Bachelor Thesis: The First Dutch West India Company (1621-1674). An historical approximation to the conflicts and circulations of Dutch goods and people in the Atlantic Ocean (original) (raw)
Related papers
Repositioning the Dutch in the Atlantic, 1680-1800
Itinerario, 2012
After some decades of historical debate about the early modern Atlantic, it has become a truism that the Atlantic may better be understood as a world of connections rather than as a collection of isolated national sub-empires. Likewise, it is commonly accepted that the study of this interconnected Atlantic world should be interdisciplinary going beyond traditional economic and political history to include the study of the circulation of people and cultures. This view was espoused and expanded upon in the issue of ltínerarío on the nature of Atlantic history published thirteen years ago-the same issue in which Pieter Emmer and wim Klooster famously asserted that there was no Dutch Atlantic empire.r Since this controversial article appeared, there has been a resurgence of interest among scholars about the role of the Dutch in the Atlantic. with Atlantic history continuing to occupy a prominent place in Anglo-American university history departments, it seems high time to appraise the output of this resurgence of interest with an historiographical essay reviewing the major works and trends in the study of the Dutch in the Atlantic.
The seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the Netherlands, or the Republic of the (Seven) United Provinces as it was then called. The Dutch were on the cutting edge of academia, art, science, engineering and defence and were well-known for their world-wide trading in the Levant, the Baltic, Africa, Asia (known as the East Indies), the Caribbean and the Americas (together known as the West Indies). One of the most remarkable of organisations created in the United Provinces was the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company. It created a territorial legacy in Asia that would last until the middle of the twentieth century, a hundred and fifty years after its disappearance, and has become one of the symbols of Dutch entrepreneurial spirit and empire. This essay will analyse the creation, overseas evolution and the decline of the VOC as well as explain its territorial legacy to the Netherlands.
The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800 Expansion Without Empire
Itinerario, 1999
The history of the Dutch Atlantic seems riddled with failures. Within fifty years of their conquest, the two most important Dutch colonies (in Brazil and in North America) were lost. In addition, the Dutch plantations in the Caribbean suffered severe financial setbacks, bringing the Dutch slave trade to a virtual standstill. In this contribution the author asserts that even without these disasters, the Dutch could not have rivalled the British, as the Dutch did not have sufficient resources or naval power. Only in the tropics were the Dutch able to continue trading and producing cash crops. The resulting high mortality made the Atlantic empire a demographic disaster for the Dutch, while the other European powers saw their overseas populations increase. The successful recruitment of foreigners to serve as soldiers, sailors and planters enabled the Dutch to remain an Atlantic power.
2013
Brothers in Arms opens with two anecdotes that encapsulate its view of Dutch-indigenous relations during the 17th-century rise and fall of the West India Company (WIC). In 1642 three WIC officials and a West African leader, ‘Ockij, King of Great Acraa’, agreed a deal establishing a trading post on the Gold Coast which would open the region for Dutch trade in exchange for a monthly ‘gift’ of gold. Three years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, a cosmopolitan Tupi leader of the Potiguares Indians, who had spent time in the Republic and was fluent in Dutch, wrote to his cousin to persuade him to abandon his Portuguese backers, who had previously enslaved fellow natives, and join with the more fair-minded Dutch who ‘live with us as brothers’. These and many more similar stories capture what Meuwese considers the importance of WIC negotiations and the striking of deals with indigenous leaders, without which Dutch trade and imperial ventures would have been impossible. Equally impo...
1961
The object of this thesis is two-fold: first to make an economic study of the East India Company's many-sided activities in the first four decades of the seventeenth century, and secondly, through such a study to cast light upon the business-technique of a great merchant company of the period. In many ways, the East India Company was a unique organization. From a limited and modest beginning it quickly developed into a trading organization with wide commercial ramifications both in Asia and Europe. The Company's port to port trade in the Indies and the role it assumed as local traders in Asiatic Continent was ultimately responsible for the rise of the multilateral trade-triangles which characterised the English commerce overseas in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Such a development brought with it the twin problems of a chronic shortage of finance capital and the political rivalry with the Dutch in the Indies. At home, the Company's existence depended on the succe...
The Dutch and the Portuguese in West Africa: Empire Building and Atlantic System (1580-1674)
2004
This thesis examines in comparative perspective the Dutch and the Portuguese Atlantic empires in the 17th century, using West Africa as a case study. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, we study how the conditions in the home countries influenced the building of the empires. Here we examine the goals of the Dutch and the Portuguese States and of the mercantile elites and their strategies for the building of their empires. In order to do so, we analyse the transfer of institutions, the labour migration and the formation of colonial societies. Part II deals mainly with the economic strategies of the Dutch and the Portuguese in their Atlantic Empires. Here, we examine the way these two European sea powers and their private entrepreneurs organized the trade on both an international and local level, as well as the way in which they structured their commercial and business networks, our final goal being a discussion of their struggle for the control of the supply and the consum...
BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 2012
Recent historiography has reconsidered the idea that the Dutch role in the early modern Atlantic was of little significance, particularly in comparison to the accomplishments of the Dutch East India Company (voc) in Asia. Revisionist studies have emphasised that in spite of the limited and fragmented nature of the Dutch Atlantic ‘empire’, the Atlantic contribution to the Dutch economy was significant and possibly even greater than the voc’s share. Moreover, this scholarship stresses the vital role of Dutch Atlantic colonies (Curaçao and St Eustatius), (partly Jewish) networks and individuals in connecting the various subempires of the Atlantic. While Oostindie subscribes to many of these conclusions, he argues against excessive revisionism. His analysis of the development of the lesser Dutch Guianas, adjacent to Suriname, is used as a counter-weight to this revisionist impulse. He demonstrates that the spectacular economic and demographic development of these colonies was due mainly...
2015
Writing a history about the Dutch Atlantic used to be easy. First, one would pick and choose one or more quotes from either “the Dutch were not very important in that part of the world”, talking about a Dutch Atlantic “makes as much sense as ‘Dutch Asia’ or the ‘Dutch Mediterranean’”, “the Dutch . . . were not until the nineteenth century an imperial power in any meaningful sense of the word”, or “there was no such thing as the Dutch Atlantic”. Such positions make sense since the territorial claims by the Dutch were, except for short-lived adventures in North America and Brazil, relatively modest. The next step in writing a history of the Dutch Atlantic would be to carefully nuance or disagree with this view in order to position oneself vis-à-vis the existing literature. After almost two decades of such “revisionist” contributions, it is no longer possible to apply this tactic. In 2014, three edited volumes relegated past the orthodox views to the wastepaper basket. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0165115315000522