The Dutch Revolt is still seen primarily as an urban affair. Its result was the establishment of a republican state dominated by urban merchants who from the security of “Holland’s Garden” managed to branch out into the seventeenth-century world. Recent historiography, however, has convincingly shown that especially the peasantry paid a high price for Dutch success in its War of Independence. The central argument of this lecture is that Dutch peasants not simply suffered the customary consequences of early-modern warfare, but also a ruthlessly efficient, city led campaign for the capitalist transformation of the countryside.