Struggle with the Dutch.
From 1689 to 1763, this struggle is marked by an almost continuous war between France and England. An earlier generation, however, witnessed a similar struggle between Holland and England. This earlier struggle is also vitally important in the history of North America. Few students of American history are aware of the unprecedented growth of the Dutch maritime power during the first half of the seventeenth century. To most of them the founding of New Netherlands is an isolated fact, comparatively unimportant because the Dutch colony ultimately fell into the hands of the English. The fact nevertheless remains that throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century the carrying trade of the world was in the hands of the Dutch and Amsterdam was the exchange of the world. What Venice had been in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam became in the seventeenth.
“To break this monopoly was England’s object; and to raise his country to a position of leadership in the commercial world was one of the greatest ambitions of Cromwell.” (Andrew’s “Colonial Self Government,” p. 11; see also p. 15). In 1651, at the instance of Cromwell, Parliament passed the first Navigation Act, “for the increase of the shipping and the encouragement of the navigation of this [the English] nation.” In the light of later events, we in America are too apt to regard this act and its successors as designed to limit the trade of the colonies. As a matter of fact, a sufficient study of these acts, especially those of 1651 and 1660, will show that they were aimed directly at the Dutch who were at the time the maritime carriers both for England and for the other nations of Europe.