Dutch and British Exceptionalism
John Merriman argues that the turmoil of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) led many members of the nobility and upper classes to agree to the terms of monarchy and absolute rule in exchange for a restoration of public order, protection against popular insurrection, and peasant uprisings, and the recognition of noble privilege. For example, the ancien régime in France describes this era where religious and other conventions supported a social and political order that glorified the king as protector and subjugated the peasants and lower classes. These monarchies routinely ignored any parliaments or government assemblies. However, in England and the Netherlands, the parliament refused to be ignored. These countries each had a growing influential commercial middle-class population, a large number of property owners, a strong urban population, a small nobility, and a decentralized police force and army. Both resisted the power of the Catholic church based in Rome in favor of more local control. Historical and intellectual elements of the Enlightenment contributed to revolutionary processes across the world. These changes and revolutions all contributed to the rise of modernity (which we explore below). Watch this lecture, which discusses how and why both England and Holland rejected absolutist rule.
Several reasons can be found to explain why Great Britain and the Netherlands did not follow the other major European powers of the seventeenth century in adopting absolutist rule. Chief among these were the presence of a relatively large middle class, with a vested interest in preserving independence from centralized authority, and national traditions of resistance dating from the English Civil War and the Dutch war for independence from Spain, respectively. In both countries anti-absolutism formed part of a sense of national identity, and was linked to popular anti-Catholicism. The officially Protestant Dutch, in particular, had a culture of decentralized mercantile activity far removed from the militarism and excess associated with the courts of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great.
Source: John Merriman, https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-202/lecture-3
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