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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1987 (1987)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1987

(1987)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Hugh Dunthorne
‘An inseparable alliance’? Scotland and Holland in the age of improvement*

In the debates which preceded the Act of Union of 1707, one of the arguments used by those who opposed the measure was that Scotland's political and commercial interests would be better served not by a parliamentary union with England but by ‘an inseparable Alliance’ with the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The Scottish economy would benefit from closer links with the Dutch, whose commercial expertise was still regarded as greatly superior to that of the English. While from the constitutional point of view the federal structure of the Netherlands, in which each of the seven provinces retained its own sovereign rights and institutions, would preserve Scotland's political independence in a way that the more centralized English state clearly would not. As one Scottish pamphleteer put it, it was ‘better to be an Eighth Province than a Twelfth County’.1.**

In retrospect, this proposal for a Scots-Dutch union appears utopian and impractical. Yet at the time when it was made it must have seemed quite natural, the logical outcome of several centuries of close association between Scotland and the Low Countries. Commercial links with the Netherlands could, after all, be traced back to the twelfth century, and by the end of the seventeenth they constituted by far the most important part of Scotland's foreign trade.2. By 1700 substantial communities of Scots merchants were established at Rotterdam and half-a-dozen other Dutch towns, matched - if on a smaller scale - by a scattering of Netherlands settlers along the east coast of Scotland.3. And by this time, too, it had become normal practice for young Scots with commercial

ambitions to attend a mercantile school in Holland for a year or so in order ‘to learn book-keeping and the languages’.4. The Dutch universities, founded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, served a similar function for Scottish gentlemen in search of legal, theological or medical education. At Leiden, for example, the 419 Scots who matriculated in the quarter-century between 1675 and 1700 were, after the Germans, the largest single foreign group at the university5. - their presence a striking indication not only of what was lacking in the university teaching offered in their own country but also of the affinities that existed both between the Scottish and Dutch legal systems, with their common basis in Roman law, and between Scottish presbyterian and Dutch Calvinist theology. Furthermore, by the turn of the seventeenth century, the Scots were as familiar as any Europeans with the dual role which the Dutch Republic had come to assume as a haven for refugees and a magnet for migrant labour. Scottish Whigs and Covenanters found asylum there in the 1680s, as Scottish Jacobites did in the 1690s and intermittently thereafter. While, over a rather longer period, the Dutch gave employment to the mercenary soldiers of the Scots Brigade in Holland, to Scottish seamen serving on Dutch merchant ships or men-of-war, and to a more miscellaneous group of Scottish immigrants ‘seeking work ... in Breweries, Warehouses and as Porters etc.’.6.

Given the closeness of Scotland's ties with Holland down to 1707 - ties based on trade, migration and education, as well as on affinities of law and religion - it is worth considering how their association developed in the century after that date. What changes took place? And what light do those changes throw on the parts played by the two countries in the European Enlightenment? It is clear that some of the traditional connexions between Scotland and the Low Countries became weaker during the eighteenth century. In the military sphere, for instance, the Scots Brigade in the Netherlands found itself increasingly the victim of the diverging foreign policies of Britain and the Dutch Republic. The Dutch state, for its part, was anxious to cut costs and limit foreign commitments and decided in 1717 to halve the size of the Scots brigade and to confine it to a purely defensive garrison role. On the other hand, Britain's widening international activity during the 1740s and 1750s led to the Whig government's decision in 1756 to earmark Scotland as an exclusive source of manpower for the expanding British armed forces, thus depriving the Scots brigade in Holland of what had always been its traditional right to recruit in Scotland. Consequently, by the time the brigade was finally wound up in 1782 during the course of the fourth Anglo-Dutch war, the proportion of Scots among its officers was small, and smaller still in the rank and file.7. In the world of international trade, too,

changing conditions were tending to lessen the relative importance of mercantile links with the Netherlands. This is not to say that Scots-Dutch trade contracted significantly in itself: during the last quarter of the eighteenth century Holland remained Scotland's most important trading partner on the European mainland, and the Scots community in Rotterdam continued to thrive. But these years also saw the opening up and rapid expansion of new trades from the ports of the Clyde to Ireland, North America and the Caribbean; and their effect was to shift the balance of Scotland's trade dramatically to the west, in the process making Scots merchants less dependent than they had once been on the Dutch staplemarket.8.

Scotland was outgrowing its earlier dependence on the Netherlands in one other respect also - that of professional and commercial education - thanks, in this case, mainly to the reform and development of the Scottish universities during the eighteenth century. Much of this reform, of course, was undertaken in direct emulation of what had already been achieved by the universities of the Dutch Republic. The two main architects of Edinburgh University's transformation, Principal William Carstares and Provost George Drummond, both looked to the Dutch universities of Leiden and Utrecht as models. The abolition of ‘regenting’ (the traditional Scottish academic system by which instructors were expected to teach their students across a whole range of different subjects) and its replacement by specialist professorial chairs corresponded to academic practice in Holland; and the majority of early professorial appointments at Edinburgh went to Scots who had studied in the Netherlands. New subjects introduced into the University curriculum at Edinburgh - Medicine and Chemistry (1713), Universal and Civil History (1719), Civil and Scots Law (1710, 1722), and Hebrew (1751) - all reflected what was already taught in the Netherlands, just as the facilities established in the city for medical teaching - from the botanical garden (1670), the anatomy theatre and chemical laboratory (1697) to the teaching hospital (1729) - were modelled on those of Leiden.9. Such reform and expansion, moreover, was undertaken not only at Edinburgh but also at the universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew's and Aberdeen - and even outside the university sector, with the establishment in several Scottish towns of municipal teachers of merchant accounting.10. Its overall effect was to reduce, if not to eliminate altogether, the need for Scots to go abroad in order to complete their education. By the 1750s Scotland had become what it has remained ever since, an importer rather than an exporter of students. At the time, this must have seemed a strikingly novel situation - and, from the point of view of the Dutch universities, a somewhat threatening one. It prompted a Leiden professor to complain in 1754 ‘that all the English [i.e. British] students, which

formerly came to his university, now went entirely there’ and to enquire, with a touch of envy, ‘if the Professors of Edinburgh were rich’.11.

The Leiden professor's anxiety was understandable. The numbers of Scottish students attending Dutch universities, dwindling steadily since 1725, began to fall more dramatically after 1750, although they never dried up altogether.12. What is more, those Scots who went to study in the Netherlands, were inclined to grumble about falling standards of teaching there, comparing the situation unfavourably with what they had become accustomed to at home. At Groningen, for example, it was said in 1740 that Professor Barbeyrac's ‘bad delivery and indistinct way of pronunciation, through grimace and loss of Teeth’ made his course on international law ‘very hard to understand’.13. Not that all the faults were on the Dutch side. If the Republic's universities were indeed losing their intellectual bite - and their decline can probably be exaggerated14. - the Scots students were losing their command of Latin, which was still the language of academic instruction in the Netherlands. Even among Scottish professors, the old habit of maintaining a Latin correspondence with one's colleagues abroad was dying out by the mid-eighteenth century.15. Yet, despite the fact that academic contact with the Dutch universities through the export of students and through academic correspondence was diminishing, this never led to a complete breach of relations. For there was another, increasingly important way in which intellectual communications with the Netherlands could be maintained and even expanded: through the import and export of learned publications. Edinburgh lawyers, for example, a professional group who evidently kept up their Latin, continued throughout the eighteenth century to study predominantly from Dutch textbooks written in Latin, and as new legal treatises were published at Leiden they were regularly acquired by the Advocates' Library16. - a sign, incidentally that the traditional reliance of the academic world on Dutch printers and booksellers had not been entirely eliminated by the boom in English and Scottish publishing. Moreover, even in those subjects where the use of Latin had gone out, the practice of translation was coming in as the new currency of intellectual exchange. In the field of natural and civil law, Barbeyrac's commentaries on Pufendorf could be read in English from 1729 and they played an important part in moulding the moral and social thought of Hume's generation.17. In theology, English versions of Hermann Witsius and other Dutch theologians helped to encourage the more tolerant attitudes of the Moderate party within the Scottish kirk.18. While in science, Boerhaave's massive Elements of Chemistry, the first textbook on the subject, was translated into English three times in the decade of its initial appearance - and, like his medical treatises, it remained influential for most of the rest of the century. The chemist William Cullen

remembered his medical education at Edinburgh in the 1730s as consisting almost entirely of Boerhaave's system, which was considered ‘very perfect, complete and sufficient’. And when Cullen became professor of medicine himself at Edinburgh in 1776 and ventured to modify Boerhaave on certain points, he was at once accused of being ‘a whimsical innovator’ and advised ‘to avoid differing from Dr. Boerhaave’ as this was ‘likely to hurt himself and the University’.19. Furthermore, it was not long before the traffic in translations was flowing just as effectively in the other direction too - from Scotland to Holland. During the second half of the eighteenth century, essays of Hume and of his fellow-philosopher James Beattie, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and sermons of Hugh Blair and other Scottish Moderates all appeared in Holland in Dutch translation, to play a significant part in shaping the evolution of Netherlands enlightened thought towards a synthesis of natural science, theology and moral philosophy. While a major contribution to Scots political writing of the previous generation, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun's Discourse on Government in Relation to Militias (1698), was given a new lease of life in 1774 when it was translated by Baron Van der Capellen tot den Pol and pressed into the service of the Dutch Patriot cause.20. By the later eighteenth century, in short, Scotland's former intellectual dependence on the Netherlands had been, if not turned on its head, at least transformed into a more evenly balanced exchange of ideas and information between the two countries. Moreover, with the growing availability of translations, both Scots and Dutch could now appreciate each others' related cultural traditions without needing to cross the North Sea or even to open a dictionary.

Yet there were, of course, still many in the eighteenth century who did make the crossing to Holland, if not for quite the same reasons as before. Thanks to Scotland's economic expansion, to its growing political stability, and to the coming of age of its universities, fewer Scots now went to the Low Countries to find employment, seek refuge from persecution, or obtain a degree. But the place of these earlier exiles was increasingly taken by a new kind of Scottish émigré - the enthusiastic tourist. Such tourists quickly discovered not only that Holland had a well-organized tourist industry but also, as one visitor put it, that it was ‘a most interesting country and well worthy of the attention of any inquisitive traveller, who prefers useful information to mere amusement’.21. What is more, the Scots did not merely visit the Dutch Republic; they also read and wrote about it. Sir William Temple's deservedly famous account of the country, the Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, first published in 1673, was still being used in the 1760s and 1770s;22. and during the next half-century it was supplemented by half-a-dozen other accounts, all of them serious stu-

dies of Netherlands affairs written by Scots with first-hand knowledge of their subject. They included the first account of the Dutch Revolt to be written in English - William Lothian's History of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1780) - as well as surveys of the development of Scots-Dutch trade and of the Scots Brigade in Holland, and accounts of the country's banking system, cloth industry, agriculture and horticulture.23. By one means or another, the Scots of the eighteenth century were remarkably well-informed about the Netherlands, past and present. So it is not surprising that the changing fortunes of the Dutch Republic should have become a lively and recurrent theme in the debates of the Scottish philosophers and political economists of the mid- and later eighteenth century. It is a theme worth exploring, for it had practical as well as theoretical implications for Scotland.

One fundamental problem about the Netherlands which interested Scottish thinkers was the question of how the Dutch had originally achieved their prosperity. To this Hume offered a characteristically concise answer. Three things, he said, had ‘begotten commerce in Holland’: ‘multitudes of people, necessity and liberty’. The wars, religious divisions and economic hardship of the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries had caused migration into the northern Netherlands; and since this was a small country with few natural resources and an inhospitable climate, its large population could survive only through hard work and ingenuity.24. The process had been completed by what Hume and his contemporaries called ‘liberty’ - meaning, in this context, the establishment of an independent republic as the outcome of Holland's revolt against Spanish dominion. The characteristic features of ‘free’ republican government - constitutional and administrative decentralization, religious toleration and freedom of the press, impartial justice and security of property - had all contributed towards transforming what had once been ‘a marsh inhabited by poor, ignorant and oppressed peasants’ into a prosperous and civilized commercial community.25. Moreover, the most important feature of all in this process, Hume argued, had been the greater social esteem and political influence which merchants enjoyed in a republic compared with a monarchy. Adam Smith agreed. Only in Holland, he observed, was it ‘unfashionable not to be a man of business’.26.

When the discussion turned to the republic's current situation, however, interpretation became more difficult. Was the Dutch economy now in decline? Boswell, writing from Utrecht in 1764, had no doubt that it was, painting a picture of urban decay, unemployment and political corruption.27. Other observers recognized that things were actually more complicated than this. Adam Smith, whose sources of information included the Scots-Dutch banking family of Hope in Amsterdam and

Rotterdam, maintained that though ‘some particular branches’ of Holland's economy were experiencing difficulties - particularly its manufacturing industries - there was ‘no general decay’. By adopting a policy of neutrality in the Seven Years' War ‘the Dutch [had] gained the whole carrying trade of France, of which they still retain [in the 1770s] a very large share’, and the international business of Dutch finance houses was thriving.28. But if it was difficult to agree about the extent of the republic's deterioration, it was harder still to explain it. One view - the traditional civic humanist view - saw Holland's situation as an instance of the inevitable rise and fall of great commercial empires. Like the Venetians and the ancient republics before them, the Dutch had been gradually corrupted by their own success - ‘by the abuse of liberty’ and the growth of ‘private luxury’ - and were consequently now being overtaken by the growing expertise of their commercial rivals.29. Others, like Hume and Adam Smith, attributed Holland's difficulties to a more specific sequence of events. The long, expensive wars against Louis XIV's France and the heavy costs incurred (especially during the 1730s) in repairing the western provinces' defences against the sea had obliged the Dutch state ‘to contract great debts’, which led inevitably to heavier taxation, to higher wages, and to the consequent pricing of Dutch industrial manufacturers out of the international market.30. What was to be done? For Hume and for the Aberdonian David Skene the remedy for the Netherlands' problems seemed to lie with the elevation of the House of Orange to some form of monarchial authority. If Holland ‘was... ruin'd by its Liberty’, Hume wrote from The Hague in 1748, shortly after the revolution which restored Prince William IV of Orange to the semi-monarchical office of stadholder, it now had ‘a chance of being sav'd by its Prince’.31. But Adam Smith disagreed, arguing on the contrary that any change likely to ‘destroy the republican form of government’ would be disastrous. It would tend to ‘throw the whole administration into the hands of nobles and soldiers’, and the ‘great mercantile families’ would be inclined to leave ‘a country where they were no longer likely to be much respected’.32.

Besides these questions of rise and decline, the Scottish discussion of Holland's political economy raised one other important issue. Could Dutch policy and methods be imitated successfully by other countries? Economic thinkers of the previous century had had few doubts about this. Sir Robert Sibbald's ‘Discourse Anent the improvements [that] may be made in Scotland for advancing the Wealth of the Kingdome’, for example, rested firmly on the belief that ‘if wee would but follow their [the Dutch] example, wee might be much more considered in the world than wee are’, and contained elaborate recommendations for the development of a Scottish fishing industry along Dutch lines.33. And in the mid-

eighteenth century David Skene remained confident that lessons could be learned from the Netherlands ‘even where the circumstances are not exactly similar’.34. Others, however, had reservations. Dugald Stewart pointed out that as a commercial economy, heavily dependent on the import of raw materials from abroad, Holland was ‘one of those extreme cases in human affairs... from which it is always dangerous to apply our inferences to the general condition of mankind’, and concluded that it woud be absurd to apply them ‘to our own country’.35. Yet whatever the conflicting views of the theorists, there can be no doubt that in practice Scotland's eighteenth-century economic expansion owed a good deal to the Dutch example. Scottish gentlemen travelling in the Netherlands took careful note of the techniques of Low Countries agriculture, industry and engineering, and were not above sending their employees over as industrial spies.36. Materials and equipment were imported, particularly by the brewing, sugar-refining and, above all, the textile industries.37. Agriculturalists acquired seeds and plants from the Netherlands and discussed Dutch and Flemish farming methods at the meetings of the Edinburgh-based Society of Improvers. The second earl of Stair introduced what soon became known in Scotland as the Dutch plough and employed Dutch gardeners to lay out his grounds at Castle Kennedy.38. But it was on the Scottish linen industry that the importing of Dutch skilled labour had its most widespread effect. The Dutch masterweaver as supervisor and instructor became a familiar figure in Scottish linen factories in the 1730s; by the next decade the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures had developed a scheme employing six Dutch weavers in this way at factories in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Ormiston, and after 1745 the policy was extended to the north-east.39. Moreover, when Scotland embarked some twenty years later on largescale construction of bridges and canals, it did so with the help of experts like John Smeaton, who had been schooled in Netherlands engineering. Even as late as 1818, when construction began on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, it was to Holland that the company sent for plans of the ‘latest and most approved Dutch boats’ and for the regulations of the Netherlands canal services, to be translated into English.40. Finally, it is worth noticing that Dutch social and constitutional policies were emulated, too, particularly when they were seen to bring economic advantages. For example, the proposals made in Edinburgh in 1726 for the establishment of an orphanage and in 1782 for a new prison and bridewell both referred to the way in which the humane running of such institutions in Holland encouraged diligence and ‘useful works’.41. And when, like other improving landowners, Lord Gardenstone built a planned industrial village at Laurencekirk and made it in 1780 a ‘free burgh of barony’, he did so in the conviction that the ‘evident conse-

quence of ... freedom’ was prosperity, as the history of the Dutch provinces had proved.42.

By this date, of course, the Dutch provinces were on the threshold of an historical experience quite different from the freedom and prosperity which they had earlier enjoyed. The 1790s were to see the collapse of the old republic in the face of invading French armies. And the subsequent years of war, military occupation and revolution would have the effect of interrupting or permanently breaking some of the Low Countries' traditional ties with Scotland.43. Yet for much of the eighteenth century, as this essay has sought to show, those ties had remained close and productive, extending and broadening in some respects the affinities which had linked Scotland and Holland since the Reformation. Not only are such connexions a reminder that Scotland's age of improvement was part of - and to an extent the product of - a wider continental movement. They also serve to indicate the role which the Dutch Republic played in the European Enlightenment, both as a source of information and expertise and as a model of economic and social development. If it is true that by the later eighteenth century Scotland's intellectual and material achievements had given the country a new international importance and reputation, it is also true - and deserves to be more generally recognized - that the Netherlands, through their special links with Scotland, made a significant contribution to the building of that reputation.


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