The Dutch colonial empire was the collection of colonies and overseas trading outposts which the Dutch state created and controlled between the late sixteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. This began when the Dutch Republic began efforts to expand in various locations in Asia, Africa and the Americas, often targeting zones of Portuguese influence as a way of indirectly attacking Spain with whom the Dutch had been at war in a long war of independence since 1568. The Portuguese established colonies in New Holland (later New York), the Caribbean, Surinam, Brazil, southern Africa, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and throughout the East Indies. They were often supplanted from these regions by other colonial powers like Britain in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though they retained control of the East Indies until 1945 when the independent country of Indonesia began to emerge there. The Dutch engaged in settler colonialism in New Holland and the Cape Colony and these have left a tangible legacy in New York and South Africa, with many people in these regions being of Dutch descent.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
Dutch colonial empire chronology of events
The emergence of the Dutch Republic as a major colonial power in early modern times was quite unexpected in many ways. Prior to 1568 the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries, which comprised the modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of north-eastern France were ruled by exterior powers. The Burgundian state ruled here until the last ruler thereof, Charles the Bold, was killed in battle in 1477. Then the provinces passed to the House of Habsburg, being ruled by the Austrian branch for several decades before finally ending up as a territory of the Spanish Habsburg and a part of the empire of King Philip II of Spain from 1556 onwards.[2] There was already trouble brewing in the provinces when Philip became ruler, with the Dutch nobles of the northern provinces in particular pushing for religious concessions for Protestants, lower taxes and great powers of self-government. In 1568 this unrest would break out into a long war of independence, the Eighty Years’ War, which amazingly would run on and off until 1648, albeit with a twelve-year truce between 1609 and 1621.[3]
Long before it ended, a Dutch Republic had come into being and was a de-facto autonomous state by the 1580s. The Dutch leaders soon developed a strategy of becoming the greatest trading state in Europe and also a colonial and global mercantile power. To this end, in the 1590s they began sending out trading missions to Asia and in 1602 the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or Dutch East India Company was established in Amsterdam. Their strategy in the decades that followed was to become a colonial power and at the same time undermine the Spanish by attacking Portugal’s colonies, the Portuguese crown being tied to the Spanish crown in a personal union since 1580.[4]
The seventeenth century was an immensely busy time in the creation of the Dutch colonial empire. Colonies and trading outposts were established by the East India Company in some coastal parts of India, numerous islands of the East Indies and the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), while the Dutch were also one of the only European countries to be given trading concessions by the governments of Qing Dynasty China and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan, namely trading bases on Formosa (Taiwan) and Dejima (an island off of the coast of Nagasaki).[5]
Elsewhere, efforts were made to acquire colonies on the coast of Brazil, though this enterprise was ultimately abandoned. New Holland was founded in North America, with the town of New Amsterdam settled on the lower end of Manhattan Island. For forty years between the mid-1620s and the mid-1660s the Dutch settled large numbers of settlers here and developed a thriving trade with the natives in beaver pelts up the Hudson River, but the colony was acquired by the English at the end of the Second-Anglo Dutch War and renamed New York.[6] By then Dutch settlers had somewhere else to go, as a new thriving outpost, the Cape Colony, had been founded at the southern tip of Africa around modern-day Cape Town in 1652. Finally, the Dutch, like most of the other European colonial powers, had managed to muscle in on the Spanish claim to hegemony over the Caribbean and had gained controlled over numerous small islands there like Aruba, Curacao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire, as well as a large territory on the northern coast of South America, modern-day Suriname.[7]
The Dutch Republic might have become an even greater colonial power. It was they who first discovered the great southern continent, Australia, as well as Tasmania and New Zealand, when Dutch explorers like Abel Tasman charted these waters between the 1620s and 1640s. Tasmania bears Tasman’s name today. However, they viewed these regions as being too remote to be profitable.[8] In any event, the Dutch Republic was declining as a power in the face of a more assertive Britain and France and would struggle to retain control of its existing colonies. In addition to losing New Holland, the Cape Colony was eventually lost to the British during the Napoleonic Wars, while the British also gradually muscled them out of their toeholds in India and acquired Ceylon in 1815. The Dutch would also fail to acquire any new colonies during the Scramble for Africa and the wider age of imperialism of the nineteenth century.
In the end it was only the East Indies, the Caribbean Islands and Dutch Guiana (Suriname) which they would retain control over into the twentieth century. The East Indies were largely conquered by the Japanese during the Second World War and an independence movement quickly emerged there in 1945 once the war ended, one which concluded in full sovereignty in 1949.[9] Suriname was granted extensive powers of self-government within the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954 and full independence in 1975. The Netherlands have largely retained control over the Caribbean islands they seized in the seventeenth century, with Curacao, Aruba and Sint Maarten governed as constituent countries and the smaller islands as Dutch special municipalities.
Extent of migration associated with the Dutch colonial empire
_Castello_Plan_1660.jpg)
Much of the Dutch colonial empire was created as a series of trading outposts and they did not engage in settler colonialism in all regions, whereby colonists from the mother country head out to the colony and change the demography of it. Even the amount of migration from the Netherlands to the East Indies, the core part of the empire over the longest period of time, was negligible. Instead the main regions of Dutch colonial migration were to New Holland in North America, the Caribbean islands and the Cape Colony in southern Africa. Several thousand Dutch people migrated to North America between the 1620s and the loss of the colony to the English in the mid-1660s. Thousands of Dutch settlers, along with French Huguenots (Protestants) and west German settlers made the Cape Colony their home between the 1650s and the 1790s.[10] Thus, the migration associated with the Dutch colonial empire was significant enough, though nowhere near as extensive as, for instance, that associated with the English/British in places like North America, Canada, Australia and India.
Demographic impact of the Dutch colonial empire
The number of Dutch colonists that migrated overseas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have been limited, but through natural increase over a large enough timeframe it had a very sizeable demographic impact. Again, three areas are notable. The Dutch contingent in New York society has remained very strong and prominent Dutch families like the Roosevelts[11] and the Vanderbilts[12] can trace their lineages back to settlers who arrived here in the mid-seventeenth century. Similarly, the Afrikaner or Boer population in South Africa is culturally Dutch, with Afrikaans, their language, being a West Germanic language. This is particularly the case as the Boer population in southern Africa continued to expand through new Dutch arrivals in the nineteenth century even after the British had acquired the Cape Colony. There are approximately 1.5 million people of Boer descent in South Africa today. Thus, the two parts of the world today in which the greatest number of people will have family roots tied to the Dutch colonial empire are New York and South Africa.[13]
Explore more about the Dutch colonial empire
- Netherlands, Notarial Records, 1600-1935 records collection on MyHeritage
- Netherlands Newspapers, 1659-1899 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers, 1660-1970 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Free State Dutch Reformed Church Records, 1848-1956 records collection on MyHeritage
- New Amsterdam and its People records collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Dutch Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching Dutch Family History Around the World at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- How to Use Dutch Parish Records From the 17th and 18th Century at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans (eds), The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020).
- ↑ https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1779n76h&chunk.id=d0e1287&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e871&brand=ucpress
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Eighty_Years%27_War/
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Dutch_East_India_Company/
- ↑ Louis Cullen, ‘The Nagasaki Trade of the Tokugawa Era’, in Japan Review, No. 31 (2017), pp. 69–104.
- ↑ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/new-amsterdam-becomes-new-york
- ↑ https://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/30722
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1933/the-dutch-discovery-of-australia/
- ↑ Gert Oostindie, Ireen Hoogenboom and Jonathan Verwey, ‘The decolonization war in Indonesia, 1945–1949’, in War in History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April, 2018), pp. 254–276.
- ↑ https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement
- ↑ https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2014/09/the-story-of-klein-klassje-first-new.html
- ↑ https://www.olddutchchurchnyc.org/blank
- ↑ https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/south-african-boer-war/the-boers