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Oh, crikey, not sure if I can do this (religious history outside the UK is not really my forte). Uh. Huguenots are specifically French Calvinist Protestants, but the issue is muddied by the fact that they were persecuted for much of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the (Catholic and often Counter-Reforming) French administrations - and were exiled to the United Provinces and England (the Spitalfields silk workers were mostly of Huguenot descent).
The Dutch East India Company was an independent corporation of merchants who traded with the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) and the East Indies, taking out finished goods such as textiles and bringing back raw spices, which were extremely valuable at the time. The compnay functioned by establishing 'factories', i.e. trading posts - not colonies - which, though they were established by agreement with the local potentates, were under Dutch jurisdiction and were fortified, etc. So - yes, the company did function in much the same way as a corporation which has a plant in an EPZ... but they were trading companies rather than manufacturing companies or contractors, if that makes any sense. As for what heppened to the Dutch East India Company, I'm not sure, but I do know that after the early 1700s their trade declined dramatically as the trade of the English East India Company expanded.
Dutch Calvinists and being radical or reactionary. Gah. I think a common mistake here is to think that religious radicalism is the same as social radicalism, and it isn't... If you look at the (rather overstated, but they will serve) five points of Calvinism:
- that fallen man was totally unable to save himself (Total Depravity)
- that God's electing purpose was not conditioned by anything in man (Unconditional Election)
- that Christ's atoning death was sufficient to save all men, but efficient only for the elect (Limited Atonement)
- that the gift of faith, sovereignly given by God's Holy Spirit, cannot be resisted by the elect (Irresistible Grace)
- that those who are regenerated and justified will persevere in the faith (Perseverance of the saints)
... well, you can see that it is certainly radical when compared to the Catholic Church, but that its tenets could be used in a very conservative way among members of a community... because if one was a member of the elect, one was justified in maintaining the existing order, and also people who were not of the elect (the reprobate) were definitively damned... And moreover, a religios movement can be radical in terms of its opposition to the Roman Church (or whichever church you care to mention) by within itself it can be deeply conservative.
Does that help? I know it's not very clear, but it might be a start. |
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