Native wool could not keep up with demand, and the Flemings imported English wool in great quantities. A tradition of cloth manufacture in the Low Countries existed from antiquity when the Celts and then the Franks continued an active textile industry learned from the Romans.Īs demand grew early textile production moved from its rural origins to the cities and had become, by the twelfth century, an essentially urban industry. An indigenous cloth industry was present throughout all areas of Europe in the early medieval period, but Flanders was the first to develop the industry with great intensity.
For centuries, Flanders and to a lesser extent Brabant had been at the forefront of the medieval European economy. In many respects the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic inherited the economic successes of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. The Economy of the Netherlands up to the Sixteenth Century Taking advantage of a favorable agricultural base, the Dutch achieved success in the fishing industry and the Baltic and North Sea carrying trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before establishing a far-flung maritime empire in the seventeenth century. In just over one hundred years, the provinces of the Northern Netherlands went from relative obscurity as the poor cousins of the industrious and heavily urbanized Southern Netherlands provinces of Flanders and Brabant to the pinnacle of European commercial success. The Dutch Economy in the Golden Age (16th – 17th Centuries)ĭonald J.
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