Dutch Commerce the Golden Age of Dutch

Dutch Commerce

The Golden Age of Dutch Commerce

Few powers from the age of colonialism would ascend with such speed, would proliferate so extensive an influence and would decline with such rapidity as would the Dutch in the 17th Century. A period often identified as a Dutch Golden Age, a duration initiating around the turn of the century and lasting under a century, the 1600s would be distinguished by a global dominance by the emergent Dutch Empire. The text by McKay et al. (2003) is particularly instructive on the role played by the Dutch in shaping global economic and military conditions during its brief but prodigious reign.

The forces that would first distinguish the Dutch from their competitors in a highly contentious period of European expansionism would be their superior naval and maritime capabilities. Prolific shipbuilders with tremendous seafaring and war-making capabilities, the Dutch succeeded in building their empire not by discovering and colonizing lands but by following on the heels of the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors of the preceding generation. According to Harreld (2010), "The ability of Dutch shippers to effectively compete with entrenched merchants, like the Hanseatic League in the Baltic, or the Portuguese in Asia stemmed from their cost cutting strategies (what de Vries and van der Woude call "cost advantages and institutional efficiencies," p. 374). Not encumbered by the costs and protective restrictions of most merchant groups of the sixteenth century, the Dutch trimmed their costs enough to undercut the competition." (Harreld, p. 1)

This would allow the Dutch not only to stimulate a period of rapid expansion in its maritime exploits, but also to effectively wage wars of occupation against the Spanish and the Portuguese in Africa and the Americas, and with England and France in Asia. In all of these contexts, the Dutch would establish a new model for colonial expansion and, in doing so, would create a powerful template to be followed by the rest of the world. In its Dutch West India, Dutch East India and its United East India Company, the kingdom of the Netherlands would use its affiliated corporate structures to gain dominance in critical trade areas such as the spice trade and, increasingly, the highly interrelated sugar and slave trades.

The corporations created using sovereign capital and persisting through a constant reinvestment of capital (rather than through regular payouts to their investors) would also be outfitted with an array of expansive powers. Indeed, because the Dutch had established the strategy of engaging colonial competitors in a military capacity, these corporate entities had to be given war-making capabilities. As such, the charters establishing the Dutch India Companies would allow the respective corporate entities to occupy territories, to establish settlements, to declare war and to utilize Dutch resources to wage war in the interests of territorial expansion.

These capacities would be used to expel the Spanish and the Portuguese from various locations in the Caribbean, in African and in the ports of Brazil. This allowed the Dutch to claim substantial holdings in the sugar cane agricultural business and to claim port locations critical to the Atlantic Slave Trade. And because of the massive resource holdings of the Dutch India companies, they would also succeed in pushing the British away from desired territories such as Indonesia.