Dutch Maritime Empire

11 Key excerpts on "Dutch Maritime Empire"

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  The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

  Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel

  • Peter A. Coclanis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  The Dutch Atlantic Economies Jan de Vries Within twenty years of the establishment of the United Provinces, Dutch seafar-ers and merchants had ventured from their familiar northern European trade routes into nearly every corner of the world. Their exertions exposed them to the frosty rigors of Nova Zembla and the unexpected and unwelcomed sun of the Australian coast; they rounded (and named) Cape Horn and made their way to distant Japan. The seaborne empire they constructed was primarily an empire of trade, and it left its deepest marks in Asia, where the Dutch East India Company ruled over far-flung possessions and trading posts for 200 years, before the Dutch state succeeded it to rule over the Netherlands East Indies for 150 more. By comparison, the Dutch presence in the Atlantic world has long appeared both unimpressive and unimportant. When compared to the other European powers the Dutch institutional and cultural legacy has seemed negligible, and in comparison to Asia the New World ventures appear to have possessed a dis-tinctly subordinate historical importance. But if the Dutch Atlantic has, until recently, suffered the neglect and condescension of historians, it was not ignored by the Dutch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And if their enterprise in the West never assumed the institutional form of their ventures in the East, this was not the product of their indifference. In fact, from the early days of the Dutch Republic an “Atlantic dream”— a New World redeemed from its Spanish/Catholic yoke, populated by Dutch settlers and Calvinist Indians, forming a productive and profitable part of a global trading economy—captured the imaginations of merchants, the House of Orange, and many Reformed clergymen and their followers. 1 In 1630 the new Dutch West India Company published a pamphlet with this bit of promotional verse 2 : Westindjen kan syn Nederlands groot gewin Verkleynt ’s vyands Macht brengt silver platen in.

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  To Govern the Globe

  World Orders and Catastrophic Change

  • Alfred W. McCoy(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Haymarket Books

    (Publisher)

  The Dutch Republic also became Europe’s first avowedly secular state, assuring freedom of worship to all its citizens, advancing science without religious restraint, and grounding its governance in universal principles of law. The fusion of these forces established Dutch corporations and their navy as the world’s most powerful imperial enterprise, controlling a far-flung maritime domain spanning four continents. Although this small state could not sustain such an expansive global reach for more than a fleeting half century, the Dutch union with England after 1688 would help steer that latter nation more resolutely in the direction of maritime commerce and naval power—catalyzing trends that would culminate in the British imperial age.

  The Dutch Republic aspired to religious tolerance, social equality, and economic vitality, making it a precursor for Europe’s modern democracies. Its empire in Asia and the Americas was, however, another matter, refusing to grant its colonial subjects the same rights. Britain developed a similar duality, practicing a form of democracy at home grounded in civil liberties and property rights, while acquiring an overseas empire on the basis of slavery and imperial conquest. Thus, the Dutch and British may have supplanted the Portuguese and Spanish empires in the seventeenth century, but they perpetuated and perfected several essential attributes of the Iberian age.

  In an assembly convened in 1618 to resolve theological conflicts within Protestantism, known as the Synod of Dordrecht, the Dutch Reformed Church adopted the Calvinist doctrine of “divine election,” which held that certain individuals and groups were favored by God’s protection. According to that logic, the Dutch, as God’s elect, could struggle confidently against enormous adversity to win their independence from Spain, while denying that same freedom to subjects overseas who lacked such divine grace. Specifically, the Synod ruled that a slave’s conversion to Christianity did not confer freedom, implicitly affirming the morality of slavery. As a result, for much of the seventeenth century, the Dutch would, in good conscience, dominate both the transatlantic slave trade and the production of sugar on slave plantations, while using slave labor throughout their Indian Ocean empire, whether in the cultivation of spices in eastern Indonesia or on farms in South Africa. Even in the late eighteenth century, when Enlightenment ideals inspired an abolition movement in England, the Dutch attitude was largely unaffected, and they continued to trade slaves without restraint until the British finally forced them to stop.9

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  Crises of Empire

  Decolonization and Europe's Imperial States

  • Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, Larry Butler(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  PART III DUTCH DECOLONIZATION Bob Moore 224 INTRODUCTION TO PART III: THE DUTCH EMPIRE Although the discussion of the modern Dutch Empire and its decolonization has largely been confined to Dutch writers and historians, it cannot be entirely divorced from the wider history of European imperialism. Some of the contradictions apparent in the French case could also be applied to the Netherlands, but there is also an argument for a certain particularity when discussing Dutch conceptions of colonialism and their enforced retreat from empire after 1945. The history of the Dutch overseas Empire in the modern era owes much of its origins to merchant capitalism the merchant capitalism of Dutch cities and adventurers from the sixteenth century onwards. Indeed, with the possible exception of southern Africa, none of their possessions were settler colonies but were driven by business and mercantile interests. This exploitation of trade with the East Indies and along the African coast was later augmented by the riches to be gained through voyages to the West Indies. To trade was to engage in the politics of the regions involved and also to develop the means to protect that trade from piracy and the exigencies of war. Over time this led to the amalgamated Dutch trading companies acquiring both territorial rights and military potential, a process that saw a continued growth in their geographical scope as their financial power increased – both a product of and a driving force behind the golden age of the Dutch Republic. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, their fortunes were decidedly on the wane, having to compete with other trading nations and lacking the military and (especially) naval power to defend their interests alone.

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  Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume III: A Century of Advance. Book 1

  Trade, Missions, Literature

  • Donald F. Lach, Edwin J. Van Kley(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  180

  The elevation of the United Provinces to the level of the most important shipping and trading center of Europe was led by Holland and Zeeland, the two provinces most involved in maritime trade and industry. The shipbuilding industry centered in these two provinces had been firmly established by the fourteenth century and went through its greatest period of innovation in the late sixteenth. Dutch shipbuilders concentrated from the beginning upon constructing fishing and merchant vessels, generally from Baltic timber. To the time of the Spanish Armada (1588) the Dutch vessels sent on convoy duty were converted merchantmen. To meet the Spanish challenge the Dutch organized admiralties which began the construction of warships. Private shipbuilders, left to their own devices, continued to turn out commercial vessels in constantly mounting numbers and of standard designs that were readily adaptable to particular requirements. Finally, in the late sixteenth century they developed and perfected the fluit , a long-distance cargo vessel of three to five hundred tons that provided the Dutch with a cheap means of transportation, enabling them to take the lead in northern Europe’s carrying trade.181

  Wherever the Dutch went in Asia they carried shipwrights with them to build small cargo vessels to reduce the need to carry goods of inter-Asian trade in European vessels. The warships and larger cargo vessels were generally built in Holland.182 Since the fluit was not armed, it could not function under the dangerous maritime conditions prevailing in the Indian Ocean trade. To satisfy their needs in Asia the Dutch built pinnaces, larger and more heavily timbered vessels that had a deeper draft and were in fact the warship version of the fluit . They were sturdier and more heavily armed than the native craft, and faster and more maneuverable than most of the other armed merchantmen. The pinnace gave the Dutch a marked advantage in inter-Asian trading over the native vessels and the larger armed merchantmen of their European rivals.183

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  Voyages in World History, Volume 1

  • Valerie Hansen, Ken Curtis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 476 Chapter 16 Maritime Expansion in Afro-Eurasia, 1500–1700 Apart from carrying spices and other goods back to Europe, the Dutch made substantial profits by plugging into existing Afro-Asian trade routes. For example, they sold Indian cottons in Africa and Southeast Asia, and transported spices from the Moluccas to India and the Persian Gulf. This inter-Asian trade was a partial answer to the old question of what the Europeans might offer to trade in Asian markets. However, the main solution to that problem was silver. The Dutch were lucky that at this time the entire Indian Ocean economy was being stimulated by large quantities of silver mined by the Spanish in South America and shipped across the Pacific. In the seventeenth century, increased access to silver finally gave European traders bargaining power in Asia. The Spanish city of Manila in the Philippines became the destination for the Manila Galleons, an annual shipment of silver from Mexico, with additional supplies flowing eastward from Europe through the Mediterranean. Thus, the flow of silver between the Americas and Asia was helping to lay the foundation of a global economy con-necting the Atlantic and Pacific economies with that of the Indian Ocean. The Dutch were perfectly positioned to benefit. The Dutch East India Company made huge profits, especially from the spice trade. To do so, they sometimes violently intervened in local affairs to increase production.

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  The Modern World-System II

  Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750

  • Immanuel Wallerstein(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Until the nineteenth century, says Schofier, Dutch presence meant primarily that for coastal popula-tions their merchants and administrators replaced 2: Dutch Hegemony in the World-Economy 49 Were the policies of the VOC in the seventeenth century shortsighted, 76 as Masselman asserts? I do not think so, because one has to look at the alternatives. Were there greater exploitative profits to be had elsewhere, especially in an era of relative overall stagnation of the world-economy? The answer is surely yes—in the Eastland trade, in northwest Europe itself, in the Americas, all nearer at hand. Why bother with the East Indies at all? One wonders whether the overall century-long negative balance of the VOC did not mask a gigantic process of internal transfer of income and concentration of capital within the United Provinces, from small investors to big. 77 If so, the VOC could be said to have functioned as a kind of stock exchange, very useful for those with superior access to information, such as De Heeren Zeventien themselves; but then its history, at least until the turn of the eighteenth century, belongs more properly to the financial side of the story than to the commercial and distributional side. Nonetheless, the story of the VOC illustrates well how dominance in one area is linked to domi-nance in the other. The East Indian trade may have been the most dramatic and even spec-tacular branch of Dutch commercial expansion in the seventeenth century, but it is not the most important, nor does it account for Dutch hegemony. At the time Dutch traders appeared in the Indian Ocean, they first began to ply the Mediterranean. The turning point seems to have been shortly after the Dutch-Spanish Truce of 1609. 78 Two areas of trade ought to be distin-Arab and Chinese traders (1973, 75). This is, of they could no longer afford to buy [calicoes and course, basically similar to the role of the For-they] turned to weaving their own (p. 461).

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  When the Shore becomes the Sea

  New maritime archaeological insights on the dynamic development of the northeastern Zuyder Zee region (AD 1100 – 1400), the Netherlands

  • Yftinus van Popta(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Barkhuis

    (Publisher)

  This period started in the late 16th century and lasted until the early 18th century and is known as the ‘Dutch Golden Age’ (Israel 1989: 15; Gaastra 2009: 17). One might imagine that Dutch wealth was primarily provided by their most famous commercial institution: the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC or Dutch East India Company). While it is true that the Company brought great wealth and power to the Low Countries, the main sources for economic hegemony was the Dutch influ-ence in the Baltic trade, the unique methods of ship-building, the systems of ship ownership, and a highly developed system of inland shipping (De Vries 1976: 117; Israel 1989: 48, 408–410; Van Holk 2017b: 75). The geographical location of the Dutch Republic in the northwestern tip of the European mainland was also considered to be a considerable advantage, connecting the Atlantic, Baltic, and the West-European hinterland via the Rhine and Meuse rivers. The national waters of the Netherlands (including many lakes, rivers, and their tributaries), functioned as the most important transportation network of people and merchandise for many centuries. Many of the transport routes led to a large inlet of the North Sea in the central part of the Netherlands that separated (and integrated) the Dutch lands in the north, east, south, and west (Fig. 3.1). The waters of this region were referred to as the Zuyder Zee and were considered the most important Dutch traffic junction in Medieval and Early Modern periods (see for example Van Popta 2012a; 2017b; Chapter 5). The literal translation of the Dutch word Nederland is ‘Lowland’ and underlines the vulnerable location of the country on the borders of the North Sea, and how Dutch hatred of the sea also comes into play. Large parts of The Netherlands lie below sea level and were regularly flooded in the past.

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  Social Construction and the Logic of Money

  Financial Predominance and International Economic Leadership

  • J. Samuel Barkin(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  10 Although it built on this base, the remarkably sudden rise of Amsterdam to prominence was a result of the Dutch war of indepen- dence from Spain. This gave the Dutch political autonomy from Hapsburg rule. At the same time it created a large refugee population from the Spanish Netherlands, particularly Antwerp. These refugees brought to Amsterdam the commercial and industrial skills that al- lowed it to dominate international commerce so suddenly. 11 Dutch investment in international commerce throughout most of the seventeenth century was primarily in the form of investment in the mechanisms of international commerce. This included investment in shipping, in the infrastructure required for entrepôt trade, such as ware- housing and port facilities, and in the financial services that helped attract this trade to Amsterdam. The international economy, in turn, soon became critically dependent on Dutch financing of trade services. 12 The value of many of these services is difficult to quantify pre- cisely, as aggregate records were not kept. Fairly accurate measures of shipping exist, though, and these show an overwhelming Dutch domi- nance. “In 1670 the volume of Dutch-owned shipping—some 568,000 tons—considerably exceeded that of Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Scottish, and German combined; and the preponderance of Dutch-built shipping was even greater. It is true that at that date the remarkable late seventeenth-century increase in English shipping was already under way; but even at the end of the century the volume of English-owned shipping was still only one-third to one-half that of Dutch- owned, and probably more than a quarter of English-owned ships were Dutch-built.” 13 Taking shipping as an indicator of financial investment in the servicing of trade generally, Dutch dominance was pronounced.

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  The Atlantic

  • Paul Butel, Iain Hamilton(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Having experienced an uncontested zenith in their economic activity, based largely in the Atlantic, the United Provinces saw their growth slow down between 1650 and 1672, in the course of international disturbances aggravated by the war between Louis XIV’s France and the Dutch Republic in 1672. Their Hansard and English rivals (the former using neutrality from the outset of the conflict, the latter doing likewise from 1674 rushed to take advantage of their difficulties. The time of the United Provinces’ economic hegemony was at an end.

  If the Dutch Atlantic had never experienced a ‘reversal of the secular tendency’ (Braudel), but maintained its prosperity beyond the 1650s, then neither were the British and the French to undergo a turn-around in economic circumstances in the Atlantic. There were transferrals of power and, at the end of the seventeenth century, the maritime Atlantic, if not colonial, had come to be dominated by England, which had brought its ‘apprenticeship’ to an end when it became aware of a commercial revolution based on two principal elements, namely, a spectacular growth in exports to Europe, and the increasing movement of capital, often of foreign (Dutch) origin, necessary to the development of commerce.

  Dutch participation in the Iberian Atlantic, 1609–1621

  Barely two years before the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the United Provinces, a project to create a Dutch West Indies Company was put forward. Supporting this so as to make it an organ of warfare in the New World, the merchants of Middelburg, Amsterdam and Rotterdam also intended to develop the Guinea trade and the trade with Iberian America. Zeeland forts appeared during the same period on the Guyana coast and at the mouth of the Amazon. The states of Holland and Zeeland received petitions demanding that they undertake to send a convoy of troops and arms to these settlements. The Middelburg Zeelanders were the most zealous in wanting to pursue war, having made great use of privateering and illicit trade activities on the coasts of Brazil and the Spanish Main since the 1590s. Their spokesman was William Usselinx, who, when he published his pamphlet A Demonstration of the Necessity, Utility and Profit for the Low Countries of Preserving Freedom of Trade with the West Indies

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  Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800

  Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700

  • Tamara H. Bentley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Comprised of multinational enclaves of merchants who conducted business across ethnic, national, linguistic, and reli-gious boundaries, the emporia exhibited a distinctively pluralistic and cosmopolitan character. Before it fell to the Portuguese Melaka was the quintessential example of the “port polity” emporium. Europeans—and especially their chartered trading com-panies, which acted as colonial rulers as well as commercial enterprises—fashioned a new framework for conducting maritime trade: the entrepôt. Designed to orga-nize the production, mobilization, and delivery of commodities on a global scale, the entrepôts often relied on colonial political domination to control the terms of trade. Fort Batavia, founded by the Dutch East India Company on Java in 1618, would become the prototype of this new commercial system. 4 The first phase of East Asian maritime commerce: tenth to thirteenth centuries During the period 900–1300 parallel movements of economic prosperity and com-mercial growth occurred throughout Eurasia. Favorable climate, intensifying agri-cultural production, urban growth, burgeoning money supply, the development of merchant networks and more sophisticated financ ial and commercial institutions all contributed to economic development. The initial impetus for economic expansion arose in the Islamic lands of the eastern Mediterranean and in China, but soon spread 2 My defin ition of “maritime East Asia” is more expansive than the usual geographic sense of the term “East Asia” (generally delimited to China, Japan, and Korea), and includes the lands and waters ringing the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam from the Straits of Melaka in the west to Java and Kalimantan in the east. 3 For a balanced digest of this story see Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean . 4 This distinction between emporium and entrepôt is derived from Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean , pp. 102–6.

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  The Dutch and English East India Companies

  Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia

  • Adam Clulow, Tristan Mostert, Adam Clulow, Tristan Mostert(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Clulow, Adam and Tristan Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, trade and violence in early modern Asia . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462983298/ch09 9 The Dutch East India Company in global history A historiographical reconnaissance Tonio Andrade Abstract This chapter provides a brief overview of scholarship on the Dutch East India Company, focusing on the work of major figures, including J.C. van Leur, M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Niels Steensgaard, and Leonard Blussé, among others. It suggests that one can discern a consistent trend in that scholarship: toward a greater appreciation of the power and strength of Asian trading networks. It then reflects on trends in current and future scholarship, including the work of contributors to this volume, suggesting that the network models currently in the zeitgeist are paying dividends in understanding, particularly when one keeps in mind the signif icance of the Asian networks that underlay and competed with the European networks. The chapter ends by recognising that recent scholarship seems to support a sort of ‘global early modernity’ whose salient characteristic is a dramatic – and largely reciprocal – increase in intercultural adoption. Keywords: Capitalism, peddling trade, TANAP, early modernisation, networks How influentia l was the Dutch East India Company in Asia? To what extent did it transform or revolutionise Asian trading patterns? And how powerful and resilient were the Asian trade networks that the VOC competed with? For a long time, historians thought they had answers to such questions. In the past, the Company has been portrayed as a catalyst for capitalism and a force that brought modern rational economic practices to world trade, thereby transforming preexisting trading structures throughout

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