Dutch colonial empire
Global trading empire spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The Dutch colonial empire was a network of overseas territories and trading posts under Dutch authority from the early 1600s until the late 1900s. These were first run by private companies like the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company, then later by the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. At its peak around 1652, this empire included holdings in eastern North America, the Caribbean, South America, western and southern Africa, parts of India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan.
Quick Facts
- Event pre
- First and second expedition to the East Indies
- Date pre
- 1595–1600
- Event start
- Company rule in the East Indies started
- Year start
- 1595
- Year end
- 1962
- Event end
- Dutch New Guinea transferred to UN administration
- National motto
- fr, Je maintiendrai (French) ("I will uphold")
Facts from the source article.
History
The Eighty Years' War began in the 1560s in the Habsburg Netherlands, leading a coalition of rebel provinces united in the Union of Utrecht to declare independence from the Spanish Empire with the 1581 Act of Abjuration, establishing the de facto independent northern Dutch Republic in 1588, whose sovereignty was recognized by the Treaty of Antwerp in 1609. The war caused an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 victims, including 350,000 to 400,000 civilians killed by disease and what would later be considered war crimes. Conflict extended to Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories after Portugal's incorporation into the Iberian Union with Spain by Philip II in 1580 closed Portuguese markets to the United Provinces. In 1595, the Dutch sailed to acquire products for themselves, using secret knowledge of Portuguese trade routes obtained by Cornelis de Houtman in Lisbon.
Legacy
The Dutch relationship with their colonial past is generally one of muted reflection rather than celebration, and this history receives little attention in the country's schoolbooks, though attitudes have begun to change in recent years. A 2019 YouGov survey found that half of Dutch respondents expressed some pride in the colonial empire, while only 6% reported feeling ashamed. In several former colonies, communities of Dutch descent persist. In South Africa, the Boers and Cape Dutch are known collectively as Afrikaners. Mixed-race populations with Dutch ancestry include the Burgher people of Sri Lanka, the Indo people of Indonesia, and the Creoles of Suriname. Three U.S. presidents have claimed Dutch heritage: Martin Van Buren, whose first language was Dutch and who was the first president not of British descent; Theodore Roosevelt; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only president elected to more than two terms. Despite nearly 350 years of Dutch rule in Indonesia, the Dutch language holds no official status there. Only a small, mostly older or legally trained minority speaks it fluently, though Indonesian has absorbed many Dutch words—one scholar estimates 20% of its vocabulary. In Sri Lanka and southern India, a century and a half of Dutch control left almost no linguistic traces. Dutch is the official language of Suriname, where 82% of people speak it fluently. In Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Dutch is also official but is the first language for just 7–8% of residents, though most are fluent and it is the primary language of education. The northern Antilles of Sint Maarten, Saba, and Sint Eustatius are predominantly English-speaking. In New Jersey, an extinct dialect called Jersey Dutch, spoken by descendants of 17th-century settlers in Bergen and Passaic counties, was still heard as late as 1921. President Van Buren, raised in a Dutch-speaking enclave in New York, grew up speaking Dutch as his native tongue.
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