> I visited Amsterdam and was interested in their history and how it took off after the invention of the corporation.
I wonder if anyone has written a history of the Dutch economy that can be also accessible to non-Dutch readers (i.e. translated to either English or French or Spanish). From a very outside view (i.e. mine) the Dutch used to be a very entrepreneurial society/people in the 1600s going into the 1700s, but it seems that by the 1800s that spark had gone. They're of course still one of the most developed nations in Europe and in the world, but it looks like in terms of risk-taking they're the same as us, the rest of the Europeans, i.e. behind the Americans and I'd say even the Chinese.
As a similar example the Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla was blaming the wars and the associated pests/famines of the early 1600s for Italy's towns' fall into economic irrelevance. Not sure if they're easily accessible on the Internet, but in one of his books [1] he presents some charts where the population of entrepreneurial Italian cities of that time such as Firenze, Venice, Brescia, Lucca or Bergamo felt by more than 50% during 1600-1630 (give or take), which caused them not to be able to compete against Flemish and especially English clothes-related industry. I wonder if anything similar happened to the Dutch.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Before-Industrial-Revolution-European...