The Politics of International Trade Rivalry during the Thirty Years War: Gabriel de Roy and Olivares' Mercantilist Projects, 1621–1645

Abstract

Among the main strategic aims of the Spanish monarchy during the age of Olivares none was more relentlessly pursued, at all stages, than the effort to curtail and undermine Dutch economic power both in Europe and in the rest of the world. By the later years of the Twelve Years Truce ( 1609-21 ), the Dutch were seen in Madrid not just as rebels and heretics but as subverters of the world economic order and colonial system. The continued blocking of the Scheldt, paralysing the seaborne trade of the Spanish Netherlands; Dutch dominance of Baltic commerce and of the supply of northern products to Spain, Portugal, and Italy; Dutch colonial expansion in the Far East, Caribbean, and Africa : all this was seen as an affront and an insidious danger to the monarchy, a drain on its resources which could no longer be tolerated.1 From the moment Dutch ships and goods were banned by royal decree from Spain, Portugal, and Spanish southern Italy in April 1621, Philip IV's ministers set to work to extend, refine, and intensify their grandiose programme of economic war against the Dutch. This vast process comprised not only a system of interlocking embargoes on Dutch products and Dutch-owned merchandise of any sort throughout the Spanish empire; a new customs machinery in Spain, Portugal, and Flanders; and the river blockade of the Dutch Republic mounted in the years 1625-9; but also a series of measures designed to replace the Dutch as the main trading partners of the monarchy with the Hansa towns of North Germany (together with the commercial and industrial towns of the Spanish Netherlands) and to regenerate Spain's own colonial trade and that of Portugal.2 Together, the total package of Spanish mercantilist