Episode Details

England planted the colonies. The Dutch carried the goods — and kept the profit. By 1640 Dutch trade was double England's, run on three inventions no one could match: the first public bank, the first publicly traded company, and a cargo ship built to beat the tolls. Virginia tobacco, West Indies sugar, New England timber, all of it moving in Dutch hulls. This is the problem that built an empire, and the season that follows it from the side that held the power — Whitehall, the Crown, and the king's brother, James, Duke of York.

Three wars came of it. The English invented the line of battle; the Dutch admiral de Ruyter learned it and turned it against them, then sailed up the Thames and towed away the flagship named for the king. Samuel Pepys watched London panic and wrote that the Dutch had the best of us. Johan de Witt, the republican who believed in laws over men, was torn apart by a mob, and William of Orange rose in his place — a name England would meet again. England never won a battle that mattered. It won anyway, by law, with the Navigation Acts that closed the sea. And in solving the Dutch problem, it became the thing it had set out to beat — and was handed a city on the Hudson it would rename for the Duke of York.