The Netherlands in the seventeenth century—its “Golden Age”—was a remarkable place. When the region declared independence from Spain, in the late sixteenth century, it became an unusual political entity, one led not by a hereditary aristocrat but by the heads of the seven provinces of the new Dutch Republic, united, during the seventeenth century, under a series of stadholders—the Princes of Orange, descendants of William the Silent, who threw off the Spanish yoke. (Dutch seventeenth-century history is, in fact, a lot more complicated than this, but that’s the general idea.) The stadholder selected municipal officials and was head of the Republic’s army and navy. Only a few old feudal landed nobles remained—there hadn’t been many in the first place—and there was no autocratic monarch, but the Republic was nevertheless a highly stratified society. The upper classes were, for the most part, newly wealthy merchants, investors in international trade, and appointed officials who sat on the governing boards of charitable organizations, served in largely honorary militias, and, when they became rich enough, bought estates and titles. There was a burgeoning educated middle class of ministers, notaries, and other professionals, along with shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen, and tradesman. And there were the lower classes: unskilled urban and rural laborers, and the poor, for whom the upper classes organized charities, assuming the recipients of this largesse were “deserving.”