• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 643 0

the burghers of the new republic of the United Provinces considerable freedom of action. Despite the uncertain times, the supply of luxury goods to northern Europe (mostly from Asia, and often by re-export from Portugal) had become proverbially ‘rich trades’ for Dutch merchants in the 1590s. Then in 1598 Dutch ships, goods and merchants were embargoed from all ports in the Spanish/Portuguese empire. Minds were duly concentrated, and the immediate result was an explosion of East India trading enterprise—by 1601 fourteen Dutch fleets, with sixty-five vessels, had set sail on behalf of eight different companies.16 Such a splurge of competition could only be adverse both at source in the Indies and in the customer markets of Europe, and so in 1602, with the collusion of all the companies involved, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC) was founded as a state monopoly of such trade. Somewhat later, in 1624, a similar organisation, the West India Company (Westindische Compagnie–-WIC) was established to control Dutch interests in the western hemisphere.

Of the two companies, WIC had far less long-term success as a procurer of Dutch real estate and colonial populations. It began well; from 1623 a tract of North America (covering most of what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and the southern half of New York State) was taken as ‘Nieuw Nederland’, and outright conquests from Portugal followed, of the Guinea coast in 1637-42, of northern Brazil (as ‘Nieuw Holland’) in 1631, of Angola in 1641, as well as the acquisition of less crucial holdings in the Antilles and Guyanas. Around 1640, WIC was in control of the Atlantic markets in sugar, slavery and furs. But by 1665 all but the Antilles and Guyanas had been lost. Besides the recaptures by Portugal, Nieuw Nederland was taken forcibly by England (and New Amsterdam became New York) in 1664. WIC retrenched to being a simple trading company, making a good living where previously it had aspired to rule. There was still plenty of gold in Guinea, and a demand for African slaves in the Netherlands. Dutch remained, in the small colonies, as a language of administration. Nowadays there are a bare thousand native speakers of Dutch in the republic of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), while perhaps a quarter of the half-million population use it as a second language. The Antilles remain for the most part dependent on the Netherlands, but fewer than 10 per cent of the 185,000 people have Dutch as a first language.

The VOC, on the other hand, went on to real colonial greatness. In the East Indies, the source of the spice trade, they displaced the Portuguese permanently from Ambon, and later Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas (1605-62), Malacca in Malaya (1641), and Macassar (modern Ujung Pandang) in Sulawesi (1667). They also went beyond the scope of Portugal’s holdings by seizing Jakarta in western Java (1619) as their centre of operations (comparable to Goa for the Portuguese), and renaming it Batavia.* Through intrigue rather than war, they displaced the Portuguese as monopolists in the Japan trade (1639), with a permanent base in Nagasaki.† In the Indian subcontinent, they established an early foothold at Pulicat (1613), and between 1638 and 1661 they took from the Portuguese Ceylon and their whole string of southern Indian possessions from Kannur round to Negapatam. In Africa, they were unable for long to dislodge the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique, but went on to found their own South African colony in between at Cape Town (Kaapstad) in 1652. Willem Bosman remarked in 1704 that the Portuguese had been ‘as setting-dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done, was seized by others’.17

Curiously but significantly, it was only in Africa that their colonial intrusiveness bore any linguistic fruit. It was here that Dutch settlers were attracted, just as Brazil, in the end, attracted settlers from Portugal. The Dutch settlers were not merchants, nor miners, but farmers (i.e., in Dutch, Boer). Their language, a mildly simplified version of Dutch