“While the most considerable nations in Europe found it necessary, from the circumstances which I have mentioned, to remain inactive spectators of what passed in the East, the seven United Provinces of the Low Countries, recently formed into a small state, still struggling for political existence, and yet in the infancy of its power, ventured to appear in the Indian Ocean as the rivals of the Portuguese; and, despising their pretensions to an exclusive right of commerce with the extensive countries to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope, invaded that monopoly which they had hitherto guarded with such jealous attention.  The English soon followed the example of the Dutch, and both nations, at first by the enterprizing industry of private adventurers, and afterwards by the more powerful efforts of trading companies, under the protection of public authority, advanced with astonishing ardour and success in this new career opened to them.  The vast fabric of power which the Portuguese had opened in the East, (a superstructure much too large for the basis on which it had to rest) was almost entirely overturned in as short time, and with as much facility, as it had been raised.  England and Holland, by driving them from their most valuable settlements, and seizing the most lucrative branches of their trade, have attained to that pre-eminence of naval power and commercial opulence by which they are distinguished among the nations of Europe.”  (Robertson’s India, pp. 177-9. 8vo. edition.)

Before, however, we advert to the commerce of the Dutch in India, it will be proper to notice those circumstances which gave a commercial direction to the people of the Netherlands, both before their struggle with Spain, and while the result of that struggle was uncertain.  The early celebrity of Bruges as a commercial city has already been noticed; its regular fairs in the middle of the tenth century; its being made the entrepot of the Hanse Association towards the end of the thirteenth.  It naturally partook of the wealth and commercial improvement which Flanders derived from her woollen manufactures, and was in fact made the emporium of that country at the beginning of the fourteenth century; and within 100 years afterwards, the staple for English and Scotch goods.  When the increased industry of the north of Europe induced and enabled its inhabitants to exchange the produce of their soil, fisheries, and manufactures, for the produce of the south of Europe, and of India, Bruges was made the great entrepot of the trade of Europe.  In the beginning of the sixteenth century its commercial importance began to decline, but the trade which left it, did not pass beyond the limits of the Netherlands; it settled in a great measure at Antwerp, which, as being accessible by sea, was more convenient for commerce than Bruges.  This city, however, would not have fallen so easily or rapidly before its rival, had it not been distracted by civil commotions.  From it the commerce of the Netherlands, and with it of the north of Europe, and the interchange of its commodities with those of the south of Europe and of Asia, gradually passed to Antwerp; and about the year 1516, most of the trade of Bruges was fixed here, the Portuguese making it their entrepot for the supply of the northern kingdoms.