Jasper’s Wardrobe

1. Fernand Braudel published volume two of the extremely influential Civilization and Capitalism in 1979. In it he shows Amsterdam and The Dutch Republic as the commercial and financial center of Europe between roughly 1550 and 1700. 
2. Habermas' traces the public sphere to post-1688 England. He also views financial capitalism, and the power of the Bourgeois class as emerging at this place and time. We now know that Financial Capitalism has a much longer European history starting with the city states Venice and Genoa in the south and migrating to the Spanish Empire's financial center in Flemish Antwerp, and from there to the Amsterdam in the 1500's.
3. The Dutch republic was unique in being a pragmatic confederation of City States without a centralized government, devoted to Commercial Empire and Laissez Faire economic policies. Without a strong state, heresy and innovation blossomed
4. Holland became the European center of printing in Europe from 1585 until the rise of Capitalist London in the 1700's. Dutch printers were skilled at evading censorship. They built an industry around printing banned and heretical books in foreign languages and then smuggling them into autocratic states like England and France. In france the phrase "Dutch Books" literally meant banned books.
5. Holland functioned as a viral host for dangerous ideas from the margins. In the world of ideas this Dieism, Pantheism, Christian Rationalism and even Atheism. Science, Art, Heresy and Commerce flourished. This is the true beginnings of the European Enlightenment.
6. The Spinozaist Public formed in Europe around the banned books of of Baruch Spinoza, written in the 1670's. Spinoza inspired atheism was being debated behind closed doors in many parts of Europe. Conservatives had a great moral panic and Spinoza became a byword for subversion.
7. Monarchists and and Orthodox Calvinists took control of the Netherlands in a Junta in 1672, which resulted in a purge of many of the key supporters of the republic in Holland, and the installation of the Gereral/Prince William III as hereditary leader of the Dutch Armies. 
8. After the successful Dutch Naval Invasion of England during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 William III and his Wife Mary as King and Queen of Britain. Parliament forced William to concede a great deal of Royal Authority to Parliament as a condition for his enthronement as King. 
9. At the same time as William III's clique sucked the life out of the Dutch Republic, he presided over the great English Enlightenment Liberalizations of 1688-1700 which lifted the autocratic yoke on expression, reason, religion and commerce. 
10. London became the most disruptive european cultural-economic center while the Dutch Republic faded under the Authoritarian Stranglehold of the House of Orange, and its allies the orthodox Calvinist Church. 

Jonathan Israel scholarship along with that of Braudel is responsible for "rediscovering" the Dutch Republic. Dutch history was written by the Dutch Constitutional Monarchists. It took an outsider like Israel to put the Dutch back at the center of the Enlightenment and the birst of Modernity.

google book of Israel's Book on Spinoza and the Early Radical Enlightenment