Patrick O\u27Brien, Derek Keene, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 361 pp. ISBN 0521594081

Stewart, Alan

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature
Volume 4
Number 2 Spring 2004 Article 5
Spring 2004
Review of Patrick O'Brien, Derek Keene, eds.
Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe:
Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London.
Alan Stewart
Columbia University
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Recommended Citation
Stewart, Alan (2004). Review of "Review of Patrick O'Brien, Derek Keene, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden
Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London.," Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature: Vol. 4 : No. 2
Available at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol4/iss2/5
 
 
BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2004) 
Patrick O'Brien, Derek Keene, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden 
Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 
361 pp. ISBN 0521594081.  
Reviewed by Alan Stewart, Columbia University 
This collection derives from a Renaissance Trust project set up by Gerry Martin in 1990 with a 
mission to provide a network for scholars to pursue, in a series of conferences, meetings and 
seminars, an investigation into "Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early 
Modern Europe." The project, which lasted five years, produced four volumes of essays, of 
which this was the third to be published; a final report on its activities was published in 1996. 
The present collection, although lacking the contributions of several French academics involved 
in the two conferences that inspired it, nonetheless still features an admirable range of work from 
scholars active in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United 
States—testament to a rare and laudable group initiative that no doubt greatly enhanced the 
research of the individuals involved, and that has produced this useful and interesting book of 
essays that are, in their own right, uniformly knowledgeable, clearly written and eminently 
readable. 
From the outset, however, two major methodological issues pose themselves as challenges to 
which Urban Achievement has only partial answers. The collection claims to be a comparative 
study of the so-called "golden ages" of three northern European cities in the early modern period: 
Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Yet its design gravitates against its objectives. Its 
contributors, as might be expected, draw on their own single-city specialisms and make only 
occasional gestures toward comparative critical observations. It falls to the introduction of 
economic historian Patrick O'Brien to attempt some kind of comparative study, or at least 
synthesis, but the given terms of the enterprise produce oddly overdetermined results. As O'Brien 
concedes, the very idea of a "golden age" is problematic—not in itself a historical fact or even 
common opinion, but rather a trope that structures many narratives of "the rise, decline and 
revival of cities" (5). There are many European cities that might feasibly have been included: 
O'Brien himself lists Genoa, Venice, Bruges, Florence, Milan, Brussels, Hamburg, Bordeaux and 
Paris. But the very selection of these three particular cities evokes another narrative: Fernand 
Braudel's broadly "mercantilist" model which sees hegemony moving in the period from the 
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, albeit not smoothly or directly, from Antwerp to 
Amsterdam to London. A more pointed critical enquiry might have been to examine the tacit 
premises of this selection.  
According to O'Brien, the book seeks to answer a question posed to the collective enterprise by 
Gerry Martin: "Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of 
endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?" This question neatly 
elides another key problem: the book's title category of "achievement." For historians interested 
in comparative study, O'Brien concedes, "achievement" as a methodological tool proved to be "a 
more amorphous label" than more easily quantifiable outcomes such as crime rates, rising 
productivity, and the status of women." Levels of achievement (however defined) for other areas 
of endeavor," O'Brien admits, "emerged as far more difficult to aggregate, pinpoint and weigh." 
In fact, it could be argued that "achievement" is difficult to define in any historical study, 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2004) 
comparative or not. How does one judge achievement? Tellingly, the book's chosen fields of 
focus and knowledge—more generally, book-publishing, art, and architecture—are neither 
explained nor justified in the otherwise cautious and comprehensive introduction. O'Brien 
merely asserts that each golden age was preceded and accompanied by "cultural reordering" 
which manifested itself in "intense rivalries and quests for identities along all the 'frontiers' of 
artistic, architectural, scientific as well as economic endeavor that divided Protestant from 
Catholic communities throughout post-Reformation Europe" (17). It is taken for granted that 
these are symptoms of "achievement" (and specifically "urban achievement"). It is significant 
that in an introduction that is otherwise cautious and comprehensive no need is felt to justify this 
Burckhardtian linking of economic supremacy with artistic flowering—an assumption that has 
received its share of critical rethinking elsewhere recently.  
This is not to say that the parameters of "achievement" adopted by the collection are necessarily 
misguided, as is signalled by the narratives of the economic growth and demographic change of 
the three cities neatly recapitulated in essays by Michael Limberger (Antwerp), Clé Lesger 
(Amsterdam) and Peter Earle (London). They identify the obvious common features of the cities: 
all three are ports on inland waterways; all were centers of European trade and finance; during 
their periods of economic prosperity, all were leading cultural centers. All three examine local 
and internal factors (type of harbor, proximity to certain trades and trade routes), as well as 
external factors, such as international political and religious issues. Limberger emphasizes that, 
during Antwerp's golden age, not only did the city's market grow quantitatively, but "important 
qualitative improvements in organization and improvement also took place," such as the spread 
of share-companies, trade on commission and commercial bills, the opening of an exchange, and 
improvements in commercial insurance. Lesger focuses on Amsterdam's simultaneous leading 
roles in trade and shipping, and in "the manufacture of luxury goods, in printing and publishing, 
in cartography, in science and technology, in learning and the arts" (63). Earle, recognizing that 
London has had many potential golden ages, nevertheless sees 1660-1730 as the period when 
England's capital stopped being effectively an economic satellite of Antwerp, or in the shadow of 
Amsterdam, and when "what the Elizabethans had initiated was achieved and London became 
the equal of Amsterdam as a trading centre" (81).  
What remains consistent through these survey chapters is the way in which contemporaries 
viewed each of the cities during its particular golden age. When the late sixteenth century's 
preeminent printer, the Frenchman Christopher Plantin, explained to Pope Gregory XIII why he 
had opted to settle in Antwerp, he wrote, "no town in the world provides more advantages for the 
profession I wanted to pursue. It is easy to get there, one sees different countries get together at 
the market; one also finds all the raw materials which are indispensable for my craft; for all 
professions, there is no problem in finding labourers who can be instructed within a short time" 
(59). Amsterdam was observed to be 
one of the cities with the greatest trade that there is in the world, whether by the amount of 
money remitted by its merchants and bankers to all foreign countries, or by the almost infinite 
number of commodities with which its warehouses are filled, and which come in and go out 
unceasingly in the commerce which she carries on, even to the ends of the earth. (63-4) 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2004) 
What is identified here is the multicultural cosmopolitanism of the cities, inexorably linked to a 
rise in foreign (especially long-haul) trade, heightened market and banking opportunities, peaks 
in the availability of both raw materials and other commodities—and the concomitant lure of 
such financial success to strangers. If "achievement" needed a working definition, these 
observations—reflecting the understanding of contemporaries rather than the entrenched 
categories and disciplinary specialisms of historians—might be the best place to start. 
Following these sketches of the three main players, the book's final four sections focus on 
architecture and urban space; fine and decorative arts; books and publishing; and "scientific and 
useful knowledge." Here again, within the given subject areas, each city is represented by a 
discrete essay, and comparative deduction is largely left to the reader. Sometimes, the focus of 
the essays will helpfully suggest differences: Piet Lombaerde plays up Antwerp's reputation as 
"one of the best fortified [cities] in Europe," while Marjolein 't Hart is more concerned with 
Amsterdam's emergent "monumentalism" following the Alteratie of 1578. But a common thread 
emerges in the authors' various emphases on the market economy: Marten Jan Bok's 
understanding of "Amsterdam as a cultural centre," for example, rests as much on its reputation 
as "a market for paintings" as on the art itself; while Paul Hoftijzer's elevation of the same city as 
a "metropolis of print" is as interested in Amsterdam's book trade as in its intellectual 
contributions to European life; Geert Vanpaemel's study of Antwerp's "metropolitan stimulus for 
scientific achievements" is tellingly titled "science for sale," while Larry Stewart's account of 
Restoration London's "coffee-house and experiment" culture is dubbed "philosophers in the 
counting house." In other essays, Judi Loach examines the possibilities for the architecture and 
urban space of London after the Great Fire of 1666; Hans Vlieghe and David Ormrod explore the 
fine and decorative arts of Antwerp and London respectively; Werner Waterschoot and Adrian 
Johns pinpoint the publishing trends of a trendsetting pre-1585 Antwerp and a Restoration 
London "steeped in the printed word"; and Karel Davids provides a survey of Amsterdam's long 
tenure as a center of learning from 1580 to 1700.  
While all the chapters are valuable essays in their own right, they generously signal directions for 
further reading through their footnotes, and thus are clearly designed to provide convenient entry 
points into further reading on their subjects. There is a great deal here to admire and savor; at the 
very least, the juxtaposition of work on the three cities forces the reader to identify continuities 
and differences between these golden ages. While the comparative study ambitions of this 
collection are by its very nature and format somewhat curtailed, its model of thoughtful and 
collaborative scholarship will hopefully be repeated and pushed further in future ventures. 
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Review of Patrick O\u27Brien, Derek Keene, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London.

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Review of Patrick O\u27Brien, Derek Keene, eds. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London.

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