In 1596, the wind-powered sawmill was introduced to the Zaan region north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and within decades the Zaandam area had become the world's first industrial zone, with hundreds of windmills sawing timber for the Dutch East India Company's (VOC) shipbuilding programme. The efficiency of wind-powered sawmilling allowed the Dutch to build ships at a fraction of the cost and time of their competitors, directly enabling the VOC to become the world's first joint-stock company and the most powerful trading empire of the seventeenth century. This industrialisation of wind power represented a decisive leap from craft production to early industrial capitalism.

The Dutch Golden Age of commerce that wind-powered sawmills helped create also produced a Golden Age of arts and letters: the poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel, often called the Dutch Shakespeare, wrote his greatest works during precisely this period of Zaandam-powered prosperity. The VOC's global trading network, physically built by wind-sawn timber, brought non-European manuscripts, languages, and poetic forms into Dutch literary circulation. The industrial windmill became a symbol of Dutch civic virtue and ingenuity in the emblem literature and occasional poetry of the seventeenth century.