Soon after arriving in Amsterdam in the early 1980s I found myself at the opening of a show by the then controversial gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The show sold well, and the party moved next door to a shabby canal house. Looking for the bathroom, I stumbled down a marble corridor, one wall of which was decorated by an extremely good copy of a 17th-century Dutch master. On my return I remarked on it to my hostess. She gave me a look that made me feel very much an out-of-towner. It was not a copy but a commission by her ancestor, who had built this house, in which her family had been living for nearly 400 years.
It was an excellent introduction to the social and economic continuities underlying Amsterdam history, another Amsterdam light years from the tourist city of coffee shops and brothels.
Russell Shorto is the author of a bestselling history of early New York, and this makes him an apt chronicler of Amsterdam. New York started life as New Amsterdam, and Amsterdam, in its wealth and cosmopolitanism, was the New York of the 17th century. It had all started a few hundred years before, when a few eel fishermen built a dam across the River Amstel in a marshy corner of northeast Europe.
The village of Amsterdam had no obvious economic, ecclesiastical or military importance. People joined together in so-called waterschappen, or water boards (which still exist), digging canals to drain the land, and erecting dikes to protect the settlement from the ever-present threat of the sea. Many commentators see this ongoing necessity for communal work and planning, and the special social sensibility this induces, as forming the basis of Amsterdam society, which paradoxically nourished its assertion of individual liberty.
Struggle against tyranny
Shorto's very readable book is not a comprehensive history of the city but a thesis, arguing that the city gave birth to many of the ideas of tolerance and liberalism that we are still fighting about.
The little fishing village began to thrive by exporting the humble herring, and was soon an important trading centre, dealing in herring, timber, grain and beer with the Hanseatic cities. As it grew into a powerful city state it joined the Dutch bid for freedom against Catholic Spain. This bloody struggle against tyranny, over hundreds of years, strongly influenced Amsterdam attitudes to individual liberty. Then, over the course of barely a century, it’s as if the world we call modern suddenly came into being in this unlikely city.
It started, Shorto argues, in 1594 with the foundation, in a backstreet wine shop, of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – the United East India Company – the world’s first global corporation. Soon it had become – and remained for hundreds of years – one of the most successful. Amsterdam’s golden age had begun. It turned Amsterdam into the warehouse of the world, trading in everything from pepper to porcelain, textiles to tea, on a huge scale.
The wealth generated was unprecedented, and this created a whole new culture of consumerism and domestic life. The world’s first stock exchange was built there in 1611, and Shorto adds, almost breathlessly, within a couple of years we had it all: “call options, repos, futures contracts, short selling, naked short selling.”
His argument is that what we now call liberalism is inextricably tied to the kind of free-trade capitalism that Amsterdam pioneered. Soon the city began to reflect this wealth, with the layout of the inner circle of canals and the construction of the canal houses that still dominate our image of Amsterdam.
But, remarkably, the fabulously wealthy merchant and the ordinary craftsman lived in roughly the same kind of single-family house, in the same area.
This sense of egalitarianism and abhorrence of tyranny, coupled with huge wealth, was a magnet for immigrants, both economic and political. Remarkably, in the 17th century, 30 per cent of all books published in the world were published in Amsterdam, out of reach of kings and popes.
But Shorto skates over the fact that religious tolerance largely meant tolerance between Protestant sects. The Sephardic Jews who settled there were a separate, self-governing community who were quick to excommunicate the philosopher Baruch Spinoza when he started to rock the boat.
Catholics would have to wait until the 19th century to become completely equal citizens. Catholic emancipation led to the so-called pillarisation system, whereby Dutch society was organised on a confessional basis, a kind of Lebanon. Protestants, Catholics, liberals and socialists had separate schools, newspapers and, eventually, television stations.
Amsterdam suffered terribly during the Nazi occupation, but it set about reinventing itself with its usual vigour, and by the 1960s it was again becoming unique in the world. Building on the traditional freedoms, the counterculture that petered out elsewhere became the dominant culture here. Not so much freedom of religion as freedom from religion. This is what made it so attractive to immigrants like myself. This was a society whose unofficial motto was niets hoeft en alles mag: nothing is compulsory, everything is allowed. But, like Concorde, it flew too high, too fast.
Rejection of values
On September 11th, 2001, all changed. I went to my office in a Moroccan district, and saw the spontaneous parties in the cafes, celebrating the destruction of buildings on the site of Amsterdam's 17th-century colony. Amsterdammers discovered a group of people in their midst who had not integrated into their society, and who reject its values.
In 2004 my neighbour and sometime colleague Theo van Gogh was butchered on an Amsterdam street because he had made a film offensive to Islam. And the demographics have changed: Amsterdam, like Rotterdam, now has a population where half are "non-Dutch". Under such circumstances, integration and multiculturalism have become elusive. Already, Dutch commentators are saying that the best that can be achieved now is "mutual acceptance". Amsterdam may yet again be leading the way in Europe.
Michael O'Loughlin, author of In This Life, lived in Amsterdam from 1982 to 2002.
