ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: A neighbour country, Holland: an ideal model to follow, or just an enemy?
Author: Ito Seiichiro
In the seventeenth century, particularly in its first half, the English pamphleteers often argued that the English should learn the manner of herring fishing from the Dutch and it is essential for the success of the English trade. While they tended to focus on the technical aspects of fishing business, around mid-century some pamphleteers started to show their interest in the Dutch society as a whole. They shared the list of their merits to learn from the Dutch model, such as the foreign exchange market, the high quality of products, the good management of trade, low customs, the encouragement of invention, low interest rates, banking, gavelkind, and the system of the registration of estates. For example, over the Navigation Act of 1651, some were supportive and some were against, but both sides shared the same images of Holland. In other words, whether one advocates free trade or takes protectionism, his aim was to make England prosperous by following the Dutch manner. Those lists offered by the pamphleteers on fishing business were almost the same as what Sir Josiah Child presents in his pamphlet of 1668 which launched the interest-rate controversy. But, while the pamphleteers on fishing focused on the benefits of that business and the ownership of the British seas where the business was carried out, Child argued that the lowness of the Dutch interest rates was the most fundamental engine of their successful trade. From around 1670 the styles of the discourses of the pamphleteers who discuss trade also changed. They got more analytical and systematic. Roger Coke was an example. His discourse reminds the quasi-economic theories which will be found in economic essays in 1690s, such as those of Nicholas Barbon and Sir Dudley North.
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