Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Dutch Golden Age lasted roughly from 1588, when the Dutch Republic was established, to 1672, the year the Dutch called the Rampjaar or disaster year. The period spans approximately eighty years of commercial, cultural, and scientific dominance.
The VOC, or Dutch East India Company, was founded in 1602 and became one of the first multinational corporations in history. Financed through shares that established the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, it held a monopoly on Asian trade for two centuries and became the largest commercial enterprise of the seventeenth-century world.
It is estimated that more than 550,000 people were brought to the Americas in slavery by Dutch ships during the Golden Age period. Across the broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, approximately 1.7 million people were enslaved by Dutch slavers.
In a 2019 exhibition, the Amsterdam Museum announced it would stop using the phrase. Artistic director Margriet Schavemaker stated that the term is the story of the winners and hides the colonial past of the Netherlands, including slavery and poverty. Several other Dutch museums followed the museum's lead.
Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) invented the pendulum clock and explained Saturn's rings. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ground lenses as small as one millimetre in diameter and became the first person to describe bacteria, founding the field of microbiology. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) developed the concept of freedom of the seas and a framework for international law.
The Mothertrade, or Moedernegotie, was the Dutch trade with the Baltic states and Poland in bulk goods such as grain and timber. By stockpiling these essentials in Amsterdam, the republic protected itself from the famines that repeatedly struck France and England, and it profited when those famines occurred.