THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 1581–1975 · Europe

Dutch Republic and Dutch Colonial Empire

Also known as Dutch Republic, Netherlands, Dutch East Indies, Netherlands Indies, Dutch Brazil, Guyana (Netherlands), Dutch Guiana, Dutch Guinea, Ceylon (Dutch), Dutch Formosa, Dutch settlements, Netherlands Antilles

The Dutch Republic was born when seven northern provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands revolted against Philip II of Spain and renounced his rule in 1581. Its merchants built the most advanced commercial economy of the 17th century, and two chartered firms, the Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602) and the West India Company (1621), carved out an empire of trade.

The VOC seized the Spice Islands from Portugal, founded Batavia (Jakarta) in 1619 and held Ceylon, the Cape and a post at Nagasaki, while the West India Company briefly held northeastern Brazil and New Amsterdam, later New York. After the VOC collapsed in 1799, the Netherlands, a kingdom from 1815, ruled the East Indies directly and forced farmers to grow export crops. Indonesia won independence in 1949 after a war, and Suriname left in 1975.

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The Night Watch, painted by Rembrandt in 1642 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
The Night Watch, painted by Rembrandt in 1642 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) Rembrandt · Public domain
Years
1581–1975
Capital
Amsterdam (government at The Hague); Batavia in the East Indies
Greatest extent
1938, about 2.10 million km²
Region
Europe

c. 2.1M km² (Oxford figure cited in Wikipedia's list; not covered by Taagepera); mostly the Netherlands Indies, today's Indonesia, plus Suriname

Legacy

Afrikaans, Dutch place names from New York to South Africa, and modern financial tools such as the stock exchange all trace back to the Dutch golden age.

Timeline of Dutch Republic and Dutch Colonial Empire

  1. Dutch East India Company (VOC) founded

    In the 1590s, while still fighting for independence from Spain, Dutch merchants began sending fleets to the East Indies for pepper and spices, and several rival companies competed for the trade. To end the competition and take on Portugal and England, the States General merged them on 20 March 1602 into the United East India Company (VOC), with a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade in Asia. It was one of the world's first joint-stock companies, whose shares any Dutch citizen could buy and trade. The VOC could build forts, keep armies and make treaties, and it became the main engine of the Dutch empire in Asia.

  2. Coen takes Jakarta and refounds it as Batavia

    The VOC needed a permanent base in Asia to control the spice trade. In 1619 Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen captured the Javanese port of Jayakarta and built a new fortified town on its ruins, which the company named Batavia. Batavia, on the north coast of Java, became the centre of the VOC's trading network across Asia for nearly two centuries. Coen was ruthless: in 1621 he led the conquest of the Banda Islands, killing or enslaving much of the population to secure a monopoly on nutmeg. Batavia, today's Jakarta, remained the capital of the Dutch East Indies until 1942.

  3. New Amsterdam founded in New Netherland

    The Dutch also traded in North America, where the Dutch West India Company founded the colony of New Netherland to run the fur trade along the Hudson River. In 1624–25 it built Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan; the settlement around it, New Amsterdam, became the colony's capital in 1625. It grew slowly, to about 2,500 people by 1664. That year the English seized it and renamed it New York, and after the Second Anglo-Dutch War the Dutch kept Suriname instead, ending their mainland colony in North America.

  4. West India Company occupies Pernambuco: Dutch Brazil (to 1654)

    The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, aimed to attack the Atlantic empire of Spain and Portugal, then united under one king. In February 1630 its forces captured Olinda and Recife in Pernambuco, the heart of Brazil's sugar industry. Under Governor John Maurice of Nassau (1637–43) Dutch Brazil, with its capital at Recife, controlled almost half of Brazil's settled area, and artists and scientists recorded the land. But Portuguese settlers rose against Dutch rule and won battles at Guararapes in 1648 and 1649, and the Dutch surrendered Recife on 28 January 1654. In 1661 the Netherlands formally gave up Brazil.

  5. Malacca taken from the Portuguese

    After Portugal broke away from Spain in 1640, it remained at war with the Dutch in Asia. The VOC, allied with the Sultanate of Johor, besieged Portuguese Malacca from August 1640. After more than five months of blockade, starvation and disease, the garrison surrendered on 14 January 1641. Malacca, which controlled the strait linking the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, became a Dutch possession for over 150 years. Its fall broke Portuguese power in the region and left the VOC the leading European power in the East Indies.

  6. Cape Colony founded; the Dutch empire at its height

    VOC ships sailing between Europe and Asia needed a place to take on fresh water, meat and vegetables on the long voyage. In 1652 a VOC expedition led by Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay and built a fort, founding a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope. Much to the dismay of the company's shareholders, the Cape soon grew into a settler colony as farmers moved inland. By the mid-17th century the Dutch held trading posts and colonies from the Americas and Africa to India, Ceylon and the East Indies, the height of their overseas empire.

  7. Conquest of Portuguese Ceylon completed

    The coasts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), with their valuable trade, were held by the Portuguese. The king of Kandy, in the interior, invited the Dutch to help drive them out. The VOC took Negombo and Galle in 1640, and after a long war captured Colombo in 1656; by 1658 it had taken the last Portuguese strongholds. Colombo became the capital of Dutch Ceylon. The Dutch controlled most of the island's coasts but never conquered the Kingdom of Kandy, and Dutch Ceylon came to an end in 1796 when the British took over.

  8. French-backed Batavian Republic; Britain occupies the Cape

    In January 1795 French revolutionary armies overran the Dutch Republic, and Dutch revolutionaries, with French support, proclaimed the Batavian Republic on 19 January, ending the rule of the stadtholder, William V. As the Netherlands was now a French ally, Britain began seizing Dutch colonies, and in 1795 British forces occupied the Cape of Good Hope. Other Dutch posts in Asia soon followed. The VOC, already in deep debt, was nationalised and dissolved at the end of 1799. The Dutch empire overseas was falling into British hands.

  9. Kingdom of Holland annexed to Napoleon's French Empire (to 1813)

    In 1806 Napoleon turned the Batavian Republic into the Kingdom of Holland and made his brother Louis Bonaparte king. Louis tried to protect Dutch interests and did not strictly enforce Napoleon's Continental System against British trade, so smuggling continued. Losing patience, Napoleon sent troops, who took Amsterdam in early July 1810; Louis abdicated on 1 July, and on 9 July 1810 the kingdom was annexed to the French Empire. The Netherlands ceased to exist as a separate state until 1813, and with no Dutch government to defend them, the remaining Dutch colonies were exposed to British attack.

  10. Anglo-Dutch Treaty returns the East Indies; the Cape stays British

    After Napoleon's defeat, Britain wanted a strong Netherlands as a buffer against France. By the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, signed in London on 13 August, Britain returned most of the Dutch colonies it had occupied, including the Dutch East Indies, Malacca, Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands. In return the Dutch ceded the Cape Colony and parts of Guiana (later British Guiana) to Britain. The treaty restored the East Indies, the heart of the Dutch empire, but the Cape stayed British, ending Dutch rule in southern Africa.

  11. Aceh War begins in northern Sumatra (to 1904)

    Aceh, a strong independent sultanate at the northern tip of Sumatra, controlled the approaches to the Strait of Malacca and traded with other powers. In 1873 the Dutch declared war; the first expedition, sent in March, failed after its commander, General Köhler, was killed, and a second, larger force followed. Acehnese resistance, led by sultans, nobles such as Teuku Umar and Cut Nyak Dhien, and Islamic scholars, turned into a long guerrilla war. Some 37,000 soldiers on the Dutch side and 60,000–70,000 Acehnese died, many from cholera. By 1904 Aceh was conquered, completing Dutch rule over almost all of today's Indonesia.

  12. Japan conquers the Dutch East Indies; Dutch surrender in March

    The Dutch East Indies were one of the world's leading oil exporters, which made them a prime target for Japan once war began with the Western powers in December 1941. Japanese forces invaded from January 1942, and destroyed much of the Allied fleet; the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman was killed in the Battle of the Java Sea. Japanese troops landed on Java, and the campaign ended with the Allied surrender on 9 March 1942, with more than 100,000 Allied soldiers captured. The Japanese occupation of more than three years ended Dutch rule in practice and fuelled the movement for Indonesian independence.

  13. Sovereignty transferred to Indonesia (independence proclaimed 1945)

    Two days after Japan surrendered, on 17 August 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence. The Netherlands tried to restore its rule by force, but after a Dutch military offensive in 1948–49 the UN Security Council demanded that it stop and restore the republican government. At a Round Table Conference in The Hague, held from August to November 1949, the Dutch agreed to hand over sovereignty, and on 27 December 1949 power passed to the United States of Indonesia. The Netherlands lost its largest and richest colony, keeping only western New Guinea in Asia.

  14. Dutch New Guinea handed to UN administration

    The Netherlands had kept western New Guinea in 1949, but Indonesia claimed it and threatened to take it by force. With the United States hosting talks, the two sides signed the New York Agreement at the United Nations on 15 August 1962. The territory was handed to a temporary UN administration, which handed it to Indonesia on 1 May 1963, with a promise of an 'act of free choice' by the inhabitants before 1969. The transfer ended Dutch rule in Asia after more than three and a half centuries, leaving only Suriname and the Caribbean islands.

  15. Suriname becomes independent

    Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, had been a Dutch colony since 1667, when the Dutch kept it in exchange for New Amsterdam, and its plantations were worked by enslaved Africans until 1863. In 1954 it became an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A left-wing Dutch government took the initiative for full independence, which was granted after negotiations on 25 November 1975, followed by years of Dutch aid. With Suriname gone, only the small Caribbean islands remained of the Dutch empire.

Periods and reigns

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