The Dutch are truly magnificent. Amsterdam had the first stock market, the first proto-central bank, and the first widespread ownership of a publicly traded company (although tradable shares in common ventures had existed before). Their Golden Age spawned some of humanity’s best art, their mastery of the sea is to this day astonishing, and one of the oldest financial contracts still paying interest belongs to a Dutch water company. Clearly, something grand was happening in the early 1600s in the Low Countries. …

In total, the early capitalist example of the Dutch wasn’t mainly connected to the Reformation or Protestantism. Dutch capitalism is hundreds of years older: “[T]he market economy in combination with large-scale wage labor was emerging as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thus long before the Reformation.” Prak and van Zanden show that “capitalism in tandem with republicanism had brought about numerous changes, but that those changes did not necessarily lead to an erosion of civil society, nor to a deterioration in the living conditions of ordinary people.”

[For those inclined to think of innovation, liberty, and capitalism as a Scots-English development, this essay is worth reading. — Ed]