The Failure of the Dutch Free Ports in the Nineteenth Century: Commerce, Colonialism and the Constitution

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1820s and 1830s, two debates about free ports took place in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. One debate concerned domestic fiscal policy and the regulation of foreign trade. In this debate the legacies of the political economic thought of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and the mid eighteenth-century debate on turning the Dutch Republic into a limited free port were played out. The first Dutch debate on free ports was a response to changing conditions in global trade and a further attempt to regain the old staple market and connect it to an industrialising national economy. The other debate concerned the establishment of the Dutch Trade Company (Nederlandse Handels Maatschappij) and the declaration of a series of overseas free ports in the years after the British seizure of Singapore and its ratification in 1824. This second debate concerned the modernisation of colonial trade to halt the expansion of British commercial settlements in and around the Dutch East Indies as well as in the Caribbean. Together these debates represented the national challenge to put the entire Dutch economy on a new foundation and reflected differing constitutional perspectives that had pitted liberals against patriots since the late eighteenth century.