The Guilded Age: Protectionism by Free Trade in the Revolutionary Dutch Republic during the Age of Enlightenment

In the popular and scholarly imagination, free trade has long been associated with laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberal economics. Yet, as this paper argues, the origins of free trade thinking preceded those phenomena, by decades if not centuries. Surveying the political-economic theories and practices of Dutch revolutionaries in the Age of Enlightenment, this paper demonstrates how demands for free trade went hand-in-hand with protectionist economic ideas and institutions, predominantly local guilds. For political-economic thinkers, merchants, and artisans in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, domestic industries needed to be propped up to protect them from international competition. At the same time, they defined free trade as largely the uninhibited passing of merchant ships to and from free ports with minimal government intervention. The combination of protectionism at home and liberalism abroad, they argued, would revitalize the economy of the Dutch Golden Age.