What made the Dutch Golden Age possible?

A new financial machine. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, was the first joint-stock company with permanent transferable shares - investors could sell their stake to someone else rather than waiting for a voyage to conclude, which meant capital could be raised on a scale and a timescale nobody had managed before. The Amsterdam exchange grew up to trade those shares and became the first stock market.

Everything else followed from having capital and being able to move it. The Dutch Republic was small, largely without natural resources, and became the richest society in Europe - with a merchant class rather than an aristocracy buying art, which is why Dutch painting of the period is full of landscapes, domestic interiors and ordinary people rather than saints and kings. Rembrandt and Vermeer were selling to shopkeepers and brewers.

The company was also a state in everything but name, with the right to wage war, sign treaties, mint money and execute people. It did all of them - a monopoly maintained by violence in the Banda Islands amounted to the near-extermination of the population for control of nutmeg. The first modern corporation and the first corporate atrocity arrived together, which is worth holding alongside the paintings.