Dutch West India Company

4 Key excerpts on "Dutch West India Company"

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  eBook - ePub

  Outsourcing Empire

  How Company-States Made the Modern World

  • Jason Sharman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Dutch Moment: War, Trade and Settlement in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World by Wim Klooster (Cornell University Press, 2016).

  Nearer the expiration of the truce, shifts in power between Dutch hawks and doves renewed the impetus to open another front against the Habsburgs in the Americas and the Atlantic using the same institutional model as the VOC. Once chartered in 1621 for a term of 24 years, the West India Company set about raising its initial capital of 7.1 million florins, slightly larger than the 6.5 million VOC had begun with, but an order of magnitude greater than the English East India Company, let alone the Royal African or Hudson’s Bay Companies fifty years later.17 Where the VOC had reached its target in a month, however, the newer company took two years. This rather tepid support reflected concerns among investors about the extent to which the new company would pursue piracy and conquest over profits and dividends.18 These concerns were later shown to be well-founded.19

  Notwithstanding the differences indicated above, the charter otherwise followed the precedent of the VOC in the suite of legal and sovereign powers conferred, including powers to make war and peace, engage in diplomacy, and carry out administrative and judicial roles in the lands it conquered. “Once again, commerce, capital, and state power worked hand in hand to produce another weapon in the struggle for Dutch independence, profit and influence, and once again a company seemed to provide the proper and necessary means.”20 The WIC was granted a monopoly on trade from Newfoundland to the Cape of Good Hope, but also in the Pacific from the west coast of the Americas to New Guinea. Thus trading rights in the whole extra-European world were divided between the two Dutch company-states.21

  The company was to be run by a board of 19 directors, the Heeren XIX. The distribution of directorships among different chambers reflected both the United Provinces’ confederal structure, but also the financial and political power of Holland and Amsterdam in particular. The latter received eight votes on the board; Zeeland, four; the Northern Quarter, Maas, and Gronigen, two each; while as noted the representative of the States-General held the nineteenth vote. Although Amsterdam was clearly the most powerful, its dominance was somewhat less pronounced than in the VOC, or for that matter the States-General, where Holland provided over 58 percent of the total revenue.22 Despite their formal rights, as with the VOC, the WIC often rode roughshod over the wishes of its shareholders, refusing audits and only reluctantly distributing dividends.23

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  The World Encompassed

  The First European Maritime Empires c.800-1650

  • G. V. Scammell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  But that imperial success was not the necessary corollary of business acumen, and that merchants could be as ardent in the pursuit of chimera as squires and peasants was shown by the history of the Dutch West India Company (WIC= West Indische Compagnie). This, unlike the VOC, sprang from no existing trading organizations, but was created in 1621 ‘to do all that the service of this country and the profit and increase of trade shall require’. In other words it was to attack Iberian possessions, commerce and shipping in the Atlantic and in so doing both benefit the republic’s merchant oligarchs whilst diverting, at little cost to the state, Spanish strength and resources away from the Low Countries. The better to accomplish these objectives the company was given a twenty-five-year monopoly of Holland’s trade and navigation with the Americas and West Africa, and granted the same semi-sovereign powers as the VOC. It was of a similar federal structure, comprising five ‘chambers’, each entitled to conduct a more or less automonous commerce with some particular area. Like the VOC, the company was dominated by a self-recruiting oligarchy of directors who, however, held office for only six years and accounted to the shareholders at a similar interval. The WIC was financed, as was the East India Company, by the sale of shares on the open market. It attracted money from the same wide range of investors – with serving girls and merchant plutocrats alike contributing to its capital – and was again dominated by Amsterdam and Zeeland. Between them their ‘chambers’ were entitled to two-thirds of the company’s trade, and together they provided twelve out of the WIC’s nineteen-man central management (Heeren- 19). But because of the company’s strategic purpose state direction was closer than with the VOC (cf. pp. 403ff.)

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  Colonial America

  A History to 1763

  • Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  When it appeared in 1620 that war was about to break out again between Spain and Holland, Dutch interest in the area revived, in part because a base might be required for operations across the Atlantic. The Dutch East India Company was preoccupied elsewhere so a new corporation was formed to establish a base and exploit the area's commercial potential. Initially, the Dutch West India Company devoted its attention to Bahia in the Caribbean, until a small group of settlers was finally dispatched to the mainland of North America to consolidate Dutch claims to the region in 1624. Most of the party went to the site of the earlier post, now called Fort Orange, to resume the fur trade. A smaller group settled on Governor's Island at the mouth of the Hudson, while a further detachment went to the Delaware Valley, establishing Fort Nassau near the future city of Philadelphia. To guard against the possibility of attack by competing European powers, additional settlers were sent in 1625 to a fortified post on Manhattan Island called New Amsterdam.

  In some respects the Dutch company resembled that of Virginia in its early stages. Governmental authority lay primarily with the director general and his officials, though they were supposed to seek the occasional advice of a council drawn from the inhabitants. Most settlers arrived as servants of the company, usually for a period of six years. After this they could take up tenancies, as in Virginia. In other respects, the Dutch company's policies were quite different from those of the Virginia Company. Dutch colonists were required only to grow food, and to sell their produce to the company. The company offered few incentives to encourage immigration. Thus, though the settlement never experienced the tribulations of Virginia, since it was self-sufficient from the outset, it grew very slowly, like the colony of New France. By 1630 it contained only 300 inhabitants.

  Historians have sometimes portrayed the Dutch failure to encourage immigration into New Netherland as evidence of Dutch short-sightedness, a failure to envision the profit-making potential of an expanding agricultural colony. But recent research suggests the Dutch West India Company made a conscious, even principled decision to focus primarily on trade rather than on settlement. According to this view, the Dutch sought a colony that remained “alongshore,” on the margins of Native American society, rather than one that pressed into the interior.5 Their rights to inhabit the land would be based on contractual relationships with the native inhabitants rather than on conquest or the grants of a distant monarch. Consistent with these principles, the company initially developed policies to help it build amicable trading relationships and to avoid hostilities with the local Indians. Policy dictated that land should be purchased from the Indians, not taken by force. When Willem Verhulst and his successor Peter Minuit negotiated an alliance and purchased the island from the Manhattan Indians6

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  The Atlantic

  • Paul Butel(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the face of these difficulties, overseas expansion made a striking contrast both in the New World and in Asia. The Dutch entertained great hopes and thought it possible that the Spanish and Portuguese Indies might be broken up. In the event, however, at least in the Americas, the expansion proved difficult, perhaps because of the late foundation of the West Indies Company, which was only created when the truce ended in 1621, more than 15 years after the initial project. Moreover, due to the resistance of Fresian ports such as Hoorn, which dominated the salt trade in the Caribbean and had no wish for a monopoly, it was only ready to act in 1623.

  To attract shareholders, the company directors presented the general malaise of which Dutch trade was the victim in Europe’s seas. The trade in Baltic grain had just collapsed there, and Madrid’s embargoes reduced its shipments. They contrasted this with all the benefits of a colonial trade based on closely defended trading posts and plantations, which would give stability to commerce by expanding Dutch markets.

  This propaganda was only partially successful, and the share subscription for the company was rather slow in taking off. The largest investors were a few merchants who had played a major role in the first expansion in the Caribbean, in Brazil and Guinea: Bartholotti put in up to 100,000 florins, while Balthasar Coymans risked 20,000—both men belonged to a group of merchants who were immigrants in Antwerp and who gave new vigour to Dutch trade. The Regents’ oligarchy emerged as the most favoured, without however being able to claim to monopolize investment, or even manage it. In particular, Amsterdam’s share was not very high in relation to the town’s importance, making a total of 1,700,000 florins from a share issue greater than 6,600,000. It was in certain towns in the interior, far from the sea, where religious and political zealotry fuelled heightened efforts in the war against Spain (the company had also to be an instrument of aggression against the Iberians), that the most active participation could be found. Leiden and Utrecht contributed 270,000 and 215,000 florins, Groningen 400,000.

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