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.