Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 131, Issue 3, 2018

From Binary Narratives to Diversified Tales. Changing the Paradigm in the Study of Dutch Colonial Participation

This article defends the existence of a Dutch empire and that this empire, as all the other empires in Western Europe, fulfilled the goals, interests and necessities of the central state, of the local elites and of the common man. There was thus a societal consensus about, and acceptance of empire. Furthermore, this article claims that the Dutch empire was not only a trading enterprise, as many have claimed, but a territorially expanding state that faced challenges regarding sovereignty, subjection and belonging across the globe, as did all other empires. In the conclusion, I suggest a change of paradigm in approaching the Dutch empire from the point of view of the multiplicity of actors that not only created, participated and developed the empire, but also from the perspective of the ones that actually became the empire.

Taking the Companies to Court. Wage Litigation against the Dutch East and West India Companies in the High Court

Both the Dutch East and West India Companies were taken to court in the Republic. Court cases were pursued to the highest court in the Republic, the appellate Hoge Raad van Holland, Zeeland en West-Friesland (High Court), by subjects of the States General and by foreigners, individuals, and groups. This article focuses on wage claims which involved issues of inheritance, shipwreck, and illegal private trade. They show the wide pool of litigants who took on the companies, and the use of the court to manage labour disputes. Litigation involving the VOC and WIC has long been ignored by scholars, but this article showcases the contribution that can be made to the fields of social, economic, and legal history through analysis of the High Court records.

Petitions, public opinion, and personal connections. The three Ps of lobbying in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic

This article argues that lobbying was an essential element in political decision-making in the early modern period. There were three main ways of lobbying: by issuing petitions, influencing public opinion, and through personal connections. While petitions were used to convince political mandataries, public opinion was used to pressure decision-makers. Use of personal connections and social credit were essential to secure the support of a majority of decision-makers. Studying these lobbying networks shows that they were alliances based on shared interests. These alliances transcended other barriers and brought together individuals from different genders, belief systems, nationalities, races, and classes.

Agents overseas. The principal-agent problem in early modern Dutch chartered companies

Could early modern chartered companies effectively ensure that their agents overseas were working in the best interests of the firm rather than in their own personal interests? This principal-agent problem has been the topic of a number of important studies in early modern economic history. This article contributes to the debate by elaborating on two case-studies from the two large Dutch chartered trading companies, the East- and the West India Companies (VOC and WIC respectively). Exploration of the careers of two individuals within these companies shows that supervision – and indeed career-making – was frequently a matter of unwritten rules and codes of conduct. While formal written rules might be found lacking, control could still be exerted through patronage or family ties. But this presented the companies with other challenges as well. In studying principal-agent problems, researchers in economic history need to be aware of informal mechanisms of control as well as formal ones.

The missing link between company and consumption. Who were the main buyers at the auctions of the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century?

The wholesale and retail market for Asian goods in Europe is still largely unexplored. Historians’ growing interest in consumption patterns is now revealing the importance of Asian products in the nascent European consumer market. Earlier studies have already found that the Dutch East India Company moved from shipping only luxury commodities to supplying Europe with products (coffee, tea and sugar) intended for an increasingly broad range of consumers. By compiling and analyzing a database of purchases at the auctions of the VOC in Zeeland in the eighteenth century this article investigates a crucial link between trade with Asia and consumption in Europe. It also reveals that the company catered to the burgeoning slave trade of Zeeland. We find that the auctions were dominated by a small group of wholesalers who potentially had the power to dictate the commercial policy of the company in Asia.

The Resources of Others. Dutch Exploitation of European Expansion and Empires, 
1570-1800

Historiography pertaining to the study of European colonial empires can generally be defined in two different strands: on the one hand, the nationally geared scholarship that zooms in on the development of specific ‘national’ empires and their relationships to non-European individuals, groups and polities and, on the other hand, narratives that privilege the focus on the colony and the colony’s links to the outside world. What neither of these strands does, however, is to question the role foreigners played in the capturing of resources within the logic of a foreign empire and how those resources were transferred to the places of origin of these individuals and groups. This article provides an overview of Dutch participation in the empires of others (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) by underlining the important role that Dutch merchants, investors and labour specialists played in the exploitation of other, often competing, European empires. While some of the acquired resources remained in the host society where Dutch merchants and firms settled, some of the colonial resources and by-products were sent back to the merchants’ and firms’ places of origin, more often than not through complex transnational networks of contacts and divergent groups of interests.