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.
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