DUTCH EMPIRE part 1

The first phase of Dutch overseas expansion was not an imperial one in the literal sense of the word. Only in 1816, at the Convention of London, was the newly founded Kingdom of the Netherlands granted back its overseas possessions: Java, the Moluccas, some factories in India, Malacca, Suriname, and six islands in the Caribbean. These overseas territories had belonged to the former Dutch East India Company, but were taken over by the British during the French occupation of the Netherlands. Before French revolutionary troops crossed the frozen rivers of the Netherlands in 1794, and the newly founded Batavia Republic became a vassal state of France, the Dutch overseas territories belonged to trading companies. They did not belong to the Dutch Republic, or more accurately, the Seven United Provinces. Until their bankruptcies at the end of the eighteenth century, the two maritime trading companies, the United East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) and the West India Company (WIC), administered the Dutch overseas colonies. Hence the overseas empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is called a seaborne empire, as it depended on chartered private maritime trading companies. Dutch overseas expansion took place under unfavorable political circumstances when the Dutch Republic

(founded in 1588) was at war with its overlord, Spain. In 1580, when Portugal became a subject of the Spanish crown, Dutch traders faced difficulties in purchasing fine spices in Lisbon. In 1585 and 1598 Spain confiscated all Dutch vessels visiting Iberian ports. After the Spanish conquest of the rebelling port town of Antwerp in 1585, investors moved their business to the northern Netherlands, to the port town of Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they made good profits in the sugar industry.Portuguese (Jewish) merchants, who had also fled to Amsterdam, were allowed to continue their imports from Brazil. Economically, times were favorable for overseas expansion. Dutch merchants doubled their trade with the Baltic during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Their large fleet, ship-building facilities, and investment capital could easily be used for an expansion into the transatlantic, African, and Asian trade. In addition, strong population growth in the northern Netherlands (in particular in the provinces of Holland and Zealand) provided the expanding emporium with a sufficient labor force.

In 1602 merchants from the wealthy port towns of Holland and Zealand founded the United East India Company (the VOC). This trading organization became the most effective European trading organization in Asia, and remained so until around the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1652 the VOC established a refitting station for its ships at the Cape of Good Hope. In the 1670s and 1680s this led to the first expansion into the interior, where settlers began to keep cattle and grow grapes for wine making on territory appropriated from the indigenous group, the Khoikhoi. In September of 1795, after almost 150 years of Dutch rule, the English took over the Castle of Cape Town; the Dutch permanently ceded the Cape at the London Convention of August 13, 1814. In the waters of the West Indies and West Africa, Dutch merchants and shippers could act freely until 1607. There was no specific need for a West India Company yet. Willem Usselincx, a Calvinist merchant who had fled from Antwerp to Holland, pleaded nevertheless for the establishment of Protestant colonies in the West Indies. In due time, these colonies would be able to attack and occupy Spanish overseas possessions, he believed. The articles of the Twelve Years Truce (1609–1621) stipulated that Dutch ships were allowed to frequent the Iberian ports again, but Spanish possessions in the West Indies were now forbidden territory. Despite the truce articles, Dutch traders continued to privateer and raid in the Caribbean waters. Trade and colonization were less important, but some small colonies were founded in the Amazons and Guyana. One of the successful tobacco and sugar plantations was Essequibo, founded by Aert Adriaenszn Groenewegen, whose daughter married a Native American chieftain. The Dutch West Indian Company, founded immediately after the end of the Twelve Years Truce on June 3, 1621, devoted itself primarily to attacking Spanish and Portuguese possessions and privateer ships. WIC fleets captured several costly Iberian ships; for example, in Cuba’s Matanzas Bay in 1628, ship commander Piet Hein captured cargo ships carrying silver valued at around 14 million Dutch guilders. The profits of privateering went partly to the stockholders who participated in the WIC, and partly toward the funding of large-scale operations aimed at conquering territory. In 1630 the WIC launched an attack on Pernambuco in Brazil, and seized Olinda and Recife. These important sugar ports were connected to a sugar-producing hinterland with many engenhocas (sugar factories). The Dutch conquered the great Portuguese fortress Sa˜o Jorge del Mina, or Elmina, in 1637. Because the sugar industry in the Dutch Republic had grown considerably thanks to illegal trade with Portugal during the Truce, Amsterdam traders in particular were interested in investing more money in sugar plantations. In 1622 there were twenty-nine sugar refineries in Holland, twenty-five of which were owned  by Amsterdam traders, whereas as recently as 1595 the total number of such factories totaled no more than three or four.

The sugar industry of Brazil gained new impetusunder the reign of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau, governor of Dutch Brazil from 1636 to 1644. He extended Dutch territory at the expense of the Portuguese settlers, but did not succeed in winning sufficient cooperation from the Portuguese in the seven of the twelve territories (capitanias) the Dutch had conquered.

Johan Maurits and a number of troops had to depart the colony in 1644, and the WIC board’s subsequent neglect of Dutch Brazil led to an easy reconquest by combined Portuguese land and naval forces. On January 26, 1654, the Dutch signed the Capitulation of Taborda. The loss of ‘‘neglected Brazil,’’ as Dutch pamphleteers dubbed it, still left the Dutch with a number of other colonies. Sugar cultivation in Brazil had been a strong incentive to become engaged in the African slave trade, and after the loss of Brazil, Dutch merchants and colonists concentrated on the other possessions in the West Indies recognized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648: Curac¸ao, Aruba, Bonaire, St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius. These islands were not suitable for sugar cultivation, but were nonetheless important, in particular for the slave trade the sugar trade depended on. Suriname was seized from the English by Abraham Crijnssen in 1667, but retaken in the same year. The Peace of Breda (1667) gave Suriname to the Dutch, in return for New Netherland. Suriname first belonged to the States of Zealand, and then was given to the WIC in 1682. One year later, the WIC sold a third of Suriname to the city of Amsterdam, and another third to Cornelis van Aerssen.

On May 21, 1683, the three owners formed the Geoctroyeerde Socie¨teit van Suriname, which was to be under the supervision of the States General. At the time, Suriname was only a small colony with a mere twentyfive houses, fifty sugar plantations, and around 5,000 inhabitants (579 Christian colonists, 232 Jews, and 4,281 slaves) in 1683. Suriname became increasingly important for sugar growing, however. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, some 200 plantations used more than 10,000 slaves to plant, harvest, and process sugar. At the end of the same century, the colony’s 533 plantations harbored around 53,000 people (including 2,000 Christians, 1,350 Jews, and 1,760 ‘‘colored’’), 90 percent of whom were slaves. The 1683 charter remained valid until 1795.

With the Peace of Breda in 1667, marking the end of the second Anglo-Dutch War, the WIC lost the Cape Coast Castle and New Netherland. The so-called Company of New Netherland had founded Fort Nassau on Manhattan Island along the Hudson River in 1615. In 1621 this fort was transferred to the WIC. On the upper Hudson, the WIC built Fort Orange in 1624, and one year later, New Amsterdam. Between seven and eight thousand people, many of them attracted by the fur trade, settled in New Netherland before the English took it over in 1664. One of the larger villages, located around Fort Orange, was the company village Beverwijck. This and other villages replicated much of Dutch village society and administration, having a burgher guard, a public Reformed church and council, orphan masters, a court, a poorhouse, a school, and so forth. It is often forgotten that New Netherland was the Dutch Republic’s first successful settlement colony.

Although the Dutch were only partly successful in stabilizing colonies and cultivating territories, they became important players in the Atlantic slave trade. Beginning in the 1630s, after the conquest of Brazil and the capture of Sa˜o Jorge del Mina in 1637, Dutch traders quickly expanded the slave trade in Africa. Between 1637 and 1645 the WIC transported more than 20,000 Africans to Brazil. The Dutch slave trade in Spanish America was legalized in 1662, and Curacaobecame an important transit port for some 2,000 to 4,000 slaves per year. Soon the French and English became strong competitors in the slave trade, in particular

after the founding of the Royal African Company of England in 1673. In 1675 the WIC had to be dissolved due to heavy losses. A second WIC quickly took over the trade of the first WIC, and the transatlantic slave trade continued to grow, reaching a peak in the 1680s, thanks to the asiento trade with the Spanish colonies. The second WIC’s largest expansion in the slave trade came in the 1720s, thanks to the growth of Suriname’s plantation

economy. This growth led to an increasing export of slaves from the Gold Coast, and a decrease of exports from the Slave Coast. After 1738, with the termination of the WIC’s monopoly on the slave trade and the beginning of the so-called free-trade slaving period, the

numbers of Dutch free traders involved in the slave trade increased rapidly. The second WIC still exported some 6,000 slaves annually between 1744 and 1773 (reaching the peak of 9,000 annually between 1764 and 1771). Simultaneously, the Dutch free traders exported about

7,000 slaves annually from Africa. The Dutch transported approximately 550,000 slaves from the African coasts to the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other main export product from Africa was gold dust. The WIC exported an estimated 36 million Dutch guilders worth of gold between 1674 and 1740, a very important process for the city of Amsterdam, which was one of Europe’s main silver and gold markets. The Dutch seaborne empire fell into an irreversible decline during the 1780s and 1790s. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), during which a large portion of the Dutch fleet was captured, was a financial disaster for both the second WIC and the VOC. The debts of the WIC amounted to 6 million guilders in 1789, which was miniscule in comparison to the debts of the VOC: 134 million in 1796. The charter of the WIC ended in 1791, and the company was taken over by the Dutch Republic.Five years later the VOC was also taken over.

The end of two famous trading companies in both the West and the East coincided with a period of regime changes in Europe. During the French occupation of the Netherlands (1795–1813), maintaining direct trading links with the colonies proved difficult if not impossible.

In 1795 most of the Dutch possessions were ceded to the English: the Cape, Malacca, Padang, and the VOC factories in Surat, Bengal, Malabar, and the Coromandel.

Ceylon, Ambon, and Banda were lost to the English in 1796, and Ternate was given up in 1801. In the West the English took Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice in 1796; Suriname fell in 1799, the islands of Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire in 1800, and one year later St. Eustatius, St. Maarten, and Saba.

 At the Peace of Amiens (March 27, 1802), brokered between England and France, the Netherlands received all these possessions back, except for Ceylon. When the war resumed one year later, almost all Dutch possessions were returned to the English again, except for Canton and Deshima. The Cape fell in 1806 and Java in 1811 (the latter after experiencing severe reforms under Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels [1807–1810]), but contact between England and its overseas territories were severely hampered by the Continental System, which Napoleon had introduced in 1806 to block all trade with England. The English capture of Curacao in 1807 and of the Leeward Islands in 1810 was a relief for those islands’ inhabitants, who had suffered severely from the prohibition of trade with England.