"Regenten" (Gentlemanly) Capitalism: Saint-Simonian Technocracy and the Emergence of the "Industrialist Great Club" in the Mid-nineteenth Century Netherlands

The geometric pattern of Amsterdam's canals was iconic of its nineteenth-century social order. The spider's web of canals fanned out along the Amstel river in concentric rings, its barge traffic linking the city to its hinterland, the province of Holland, and to the wider Netherlands of which it is the nominal capital. These canals divided the "Venice of the North" into ninety islands linked by more than a thousand bridges. Imposing aristocratic and merchant houses stretched along the innermost canal ring, the Golden Curve of the Gentleman's Canal. At the center of the web lay de Dam, the 200 m long market square built on the first medieval dike protecting the city from the encroaching sea. The three pillars of the Dutch state framed the market square: the Royal Palace of the Merchant King, the Dutch Reformed New Church, and in the nineteenth century, the Amsterdam stock market, the world's oldest exchange. By the century's end, the site of the stock exchange was to become Industria, the majestic home of the Industrialist Great Club. This article traces the transformation of these aristocratic financiers into Saint-Simonian-inspired industrialists under the leadership of their Merchant King over the course of the nineteenth century, as they replaced this network of canals with an equally dense national network of railways. These gentlemanly capitalists staged a "coup d'corporation." Legitimated by a technocratic ideology they co-opted the corporate form utilized by the Crown to rule while avoiding parliamentary oversight, and thereby shifted the Dutch state from autocracy to oligarchy.