(with Jessica V. Roitman), ‘Introduction’, in: Gert Oostindie & Jessica V. Roitman (eds), Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800; Linking empires, bridging borders, pp. 1-20. Leiden: Brill, 2014 (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.
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...
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.
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 2018
Historiography pertaining to the study of European colonial empires can generally be defined in two different strands: on the one hand, the nationally geared scholarship that zooms in on the development of specific ‘national’ empires and their relationships to non-European individuals, groups and polities and, on the other hand, narratives that privilege the focus on the colony and the colony’s links to the outside world. What neither of these strands does, however, is to question the role foreigners played in the capturing of resources within the logic of a foreign empire and how those resources were transferred to the places of origin of these individuals and groups. This article provides an overview of Dutch participation in the empires of others (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) by underlining the important role that Dutch merchants, investors and labour specialists played in the exploitation of other, often competing, European empires. While some of the acquired resources remained in the host society where Dutch merchants and firms settled, some of the colonial resources and by-products were sent back to the merchants’ and firms’ places of origin, more often than not through complex transnational networks of contacts and divergent groups of interests.
The French Atlantic and the Dutch, Late Seventeeth-Late Eighteenth Century
Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800, 2014
vie. Destin collectif et trajectoires individuelles des marchands français de Cadix, de l'instauration du comercio libre à la disparition de l'empire espagnol (1778-1824) (unpublished PhD diss., University of Provence, 2007). On the French in the Levant trade, see among others Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700-1820) (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1992); Daniel Panzac, La caravane maritime: marins européens et marchands ottomans en Méditerranée (1680-1830) (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2004). For a short discussion of the French empire versus French Atlantic, see Silvia Marzagalli, "The French Atlantic World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries," in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c. 1450-c. 1820, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235-251.