentos de radicalismo é uma das tarefas importantes que os historiadores da esquerda sempre buscaram realizar.

Colaboradores

Pepijn Brandon é professor de história econômica e social global na Universidade Livre de Amsterdã e autor de Guerra, Capital e o Estado Holandês (1588-1795).

Daniel Finn é editor de reportagens da revista Jacobin. Ele é autor de O Terrorista de um Homem: Uma História Política do IRA.