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In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was likely the wealthiest city in the world. Global trade and local industry financed its artistic masterpieces and furnished the abundant foods and household goods that Dutch painters immortalized in still lifes and domestic scenes.

But material abundance and industrial activities also heightened an ancient danger: they added fuel to the flames of urban fires.

‘People of all ranks owned more clothes and furnishings. Curtains became far more common: easily set alight by a carelessly positioned candle, they were the source of many fires that then spread to wooden furniture and walls’, writes historian David Garrioch .

If its homes were vulnerable, Amsterdam’s factories, workshops, and piers were in even greater peril. Maintaining all those ships required stores of highly combustible pitch, tar, turpentine, and hemp. Soap makers, bakeries, sail makers, saw mills, cloth printers, picture frame makers, and the occasional alchemist contributed their own fire hazards. So did the burgeoning industries of brewing, printing, resin making, and sugar refining.

Yet Amsterdam avoided the disastrous equivalent of London’s Great Fire of 1666. In the last three decades of the century, in fact, the toll from fires dropped dramatically. Behind this improvement lay a culture of inventiveness and, just as important, what we today might call state capacity.

In the 1660s, the city purchased dozens of large water-pumping engines from Hans Hautsch , an inventor in Nuremberg. Dragged to the scene by a horse, each engine had a cistern whose water was manually pumped into a metal pipe capped by a nozzle. By 1670, about 60 of these engines were distributed around the city, along with ladders, hooks, tarpaulins, and more than 28,000 leather buckets. Members of four guilds – inland sailors, peat carriers, beer carriers, and grain weighers – were charged with fighting fires in their districts.