Josiah Child arguing against guild regulation of cloth (quoted in Lipson, Hist., p., 118, q.v.): "if we intend to have the trade of the world we must imitate the Dutch." And so they did, in many things: naval, financial, etc.
British imitation of Dutch in late 17th C. Defeat in the Solent? Other reasons? Puritans. Cf. New England: internal colonization by non-conformists. Much larger than New England. But small.
England was just acquiring an admiration for a bourgeois version of the virtues as Holland came to its height. ... Sprat writes of how commendable it is that "The merchants of England live honorably in foreign parts" (my italics), while "those of Holland meanly, minding their gain alone." Shameful. "Ours [have] in their behavior very much the gentility of the families from which so many of them are descended. The others when they are abroad show that they are only a race of plain citizens." Appallingly plain bourgeois, those Dutch. Perhaps, Sprat notes, that is "one of the reasons they can so easily undersell us." It may be.