The Netherlands pioneered every grotesque innovation that has now metastasized across the globe: corporate imperialism, financialized capitalism, industrialized slavery, and racial supremacy. Jul 09, 2025
The mythology of progress is written by victors who prefer their violence sanitized. While we rage against British imperialism, Spanish conquistadors, and American corporate plunder, we have collectively amnesia about the diminutive nation that pioneered the very architecture of our misery. The Netherlands—that quaint land of windmills, tulips, and (so-called) “progressive” politics—deserves far more recognition as the original architect of the systems that are killing us.
This is not about assigning blame to Dutch grandmothers riding bicycles through Amsterdam—my own Dutch grandmother once among them. As someone who is Dutch myself and loves many aspects of my society, this critique comes from a place of reckoning, not hatred. This is about understanding how a nation smaller than West Virginia became the laboratory for every grotesque innovation that would later metastasize across the globe: corporate imperialism, financialized capitalism, industrialized slavery, and the bureaucratic machinery of white supremacy.
The First Global Empire
Before Britain ruled the waves, before any European power could claim global dominance, there were the Dutch. By 1652, this nation of fewer than two million people—today's Netherlands has 18 million—had become the world's first truly global colonial superpower. While other European nations were still focused on regional expansion, the Dutch had already figured out how to turn the entire planet into their extraction zone.
The numbers are staggering: at its height, the Dutch Empire spanned six continents with colonies and trading posts from New Amsterdam (now New York) to the Cape of Good Hope, from the spice islands of Indonesia to the sugar plantations of Brazil. They didn't just participate in global trade—they invented it. Dutch ships carried a third of all European trade, and Amsterdam became the world's financial capital centuries before London or New York achieved that status.
This wasn't accidental. The Dutch pioneered the technologies of global domination: advanced shipbuilding, sophisticated financial instruments, and most importantly, the corporate-state hybrid that could project violence across oceans while maintaining the fiction of private enterprise. They proved that a small nation could rule the world through superior organization, technological innovation, and most importantly: ruthless systematic brutality.
Every empire that followed—British, French, American—was essentially copying the Dutch playbook, just with bigger populations.
