Colonial Empires Compared

Britain and the Netherlands, 1750–1850

Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351950503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

During the seventeenth century, the Dutch and English emerged as the world's leading trading nations, building their prosperity largely upon their maritime successes. During this period both nations strongly contested for maritime supremacy and colonial dominance, yet by the nineteenth century, it was Britain who had undoubtedly come out on top of this struggle, with a navy that dominated the seas and an empire of unparalleled size. This volume examines the colonial development of these two nations at a crucial period in which the foundations for the modern nineteenth and twentieth century imperial state were laid. The volume consists of ten essays (five by British and five by Dutch scholars) based on papers originally delivered to the Fourteenth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, 2000. The essays are arranged into five themes which take a strongly comparative approach to explore the development of the British and Dutch colonial empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These themes examine the nature of Anglo-Dutch relations, the culture of imperialism and perceptions of the overseas world, the role of sea power in imperial expansion, the economics of colonial expansion and the extension of the metropolitan state to the colonies. Taken together, these essays form an important collection which will greatly add to the understanding of the British and Dutch colonial empires, and their relative successes and failures.

PART I

THE ANGLO-DUTCH RELATIONSHIP, 1750–1850

Chapter 1

Sir Joseph Yorke and the Waning of the Anglo-Dutch Alliance, 1747–1788

H.M. Scott

I

Prussia’s Frederick the Great possessed an enviable capacity to coin a striking figure of speech. Writing in his account of the Austrian Succession War, drafted in the mid-1740s and finalised three decades later, the King famously compared the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to a longboat attached to the stem of an English man-of-war and content to be towed along in its wake.¹ The implication was clear, and spelled out in succeeding paragraphs in case any reader remained in doubt: that by the middle decades of the eighteenth century the economically declining, politically neutralist Republic had lost the capacity to conduct an independent foreign policy of the kind that it had so successfully pursued during its seventeenth-century Golden Age. Frederick’s simile was equally applicable to the contours of Anglo-Dutch diplomatic relations from the 1740s to the 1780s – the period when Sir Joseph Yorke was first minister (1751–61) and then ambassador (1761–80) at The Hague. During these decades the Republic was increasingly subordinate to its much stronger neighbour and ally across the North Sea, as the ruling House of Orange accepted political dependence in order to buttress its own shaky domestic position. By the later 1770s that subservience had become irksome to the Dutch and also impossible to sustain, and a sharp deterioration in relations took place. The outbreak of war between the two established partners in 1780–81 signalled the breakdown of one of the most enduring alliances of the eighteenth century.

The diplomatic relations between Britain and the Dutch Republic at this period were shaped, and may even have been determined, by the contrasting fortunes of the two countries. These decades saw the spectacular rise of British commercial, imperial and political power, sealed by the triumphant Seven Years War of 1756–63, in which a government headed by William Pitt the Elder overwhelmingly defeated first the established rival France and then Spain. That conflict had been ended by the Peace of Paris, signed in February 1763, by which Britain excluded her enemy from the mainland of North America.² The Seven Years War had been equally decisive in the Indian subcontinent, where British control over Bengal was firmly secured, while some smaller gains had been made in West Africa. Only in the West Indies did France avoid important losses. Spain’s defeat in the short-lived Anglo-Spanish War of 1762–1763 had been even more conclusive, with the loss of Havana, the nerve centre of Madrid’s colonial empire in Central America, and then of Manila, the focal point of the Spanish trading network in the Far East. In the Peace of Paris, in return for these port cities, Spain was forced to hand over West Florida to Britain, who thus consolidated her position on the North American mainland.

These extensive British gains were not without their drawbacks: the defeat of France proved to be a solvent of relations between the government at Westminster and its colonies in North America. Within a dozen years the colonists would revolt against the mother country; another eight and they would have secured their independence. The loss of British North America in 1783, however, was Britain’s one serious reverse during a half-century when her trajectory was sharply upwards. It may have been less important at the time, except for the undoubted damage to her prestige, than it has sometimes seemed to historians. In any case this loss was more than eclipsed by the further territorial and political gains which were to be made during the extended war with France between 1793 and 1815, by the dynamic expansion of Britain’s empire during the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century and, above all, by the initial stages of an Industrial Revolution soon to transform the country into the first industrial nation.

The impressive growth of British power contrasted sharply with the Republic’s fortunes. Whatever view is taken of Dutch economic performance during the eighteenth century and of the vexed question of whether decline was relative to its competitors (Britain and France above all) or absolute, with a falling away from the spectacular achievements of the Golden Age, there can be no doubt that the Republic was no longer the commercial and financial power which it had been a century before.³ The fact of economic decline seems difficult to contradict. It was accompanied by a distinct shift in Dutch foreign policy, which became explicitly neutralist, as the Republic’s rulers sought to benefit from abstention from Europe’s conflicts by expanding Dutch trade during wartime.⁴ Such neutrality had been the aim during the War of the Austrian Succession, but could not then be accomplished. It was achieved during the Seven Years War when, for the first time in a major European conflict, the Republic formally declared itself neutral.⁵ This remained the aim of Dutch foreign policy during the War of American Independence; that it was not achieved was due entirely to the British declaration of war at the very end of 1780. The quest for neutrality was rooted both in a recognition by its rulers of the Republic’s reduced political circumstances and a desire to benefit from the opportunities for profitable trade during European wars.

This changed outlook was accompanied – and indeed caused – by a humiliating series of military and political failures. They began with the brief and totally unsuccessful intervention in the War of the Austrian Succession, and climaxed in the disastrous – if to speak of disaster is not to underestimate the scale of the Republic’s losses – Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–84, when Britain’s far superior fleet swept its rotting Dutch counterpart from the seas, facilitating a series of British seizures of Dutch shipping and conquests of colonial territory.⁶ When peace was finally concluded in 1784, Dutch losses were much less than might have been anticipated: Britain, still aware of an obligation to support the ruling House of Orange, limited her annexations. She gained Negapatam, a minor port and trading station on the south-eastern coast of India together with the potentially important concession that British subjects could ‘navigate’ in the Dutch East Indian archipelago, hitherto closed to other European nations.

These sharply contrasting fortunes shaped relations during the three decades when Yorke was British representative at The Hague. In this, as in other respects, Frederick the Great’s figure of speech was remarkably telling. Britain’s role within the alliance was, from the later 1740s and early 1750s, that of the dominant partner, the man-of-war, while the Republic followed in its wake, the longboat tossed about in an increasingly stormy sea. This was exemplified by its increasing inferiority as a naval power. In earlier generations the Dutch had possessed a formidable navy, and even in the later wars against Louis XIV had made a respectable contribution at sea. During the eighteenth century, however, the Republic’s navy declined both relative to her British ally and to the fleets of other Western European states, and absolutely, as less and less money was spent by the provincial admiralties on new constructions and repairs. By the 1770s the Dutch fleet was in a very poor condition, as the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War would demonstrate.⁷

II

Yorke took up his post in 1751, and the middle decades of the eighteenth century were crucial in the history both of the alliance and of his own mission. It is conventional to point to the extended period of Anglo-Dutch cooperation and partnership which stretched from the 1670s, with the ending of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, to 1780 and even to 1795 when the stadholderate was finally abolished.⁸ Such an approach is perfectly valid, but it obscures an important reconfiguration of the alliance which took place after the restoration of the stadholderate in 1747 in the person of William IV, a shift linked to a wider change in the Republic’s international position.⁹ From the age of William III to the advent of William IV to power, the Dutch Republic and the British state had been – or, at least, had seemed – roughly equal in power and potential. Their cooperation had not been altogether easy: there was too much commercial and maritime rivalry for that. Yet shared opposition to France had led the two countries to fight side-by-side in the long wars of 1689–1713/14 against France, to shape the peace settlement which concluded them and the ‘Barrier’ system which this established, and to remain allies during the generation of peace which followed. These links were buttressed by a series of dynastic marriages between the ruling families of each country. The Republic’s reduced political role, after it had spent its power in the long struggle against Louis XIV, had not initially influenced its relations with Britain.¹⁰ With hindsight it is evident that the War of the Spanish Succession was the last occasion on which the Dutch played the role of a leading state. Overextension, and the immense financial problems which resulted, produced a notable contraction of the army in the aftermath of the Peace of Utrecht. The Republic, however, was central to the alliance system which re-emerged after the Spanish Succession conflict, particularly in the Barrier Treaty of 1715 and the Quadruple Alliance of 1716, and this gave it the appearance of a leading state for a generation to come.¹¹

That phase of cooperation between political near-equals ended decisively during the 1740s. When the wider European conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession, began at the very end of 1740, the Dutch Republic was still an integral part of the international alliance system. By 1748 when it ended, the weakness and political collapse of the Republic, even governed by a restored Orangist regime, was starkly evident and its implications could no longer be ignored. In 1742–43 – the last occasion on which the Dutch made a major military effort – an army of over 80,000 had been fielded and The Hague’s treaty obligations to garrison the Barrier fortresses of the southern Netherlands had been discharged – without the Republic formally entering the war. The reinforcements sent to the Southern Netherlands seriously weakened the Republic’s capacity for self-defence, however, as became apparent when France attacked in 1744.¹² During the second half of the conflict French armies, led by the impressive Marshal de Saxe, advanced through the Southern Netherlands, winning a series of major victories and overrunning the ‘Barrier’, directly threatening the Republic’s territory and eventually capturing the key border fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom.

When the European war was over, the Republic’s political and financial collapse was revealed. The regime of William IV and, after his early and unexpected death in October 1751, the informal regency ruling for his young son, headed by his widow the Princesse-gouvernante, George II’s eldest daughter Anne, confronted the fact of Dutch weakness and vulnerability. The solution adopted by the restored stadholderate, sponsored principally by Count Willem Bentinck van Rhoon, was ingenious and deceptively simple. Accepting the fact of Dutch weakness and the Republic’s now-subordinate role within the alliance, Bentinck persuaded Britain and specifically, the then-director of British foreign policy, the Duke of Newcastle, that Britain’s own security demanded the continuation of the alliances with Austria and the Republic which had fought Louis XIV and which, with the noted revival of French military power during the second half of the War of the Austrian Succession, appeared more essential than ever. Scarcely less important, he established the identification between British interests and Orangist rule. To a greater extent than previously appreciated, Newcastle’s foreign policy after 1748 was influenced by the distinctive ideas of his Dutch friend.¹³ The two men met frequently at this period, and corresponded extensively. The Duke was himself a supporter of revived alliances with Vienna and The Hague, but Bentinck at the very least reinforced these inclinations and probably helped create them. The Dutch statesman also seems to have provided the distinctive language in which these aims were now expressed: the idea of the ‘Old System’ or, less commonly, the ‘Antient System’. These are exactly the years – the later 1740s and early 1750s – when the notion of the Old System became established in British diplomatic correspondence and in the minds of the people who controlled and executed London’s foreign policy.¹⁴

From the mid-century the phrase ‘Old System’ became a shorthand for the alliance of Britain, Austria and the Dutch Republic which had fought France and (it was believed) restrained her power. The re-establishment of this diplomatic system after 1748 was to be incomplete. Austria now faced a serious challenge in central Europe from Prussia, which had annexed Silesia in the 1740s, and aimed to bring about a rapprochement with France as the prelude to an attack on Frederick the Great’s upstart monarchy. This was secured in 1756: the First Treaty of Versailles signed on 1 May, the centrepiece of the celebrated ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ whose principal architect was the Habsburg foreign minister Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. These new priorities were revealed by extended Anglo-Dutch negotiations with Austria over a restored ‘Barrier’ in 1753–54 and Vienna’s support for the Republic in the future.¹⁵ The failure of these talks demonstrated that Bentinck’s revived Old System always stood on one leg rather than the two he had hoped for and intended. Yet his achievement had been considerable and proved to be enduring. He had convinced Newcastle that Britain should support the weakened Republic and the House of Orange. It is a commonplace that the Orangist regime restored in 1747 was far from universally popular and would henceforth face severe and increasing challenges to its policies and even to its position. The stadholderate now needed British backing in exactly the same way that, particularly in an earlier generation, it had supported Britain’s Protestant succession. The Anglo-Dutch alliance had always extended to domestic political arrangements and was not simply relevant in international relations.

At this time Bentinck was a leading Orangist statesman and was himself a monument to the Anglo-Dutch partnership. Born in England in 1702 and educated there, he was the son by a second marriage of William III’s most important political adviser, an earlier Willem Bentinck, Earl of Portland. The younger Bentinck had returned to the Republic in 1719 and, alo...