"O Thou Great God of Trade, O Subject of my Song!": Dutch Poems on Trade, 1770–1830

Between 1770 and 1830, the Dutch urgently sought to remedy their nation's economic decline. Not only learned societies supplied suggestions, but poets did so too. Around fifteen remarkably lengthy poems were published during this period that sang the praises of trade and its history. In these poems, trade was put forward as a central economic force and the wellspring of prosperity, happiness, equality, and the global commonwealth. In reaction to the ongoing decline of commerce, the poems elevated trade to the level of God or Nature, presenting trade as the primum movens of human civilization, uncontrollable by human agency.