Dutch Empire

I

Introduction

Dutch Empire, countries and territories mainly in the East Indies and West Indies, historically ruled or controlled by the Netherlands.

The beginnings of the Dutch Empire lay in the later 16th century, coinciding with the Dutch Wars of Independence against Spain or Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), and with the commencement of the economic, political, and cultural Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. The Dutch lost many of their overseas territories at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but they retained their most prized possession, the East Indies. After World War II, they joined other European states in decolonization, and the Dutch Empire hardly exists today, except for a few tiny islands in the Caribbean.

At its height, however, the Dutch Empire consisted of the East Indies (Indonesia); Borneo; Ceylon (Sri Lanka); South Africa; important trading posts at Dejima (Nagasaki) in Japan; Formosa (Taiwan) and Canton in China; Bengal, the Coromandel Coast, the Malabar Coast, and Surat in India; Mokka, Basra, and Gamron in Arabia and Persia; slaving ports on the African Gold Coast; half a dozen Caribbean islands (some of them strategically important); New Netherlands (New York State and its environs) in North America; a string of plantation colonies on the north-eastern coast of South America (Demarary, the Essequibo region, Berbice; and, later, Guyana, and later still Suriname), and Brazil. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, it was one of the greatest maritime empires the world had ever known, all the more remarkable because it was run from a tiny low-lying republic squeezed in between the major dynastic powers of northern Europe.

II

The Foundations of the Empire

The Dutch Empire began as an extension of existing trading activities and as an additional element of economic warfare against the overlord Spain in the Dutch Revolt, when Dutch merchant-venturers went out to plunder Spanish fleets (especially the gold and silver fleets from Spain’s American possessions) and take over Spanish markets abroad. The crucial year was probably 1585, when Dutch ships were banned from the harbours of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire; the year before, the main rival of the trading northern Dutch, the great port of Antwerp, had fallen to the Spanish, thus removing the local mercantile competition. Closed off from the lucrative trade in exotic goods from the eastern empires of Spain and Portugal, which they had specialized in distributing around Europe, the Dutch decided to go to the source of production themselves: the Spice Islands (see Moluccas) in the East Indies. For these reasons, the decade of Dutch penetration in the East was the 1590s. The first Dutch expedition was led by Cornelis de Houtman in 1595-1597, using charts obtained from the Iberians, and soon after this first success a number of small fleets set out, some of them realizing enormous profits.

However, Dutch expansion was not initially a question of military or naval conquest, for motives were primarily commercial. Military confrontation with the Portuguese was generally avoided; rather, treaties were signed with indigenous princes on fairly remote islands. There was little or no occupation at this early stage: a trading post or “factory” would be set up on the coast, sometimes defended by a small fort. Overheads were kept to a minimum: the Dutch were generally able to flit in between the large and unwieldy Spanish and Portuguese empires and snatch business from under their noses by virtue of their financial strength, their technological prowess in navigation and munitions, and their business acumen, rather than by force of massed arms.

By the early years of the 17th century, the small beginnings had spawned rivalries among the Dutch, and in 1602 Jan van Olden Barneveldt set up the Dutch East India Company (VOC; Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) as a foil to the English one founded in 1600. It was structured as a shareholders’ company, with most of the capital and control in the hands of 17 directors (the “Seventeen Gentlemen”). Under the approving eye of the Dutch state, the VOC enjoyed great autonomy in its remit, running from the western coast of the Americas to the eastern coast of Africa: it could sign treaties, raise troops, and exercise sovereignty.

Similarly, in the West Indies the critical decade was the 1590s, for the same reasons. There was a more overt anti-Spanish military element in this region, but the underlying motives were also commercial. With the Iberian entrepôts closed to them, the Dutch headed for the sources of salt for their herring (the Windward Islands), the sites for trade with Guyana and Brazil, and furs from the eastern seaboard of North America. In 1621 the myriad strands of private enterprise were bound together in the Dutch West India Company (WIC), with 19 directors and a very similar structure to the VOC. Again, the technique was to take over existing forts and infrastructure from the Spanish and Portuguese, and to harry the Spanish wherever possible. The year 1621 marked the renewal of war between the Dutch Republic and Spain, and the WIC inflicted massive damage on the Spanish Main, culminating in the capture by Piet Hein of the Spanish silver fleet from Mexico in the Bay of Matanzas in 1627.

III

Consolidation and Occupation

In some areas of the East, on the islands of Java and the Moluccas, there was a move to establish territorial control even in the early decades of the 17th century. In 1619 Batavia (modern Jakarta) was founded as the capital of the Dutch East Indies; in the 1640s the VOC extended its influence to “factories” on the coast of India and Ceylon, and in 1652 a provisioning colony was founded on the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. The Dutch also had footholds at Nagasaki in Japan, and at Canton (Guangzhou) and Formosa (Taiwan) in China.

Elsewhere, the Dutch Empire moved from its initial stage of lightning commercial penetration with minimal overheads into a more permanent, political, administrative, territorial, and occupational phase. It was to prove expensive. In 1630 the fort of Pernambuco (modern Recife) in Brazil was garrisoned with 5,500 men, and in 1637 Johan Maurits arrived with several thousand more and set about conquering the whole of Brazil. To provide slaves for the plantations, ports on the African Gold Coast were taken by the Dutch, notably the port of St George Delmina. The Brazil campaign was beset with problems, and the conquests were returned to Portugal in 1657. In North America, the activities of private Dutch traders that had been continuing since the 1570s were brought under the control of the WIC in 1621, and a Dutch colony called New Netherlands was established, with its headquarters at New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan. Under the governorship of Peter Stuyvesant, the colony passed to the English in 1664. By 1674 the WIC had high costs and no dividends, and was reformed with much less capital as a shipping business, to harry the Spanish colonies when appropriate, and especially to run the slave trade from western Africa to the Americas.

In the East Indies, towards the end of the 17th century the idea of permanent occupation and rule became prevalent. Military campaigns were waged, treaties enforced the exclusion of the English and the Portuguese, and large parts of Java were actually ceded to the Dutch in 1676. Economic exploitation was often very harsh, but during the 18th century the VOC’s debts rose and few dividends were paid. However, settlement in South Africa grew, with the VOC allowing the use of local and imported slave labour. Cape Town became an important way station for the East Indies trade.

IV

Dissolution and Re-Establishment in the 19th Century

Dutch commercial power stagnated in the 18th century, and was eclipsed by the British Empire. In the primarily colonial Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780-1784, the Dutch suffered devastating losses. In 1792 the Dutch state was obliged to take over the WIC’s debts and possessions; the latter were taken by the English once again during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The VOC was similarly baled out by nationalization in 1799, but once again it was academic, because the English had taken over the Dutch East Indies in their wars against the French, with the exception of a small Dutch presence on Java.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Dutch colonies were due to be returned by Britain; however, it was decided instead to create a new larger United Kingdom of the Netherlands, including the Southern Netherlands provinces, as a buffer against France. In return for doubling his kingdom, Willem I of the Netherlands was persuaded to give up many of the colonies to the British, including Ceylon, the Indian factories, the Cape Provinces, and (in 1817) the western African possessions. Furthermore, in 1830 the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands revolted and became the independent state of Belgium.

This left the East Indies, the West Indies islands, and Suriname still in Dutch hands. A new WIC was formed in 1824, and although there was no Dutch slave trade after 1800, plantations were run with existing slave labour until emancipation in 1862. The WIC disbanded a year later. A profit was made on the shipping and from financial services in Amsterdam, and in about 1850 some 5 per cent of Dutch imports came from the WIC ports. However, the plantation economies were not very successful, and contributed little to the economic growth of the Netherlands.

The East Indies were a different matter. After a disastrous re-launch of the VOC in 1815, in which the Dutch seemed to bear all the costs and the English to take all the profits, Willem I appointed Johannes van den Bosch as Governor-General in 1828, with a brief to introduce the Culture System as a way of generating revenue. Effectively, this was a system of taxation that ran from about 1830 to 1870, making the colony more lucrative by imposing a tax-in-kind of about 20 per cent on the land and labour of the natives. These resources were used to cultivate cash crops like coffee, tea, indigo, and tobacco, which then became the property of the colonial regime. The profits of the system were transferred annually to the Dutch treasury, and were crucial in financing Dutch economic development: the Indies were seen as “the cork on which the Netherlands floats”. After 1865, pressure from economic and humanitarian liberals forced the dismantling of the system, and the opening of the economy to private enterprise.

Towards the end of the 19th century the Dutch took part in the New Imperialism of colonial aggrandizement, and launched a Forward Policy after 1870, imposing territorial control on most of the areas over which they held nominal authority, most notoriously in the brutal Achin War (1873-1914) in Achin (modern Aceh) in northern Sumatra. In the early decades of the 20th century, a typically imperialistic “Ethical Policy” was orchestrated from The Hague, partly aimed at “civilizing” the indigenous population through education and limited emancipation, partly as an expression of the export of European identity and culture, and partly to assuage colonial guilt. All the while the colony continued to be immensely lucrative, providing an estimated 13 to 14 per cent of Dutch national income by 1938. However, political awareness grew apace among the indigenous Indonesians, and by the 1920s a nationalist movement was under way. The Great Depression of the 1930s meant retrenchment on both sides, and when the Japanese overran the Dutch East Indies in 1942, their anti-European propaganda fell on at least some fertile ground. The Dutch colonials were interned in notoriously harsh labour and concentration camps.