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The Dutch colonial empire (Dutch: Nederlandse Koloniale Rijk) comprised overseas territories and trading posts under some form of Dutch control from the early 17th to late 20th centuries, including those initially administered by Dutch chartered companies—primarily the Dutch East India Company (1602–1799) and Dutch West India Company (1621–1792)—and subsequently governed by the Dutch Republic (1581–1795) and modern Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815–1975).
Following the de facto independence of the Dutch Republic from the Spanish Empire in the late 16th century, various trading companies known as voorcompagnie led maritime expeditions overseas in search of commercial opportunities. By 1600, Dutch traders and mariners had penetrated the lucrative Asian spice trade but lacked the capital or manpower to secure or expand their ventures; this prompted the States General in 1602 to consolidate several trading enterprises into the semi-state-owned Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC), which was granted a monopoly over Asian trade.
In contrast to Spanish and Portuguese rivals, Dutch activities abroad were initially commercial ventures driven by merchant enterprise and characterised by control of international maritime shipping routes through strategically placed outposts, rather than by expansive territorial ventures. By the mid-17th century, the VOC—along with the Dutch West India Company (Dutch: Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie, GWC), which was founded in 1621 to advance interests in the Americas—had greatly expanded Dutch economic and territorial influence worldwide, exercising quasi-governmental powers to negotiate treaties, wage war, administer territory, and establish settlements.
At its height in 1652, the Dutch empire spanned colonies or outposts in eastern North America, the Caribbean, South America (Suriname and Brazil), western and southern Africa, mainland India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan. While searching for new trade passages between Asia and Europe, Dutch navigators explored and charted distant regions such as Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, and parts of eastern North America. The Dutch also secured favorable trading relations with several Asian states, such as the Mughal Empire in India, from which they received half of all textiles and 80% of silks, and exclusive access to the Japanese market.
With the VOC and GWC controlling vital sea lanes and maintaining the largest merchant fleets in the world, the Dutch dominated global trade and commerce for much of the 17th century, experiencing a golden age of economic, scientific, and cultural achievement and progress. The wealth generated from overseas colonies and trading ventures, including the slave trade, fueled patronage of the arts, building projects, and domestic enterprises; port cities such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam experienced unprecedented growth and expansion.
A series of wars with England between 1652 and 1784 challenged Dutch naval supremacy and resulted in the loss of multiple settlements and colonies; the rise of the British East India Company, which conquered the vital trading hub of Mughal Bengal in 1757, likewise weakened Dutch influence and access to foreign markets. By the end of the fourth and final Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), the majority of Dutch colonial possessions and trade monopolies were ceded or subsumed by the British Empire and the French colonial empire; the Dutch East Indies and Dutch Guiana remained the only major imperial holdings, surviving until the advent of global decolonisation following World War II.
With the independence of Dutch Guiana as Suriname in 1975, the last vestiges of the Dutch empire—the three West Indies islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten around the Caribbean Sea—remain as autonomous constituent countries represented within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
This list does not include several former trading posts stationed by Dutch, such as Dejima in Japan.
In the 1560s, the Eighty Years' War broke out in the Habsburg Netherlands. A coalition of rebel provinces united in the Union of Utrecht declared independence from the Spanish Empire with the 1581 Act of Abjuration, in 1588 establishing the de facto independent northern Dutch Republic (alias the United Provinces), whose sovereignty was recognised by the Treaty of Antwerp (1609). The eight decades of war came at a massive human cost, with an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 victims, of which 350,000 to 400,000 were civilians killed by disease and what would later be considered war crimes. The war was largely fought on the European continent, but war was also conducted against Phillip II's overseas territories, including Spanish colonies and the Portuguese metropoles, colonies, trading posts and forts belonging to the King of Spain and Portugal. The port of Lisbon in Portugal had since 1517 been the main European market for products from India, drawing merchants from across Europe to purchase exotic commodities. As a result of Portugal's incorporation in the Iberian Union with Spain by Philip II in 1580, all Portuguese territories became Spanish Habsburg branch territory, and all Portuguese markets were closed to the United Provinces. In 1595, the Dutch set sail to acquire products for themselves, making use of the "secret" knowledge of the Portuguese trade routes, which Cornelis de Houtman had managed to acquire in Lisbon.
The coastal provinces of Holland and Zeeland had been important hubs of the European maritime trade network for centuries prior to Spanish rule. Their geographical location provided convenient access to the markets of France, Scotland, Germany, England and the Baltic. By the 1580s, the Eighty Years' War led many financiers and traders to emigrate from Antwerp, a major city in Brabant and then one of Europe's most important commercial centres, to Dutch cities, particularly Amsterdam. Efficient access to capital enabled the Dutch in the 1580s to extend their trade routes beyond northern Europe to new markets in the Mediterranean and the Levant. In the 1590s, Dutch ships began to trade with Brazil and the Dutch Gold Coast of Africa, towards the Indian Ocean, and the source of the lucrative spice trade. This brought the Dutch into direct competition with Portugal, which had dominated these trade routes for several decades, and had established colonial outposts on the coasts of Brazil, Africa and the Indian Ocean to facilitate them. The rivalry with Portugal, however, was not entirely economic: from 1580, after the death of the King of Portugal, Sebastian I, and much of the Portuguese nobility in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, the Portuguese crown had been joined to that of Spain in an "Iberian Union" under the heir of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain. By attacking Portuguese overseas possessions, the Dutch forced Spain to divert financial and military resources away from its attempt to quell Dutch independence. Thus began the several decade-long Dutch–Portuguese War.
In the 1590s, the voorcompagnieën ("pioneer companies") emerged, which were given "express instructions to focus on trade and engage in violence only in self-defense". The Dutch took inspiration from England's many joint-stock companies and private investment, including Muscovy Company, Eastland Company, Levant Company, and East India Company.
The Dutch North Sea fishing fleet needed a great deal of salt to preserve its catch. When the war made Iberian salt inaccessible, from about 1599 the Dutch began illegally loading salt at Araya Peninsula. The salt here was said to be unusually good and inexhaustible. The Dutch also engaged in smuggling and petty piracy, threatened the pearl fishery on Margarita Island and were too numerous for the local Spanish to deal with.
In 1594, the Compagnie van Verre ("Company of Far Lands") was founded in Amsterdam, with the aim of sending two fleets to the spice islands of Maluku. The first fleet sailed in 1596 and returned in 1597 with a cargo of pepper, which more than covered the costs of the voyage. The second voyage (1598–1599), returned its investors a 400% profit. The success of these voyages led to the founding of a number of companies competing for the trade. The competition was counterproductive to the companies' interests as it threatened to drive up the price of spices at their source in Indonesia whilst driving them down in Europe.
In 1605 a fleet was sent from Spain to the Caribbean sea. They captured a dozen or more Dutch ships and sent their crews to the galleys. Next year the Dutch returned. During the twelve years' truce the Dutch shifted back to Iberia, but when it expired in 1621 they came back. The Spanish established the Araya Fortress and garrison. In the next two years there were battles and the Dutch were driven out. The Dutch then shifted to places like Curazao, Bonaire, Saint Martin (island) and La Tortuga Island.
"The present deputies of the East India Company are seriously admonished to look into and give orders to the effect that the ships, which are already equipped or afterwards shall be equipped to sail to the East Indies, can have charge and instruction to damage the enemies and inflict harm on their persons, ships and goods by all means possible, so that they may with reputation not only continue their trade, but also expand it and make it grow, otherwise by neglecting this they will certainly lose it. For this was the principal reason why the Gentlemen States General have undertaken the union of the Companies and awarded them a charter and authorisation to inflict damage on the enemies."
As a result of the problems caused by inter-company rivalry, the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) was founded in 1602. The charter awarded to the company by the States-General granted it sole rights, for an initial period of 21 years, to Dutch trade and navigation east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan. The directors of the company, the "Heeren XVII", were given the legal authority to establish "fortresses and strongholds", to sign treaties, to enlist both an army and a navy, and to wage defensive war. The company itself was founded as a joint stock company, similarly to its English rival that had been founded two years earlier, the English East India Company.
Shortly after the VOC was founded, the problem of justifying attacks on Spanish and Portuguese ships became more acute when in February 1603, the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina was captured off the coast of Singapore by three VOC ships under the command of Jacob van Heemskerck. When Heemskerck returned to Amsterdam in 1604 with the enormous booty from the Santa Catarina, this caused a major controversy in the Dutch Republic about the legality, utility, and moral permissibility of this act. As a result, in September 1604 jurist Hugo Grotius wrote a treatise titled De Jure Praedae Commentarius ("Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty"), later published in 1609 as Mare Liberum, sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio ("The Freedom of the Seas, Or, The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade"), in which the act of aggression was justified.
In the meantime, the States-General had already passed a resolution on 1 November 1603, authorising VOC ships "to damage the enemies and inflict harm on their persons, ships and goods by all means possible, so that they may with reputation not only continue their trade, but also expand it and make it grow". This was a "critical" event according to several historical studies, with Borschberg (2013) stating it "marked a major shift in policy of the VOC" and "set the cornerstone for the establishment of the Dutch colonial empire in Asia", because the resolution transformed the VOC "into an instrument of war and colonial expansion that was directed against the Iberian powers in Asia and later, of course, also against local Asian rulers and polities." Pursuing their quest for alternative routes to Asia for trade, the Dutch were disrupting the Spanish-Portuguese trade, and they eventually ranged as far afield as the Philippines. The Dutch sought to dominate the commercial sea trade in Southeast Asia, going so far in pursuit of this goal as to engage in what other nations and powers considered to be little more than piratical activities.
During the negotiations for and implementation of the Twelve Years' Truce in the years 1608–1610, the Dutch sought to secure all sorts of commercially and strategically important positions in Southeast Asia, and the VOC rushed to conclude as many contracts as possible with local monarchs and polities in the so-called frontline regions: the Malay Peninsula (particularly Johor), Sumatra, the Banda Islands, the Moluccas, Timor and southern India.
The Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, also referred to as the Banda genocide, was a process of military conquest from 1609 to 1621 by the Dutch East India Company of the Banda Islands. The Dutch, having enforced a monopoly on the highly lucrative nutmeg production from the islands, were impatient with Bandanese resistance to Dutch demands that the Bandanese sell only to them. Negotiations collapsed after Bandanese village elders deceived and murdered the Dutch representative Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff. Under the command of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the Dutch resorted to a forcible conquest of the islands, which became severely depopulated as a result of Coen's massacres, forced deportations, and the resulting starvation and disease.
The Dutch East India Company, which was founded in 1602 as an amalgamation of 12 voorcompagnies, had extensive financial interests in maritime Southeast Asia, the source of highly profitable spices, which were in high demand in Europe. A Dutch expedition had already made contact with the islands in 1599, signing several contracts with Bandanese chiefs. The profitability of the spices was heightened by the fact that they grew nowhere else on Earth, making them extremely valuable to whoever controlled them. As the Dutch attempted to form a monopoly over the spices and forbid the Bandanese from selling to any other group, they resisted, and the Dutch decided to conquer the islands by force. With the aid of Japanese mercenaries, the Dutch launched several military expeditions against the Bandanese.
The conquest culminated in the Banda massacre, which saw 2,800 Bandanese killed and 1,700 enslaved by the Dutch. Along with starvation and constant fighting, the Bandanese felt they could not continue to resist the Dutch and negotiated a surrender in 1621. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the official in charge of the fighting, expelled the remaining 1,000 Bandanese to Batavia. With the Bandanese resistance ended, the Dutch secured their valuable monopoly on the spice trade.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Dutch colonial empire”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.