Capitalism and Imperialism: Britain and the Netherlands

Abstract

In their impressive new study on British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins mention ‘the desultory negotiations sharing out the Dutch and Portuguese empires should they collapse’ between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century. In the corresponding note, however, they substantiate only the well known negotiations on the Portuguese empire and not those mysterious talks on the Dutch empire. It is one of only a few instances where Cain's and Hopkins’ 2,500 well-documented footnotes do not fully explain their 850 pages of thick description and analysis. Their suggestion of an Anglo-German understanding to divide the Dutch East Indies if necessary, however, does strike some raw nerves among Dutch contemporaries. In the official and unofficial minds of Dutch imperialism, there was a strong fear that die Netherlands could lose their large colonial empire to the great powers. In that case the Netherlands would be reduced to the ‘rank of Denmark’, to a ‘farm at the North Sea’. But this imperial fear was connected with the high hopes that the Netherlands could indeed become the ‘first among the nations of the second rank’, a real middle power, because of its vast colonial empire.