Dutch Overseas Empire

Abstract

Many have wondered how the relatively small Dutch Republic could emerge from a decades-long war of independence to achieve an outsized influence on global economic and political affairs. Explanations have focused on the commercial dynamism found in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, and the way in which the fall of Antwerp and rise of Amsterdam further strengthened capitalist tendencies. These propelled Dutch merchants, backed by the newly established state, to export the war against their Iberian adversaries to the Americas and Asia and to begin a series of conquests. Recently, historians have started to turn away from a purely commercially oriented narrative of expansion, to stress the crucial role of state planning and violence, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and slavery in Dutch expansion. These aspects were not absent from earlier literature, but historians often relegated them to second place, behind more positively perceived aspects like commercial acumen, maritime ingenuity, or tolerant attitudes toward religious diversity. Around 1650, Dutch overseas territories stretched from the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands in the Moluccas to provisioning stations and slave-trading fortresses on the African coast, and from the plantation colony Brazil to New Netherland in North America. Inter-imperial rivalry meant that the Dutch lost several Atlantic colonies while gaining new plantation colonies along the Guyana coast. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) in Asia continued to expand its territorial possessions in Asia. Some would question the use of the term “empire” for these spread-out territories, or whether it is correct to use this phrase in the singular when discussing the diverging processes of expansion in two hemispheres. Still, few historians now would deny the imperial dimension of Dutch early modernity, or its lasting global impact. The literature on the Dutch early modern empire is vast, and every selection biased. This bibliography focuses on power relations and the state. It includes several works that focus on colonial culture and the cultural resilience of the colonized, but not nearly enough. It foregrounds specialist work focused on Dutch colonization, which means that comparison and connections with other European and non-European empires are weakly represented. Finally, it reflects the tendency to treat the early modern empire as completely separate from the state-run colonial empire that emerged in the nineteenth century, though much of the more interesting work breaks through this divide. Some of the less conventional choices in this bibliography are aimed at working against these biases.