Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders

This full-length tragicomedy in three acts explores the thematic opposition between traditional Dutch commercial and republican virtue, and the speculative corruption of 1720. Set in Amsterdam at the height of the “wind trade” that inflated the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, as well as local Dutch speculative bubbles, the play dramatizes both market mania and intergenerational conflict between parent and child, with a predictable victory for the younger generation. In this instance, Hillegond, daughter of the merchant Bonaventure, loves a sensible, virtuous young man named Hendrik, but she is also pursued by Windbag, a pompous, self-important speculator in bubble shares. Windbag is a French popinjay blown ashore from Paris and London by the shifting winds of speculation. Bonaventure is dazzled by Windbag’s fortune and is drawn into the speculative activity, but his brother, Noble-Heart, prefers Hendrik, who personifies the native steadfastness of the Dutch character. Hendrik’s name recalls the wise Prince Frederik Hendrik (a ruler associated with proclamations opposing uncontrolled speculation). At the close of the play Bonaventure faces the prospect of financial ruin, but he is rescued from his own imprudence by his brother, who buys back the “futures” contracts that had threatened to undo him. Noble-Heart counts the cost of this financial rescue as a trifle compared to the value of preserving the family’s honour and its credit or reputation.

Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans

In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. This book tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. The book brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion, and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights, and the public good. The book shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets — in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.

The Eighteenth-Century Debate

This chapter explores the reasons as to why the inherited complex of ideas concerning republican virtue and its place in social time was transmitted into the eighteenth century in the form so little changed and yet so radically challenged. It shows that the American Revolution and Constitution in some sense form the last act of the civic Renaissance, and that the ideas of the civic humanist tradition provide an important key to the paradoxes of modern tensions between individual self-awareness on the one hand and consciousness of society, property, and history on the other. The American founders occupied a “Machiavellian moment”—a crisis in the relations between personality and society, virtue and corruption—but at the same time stood at a moment in history when that problem was being either left behind or admitted insoluble.