Dutc H Empire

their control for a considerable time before the coming of the Dutch inwar. Portugal's South American colony, Brazil, was partiallyconquered by both France and the United Provinces.In the 17th century, the "Grand Design" of the West India Companyinvolved attempting to corner the international trade in sugar byattacking Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Africa, seizing both thesugarcane plantations and the slave ports needed to resupply theirThe Portuguese victory at the Battlelabour. Although weakened by the Iberian Union with Spain, whoseof Guararapes, ended Dutchattention was focused elsewhere, the Portuguese were able to fight offpresence in Brazil.the initial assault before the Battle of Matanzas Bay provided the WICwith the funds needed for a successful operation. Johan Maurits wasappointed governor of "New Holland" and landed at Recife inJanuary 1637. In a series of successful expeditions, he gradually extended the Dutch possessions from Sergipeon the south to Maranhão in the north. The WIC also succeeded in conquering Goree, Elmina Castle, SaintThomas, and Luanda on the west coast of Africa. Both regions were also used as bases for Dutch privateersplundering Portuguese and Spanish trade routes. The dissolution of the Iberian Union in 1640 and Maurits'srecall in 1643 led to increased resistance from the Portuguese colonists who still made up a majority of theBrazilian settlers. The Dutch were finally overcome during the 1650s but managed to receive 4 million reis (63metric tons of gold) in exchange for extinguishing their claims over Brazil in the 1661 Treaty of the Hague.AsiaThe war between Phillip II's possessions and other countries ledto a deterioration of Portugal's Empire, as with the loss ofHormuz to England, but the Dutch colonial empire was the mainbeneficiary.The VOC began immediately to prise away the string of coastalfortresses that, at the time, comprised the Portuguese Empire. Thesettlements were isolated, difficult to reinforce if attacked, andprone to being picked off one by one, but nevertheless, the Dutchonly enjoyed mixed success in its attempts to do so.[27] Amboinawas captured from the Portuguese in 1605, but an attack onPrimary Dutch and PortugueseMalacca the following year narrowly failed in its objective tosettlements in Asia, c. 1665. With theprovide a more strategically located base in the East Indies withexception of Jakarta and Deshima, all had[28]been captured by the Dutch East Indiafavourable monsoon winds.The Dutch found what they wereCompany from Portugal.[26]looking for in Jakarta, conquered by Jan Coen in 1619, laterrenamed Batavia after the putative Dutch ancestors theBatavians, and which would become the capital of the DutchEast Indies. Meanwhile, the Dutch continued to drive out the Portuguese from their bases in Asia. Malaccafinally succumbed in 1641 (after a second attempt to capture it), Colombo in 1656, Ceylon in 1658,Nagappattinam in 1662 and Cranganore and Cochin in 1662.[26]Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East, was unsuccessfully attacked by the Dutch in 1603 and1610. Whilst the Dutch were unable in four attempts to capture Macau[29] from where Portugal monopolizedthe lucrative China-Japan trade, the Japanese shogunate's increasing suspicion of the intentions of the CatholicPortuguese led to their expulsion in 1639. Under the subsequent sakoku policy, from 1639 till 1854 (215years) the Dutch were the only European power allowed to operate in Japan, confined in 1639 to Hirado andthen from 1641 at Deshima. In the mid 17th century the Dutch also explored the western Australian coasts,naming many places.

The Dutch colonised Mauritius in 1638, several decades after threeships out of the Dutch Second Fleet sent to the Spice Islands wereblown off course in a storm and landed in 1598. They named it inhonour of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the Stadtholder of theNetherlands. The Dutch found the climate hostile and abandoned theisland after several further decades.Overview of Fort Zeelandia on theisland of Formosa, 17th centuryThe Dutch established acolony at Tayouan (presentday Anping), in the south ofTaiwan, an island then largely dominated by Portuguese traders andknown as Formosa; and, in 1642 the Dutch took northern Formosafrom the Spanish by force.In 1646, the Dutch tried to take the Spanish colony in the Philippines.The Dutch had a large force at their disposal but when they tried totake Manila, they were defeated at the Battles of La Naval de Manila.After this defeat, the Dutch abandoned their efforts to take Manila andthe Philippines.Batavia, built in what is now Jakarta,1682Between 1602 and 1796, the VOC sent almost a million Europeans towork in the Asia trade.[30] The majority died of disease or made their way back to Europe, but some of themmade the Indies their new home.[31] Interaction between the Dutch and native population mainly took place inSri Lanka and the modern Indonesian Islands. Through the centuries there developed a relatively large Dutchspeaking population of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent, known as Indos or Dutch-Indonesians.AmericasIn the Atlantic, the West India Company concentrated on wresting fromPortugal its grip on the sugar and slave trade, and on opportunisticattacks on the Spanish treasure fleets on their homeward boundvoyage.[33] Bahia on the north east coast of Brazil was captured in 1624but only held for a year before it was recaptured by a joint SpanishPortuguese expedition. In 1628, Piet Heyn captured the entire Spanishtreasure fleet, and made off with a vast fortune in precious metals andgoods that enabled the Company two years later to pay its shareholders acash dividend of 70%,[34] though the Company was to have relativelyDutch conquests in the Westfew other successes against the Spanish.[35] In 1630, the Dutch occupied[32]Indies and Brazilthe Portuguese sugar-settlement of Pernambuco and over the next fewyears pushed inland, annexing the sugar plantations that surrounded it. Inorder to supply the plantations with the manpower they required, asuccessful expedition was launched in 1637 from Brazil to capture the Portuguese slaving post of Elmina,[24]and in 1641 successfully captured the Portuguese settlements in Angola.[36] In 1642, the Dutch captured thePortuguese possession of Axim in Africa. By 1650, the West India Company was firmly in control of both thesugar and slave trades, and had occupied the Caribbean islands of Sint Maarten, Curaçao, Aruba and Bonairein order to guarantee access to the islands' salt-pans.[37]Unlike in Asia, Dutch successes against the Portuguese in Brazil and Africa were short-lived. Years ofsettlement had left large Portuguese communities under the rule of the Dutch, who were by nature tradersrather than colonisers.[38] In 1645, the Portuguese community at Pernambuco rebelled against their Dutch

masters,[39] and by 1654, the Dutch had been ousted from Brazil.[40] In the interveningyears, a Portuguese expedition had been sent from Brazil to recapture Luanda in Angola,by 1648 the Dutch were expelled from there also.Flag of DutchBrazilOn the north-east coast of NorthAmerica, the West IndiaCompany took over a settlementthat had been established by theCompany of New Netherland(1614–18) at Fort Orange atAlbany on the Hudson River,[41]relocated from Fort Nassauwhich had been founded in 1614.The Dutch had been sendingships annually to the HudsonRiver to trade fur since HenryHudson's voyage of 1609.[42] Toprotect its precarious position atAlbany from the nearby Englishand French, the Companyfounded the fortified town ofReprint of a 1650 map of New NetherlandNew Amsterdam in 1625, at themouthoftheHudson,encouraging settlement of thesurrounding areas of Long Island and New Jersey.[43] The fur trade ultimately proved impossible for theCompany to monopolize due to the massive illegal private trade in furs, and the settlement of New Netherlandwas unprofitable.[44] In 1655, the nearby colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River was forciblyabsorbed into New Netherland after ships and soldiers were sent to capture it by the Dutch governor, PieterStuyvesant.[45]Since its inception, the Dutch East India Company had been in competition with its counterpart, the EnglishEast India Company, founded two years earlier but with a capital base eight times smaller,[46] for the samegoods and markets in the East. In 1619, the rivalry resulted in the Amboyna massacre, when several EnglishCompany men were executed by agents of the Dutch. The event remained a source of English resentment forseveral decades, and indeed was used as a cause célèbre as late as the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the 1660s;nevertheless, in the late 1620s the English Company shifted its focus from Indonesia to India.[46]In 1643, the Dutch West India Company established a settlement in the ruins of the Spanish settlement ofValdivia, in southern Chile. The purpose of the expedition was to gain a foothold on the west coast of theAmericas, an area that was almost entirely under the control of Spain (the Pacific Ocean, at least most of it tothe east of the Philippines, being at the time almost a 'Spanish lake'), and to extract gold from nearby mines.Uncooperative indigenous peoples, who had forced the Spanish to leave Valdivia in 1604 contributed to getthe expedition to leave after some months of occupation. This occupation triggered the return of the Spanish toValdivia and the building of one of the largest defensive complexes of colonial America.Southern Africa

By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company hadovertaken Portugal as the dominant player in the spice and silk trade,and in 1652 founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope on thesouthern African coast, as a victualing station for its ships on the routebetween Europe and Asia.[47] Dutch immigration in the Cape rapidlyswelled as prospective colonists were offered generous grants of landand tax exempt status in exchange for producing the food needed toresupply passing ships.[48][49] The Cape authorities also imported anumber of Europeans of other nationalities, namely Germans andView of Table Bay with ships of theFrench Huguenots, as well as thousands of slaves from the East[48][50]Dutch East India Company, c. 1683Indies, to bolster the local Dutch workforce.Nevertheless,there was a degree of cultural assimilation between the various ethnicgroups due to intermarriage and the universal adoption of the Dutchlanguage, and cleavages were likelier to occur along social and racial lines.[51]The Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope expanded beyond the initial settlement and its borders wereformally consolidated as the composite Dutch Cape Colony in 1778.[52] At the time, the Dutch had subduedthe indigenous Khoisan and San peoples in the Cape and seized their traditional territories.[52] Dutch militaryexpeditions further east were halted when they encountered the westward expansion of the Xhosa people.[52]Hoping to avoid being drawn into a protracted dispute, the Dutch government and the Xhosa chieftains agreedto formally demarcate their respective areas of control and refrain from trespassing on each other's borders.[52]However, the Dutch proved unable to control their own settlers, who disregarded the agreement and crossedinto Xhosa territory, sparking one of Southern Africa's longest colonial conflicts: the Xhosa Wars.[52]Rivalry with Great Britain and France (1652–1795)In 1651, the English parliament passed the first of the Navigation Acts which excluded Dutch shipping fromthe lucrative trade between England and its Caribbean colonies, and led directly to the outbreak of hostilitiesbetween the two countries the following year, the first of three Anglo-Dutch Wars that would last on and offfor two decades and slowly erode Dutch naval power to England's benefit.[53][54]In 1661, amidst the Qing conquest of China, Ming general Koxinga led a fleet to invade Formosa. The Dutchdefense, led by governor Frederick Coyett, held out for nine months. However, after Koxinga defeated Dutchreinforcements from Java, Coyett surrendered Formosa.[55] The Dutch would never rule Formosa again.The Second Anglo-Dutch War was precipitated in 1664, when English forces moved to capture NewNetherland. Under the Treaty of Breda (1667), New Netherland was ceded to England in exchange for theEnglish settlements in Suriname, which had been conquered by Dutch forces earlier that year. Though theDutch would again take New Netherland in 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, it was returned toEngland the following year, thereby ending Dutch rule in continental North America, but leaving behind alarge Dutch community under English rule that persisted with its language, church and customs until the mid18th century.[56] In South America, the Dutch seized Cayenne from the French in 1658 and drove off aFrench attempt to retake it a year later. However, it was returned to France in 1664, since the colony proved tobe unprofitable. It was recaptured by the Dutch in 1676, but was returned again a year later, this timepermanently. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 saw the Dutch William of Orange ascend to the throne, andwin the English, Scottish, and Irish crowns, ending eighty years of rivalry between the Netherlands andEngland, while the rivalry with France remained strong.During the American Revolutionary War, Britain declared war on the Netherlands, the Fourth Anglo-DutchWar, in which Britain seized the Dutch colony of Ceylon. Under the Peace of Paris (1783), Ceylon wasreturned to the Netherlands and Negapatnam ceded to Britain.

Napoleonic era (1795–1815)In 1795, the French revolutionary army invaded the Dutch Republicand turned the nation into a satellite of France, named the BatavianRepublic. Britain, which was at war with France, soon moved tooccupy Dutch colonies in Asia, South Africa and the Caribbean.Under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens signed by Britain and Francein 1802, the Cape Colony and the islands of the Dutch West Indiesthat the British had seized were returned to the Republic. Ceylon wasnot returned to the Dutch and was made a British Crown Colony.After the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and France again in1803, the British retook the Cape Colony. The British also invadedand captured the island of Java in 1811.Dejima trading post in Japan, c. 1805In 1806, Napoleon dissolved the Batavian Republic and established a monarchy with his brother, LouisBonaparte, on the throne as King of the Netherlands. Louis was removed from power by Napoleon in 1810,and the country was ruled directly from France until its liberation in 1813. The following year, the independentNetherlands signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 with Britain. All the colonies Britain had seized werereturned to the Netherlands, with the exception of the Dutch Cape Colony, Dutch Ceylon, and part of DutchGuyana.Post-Napoleonic era (1815–1945)After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, Europe's borderswere redrawn at the Congress of Vienna. For the firsttime since the declaration of independence from Spainin 1581, the Dutch were reunited with the SouthernNetherlands in a constitutional monarchy, the UnitedKingdom of the Netherlands. The union lasted just15 years. In 1830, a revolution in the southern half ofthe country led to the de facto independence of thenew state of Belgium.Expansion of the Dutch East Indies in the IndonesianArchipelagoThe bankrupt Dutch East India Company was[57]liquidated on 1 January 1800,and its territorialpossessions were nationalized as the Dutch EastIndies. Anglo-Dutch rivalry in Southeast Asia continued to fester over the port of Singapore, which had beenceded to the British East India Company in 1819 by the sultan of Johore. The Dutch claimed that a treatysigned with the sultan's predecessor the year earlier had granted them control of the region. However, theimpossibility of removing the British from Singapore, which was becoming an increasingly important centre oftrade, became apparent to the Dutch, and the disagreement was resolved with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of1824. Under its terms, the Netherlands ceded Malacca and their bases in India to the British, and recognizedthe British claim to Singapore. In return, the British handed over Bencoolen and agreed not to sign treatieswith rulers in the "islands south of the Straits of Singapore". Thus the archipelago was divided into twospheres of influence: a British one, on the Malay Peninsula, and a Dutch one in the East Indies.[58]For most of the Dutch East Indies history, and that of the VOC before it, Dutch control over their territorieswas often tenuous, but was expanded over the course of the 19th century. Only in the early 20th century didDutch dominance extend to what was to become the boundaries of modern-day Indonesia. Although highlypopulated and agriculturally productive, Java was under Dutch domination for most of the 350 years of the

combined VOC and Dutch EastIndies era, many areas remainedindependent for much of this timeincluding Aceh, Lombok, Bali andBorneo.[59]Logo of theVOCIn 1871, all of the Dutchpossessions on the Dutch GoldCoast were sold to Britain.The Dutch West India company was abolished in 1791,and its colonies in Suriname and the Caribbean broughtunder the direct rule of the state.[60] The economies ofthe Dutch colonies in the Caribbean had been based onMap of the Dutch colonial possessions aroundthe smuggling of goods and slaves into Spanish America,1840. Included are the Dutch East Indies, Curaçaobut with the end of the slave trade in 1814 and theand Dependencies, Suriname, and the Dutch Goldindependence of the new nations of South and CentralCoast.America from Spain, profitability rapidly declined. Dutchtraders moved en masse from the islands to the UnitedStates or Latin America, leaving behind smallpopulations with little income and which required subsidies from the Dutch government. The Antilles werecombined under one administration with Suriname from 1828 to 1845. Slavery was not abolished in the DutchCaribbean colonies until 1863, long after those of Britain and France, though by this time only 6,500 slavesremained. In Suriname, slave holders demanded compensation from the Dutch government for freeing slaves,whilst in Sint Maarten, abolition of slave

Napoleonic era (1795–1815) Post-Napoleonic era (1815–1945) Decolonization (1942–1975) Indonesia Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles L e g a c y Dutch diaspora Dutch language Dutch in Southeast Asia Dutch in South Asia Dutch in the Americas Dutch in