In Conclusion

There are many definitions of empire, but in the case of most seaborne empires the case can be made that they were directly linked to the political center in the metrop­olis by state intervention.

In the case of the Dutch East India Company we may ask whether this also was true. Once the VOC was established, it preserved a remarkable independence from the political center in the Netherlands until the last decade of its existence. The founding charter gave this commercial operation the exclusive status of “state out­side the state” in the political regime of the recently established Dutch Republic. It is noteworthy that in wartime the Dutch East India Company in Asia, apart from deliveries of ship-cannons and other weaponry purchased on the account of the States-General, hardly asked for, or received for that matter, any military aid from the mother country, in contrast to the English and French Companies, whose mili­tary expenses were generously funded by the metropolis during the eighteenth cen­tury. The warships that were dispatched by France and Britain to the war theater in the Indian Ocean all belonged to the royal navies. The VOC traditionally refused to seek such military assistance from the States-General in Holland, because it jeal­ously thought to protect from government intervention its octroy that provided almost sovereign powers east of Cape of Good Hope. In principle, the VOC had to bear all of its military expenses, but when Asian politics in the eighteenth century increasingly also became tied to European politics, this arrangement turned out to be hard to maintain. During the fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch Republic had to call in at high cost French naval assistance at the Cape of Good Hope and in Asia, and it was thanks to the skillful campaigns of Admiral Suffren that Ceylon and the Cape Colony were saved.

One more distinct feature of the early Dutch seaborne empire should be noted. Unlike the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Germans, the Dutch popu­lation was not inclined to emigration.^[2126] With almost two million inhabitants, the population of the Dutch Republic may have been rather small, but owing to the country's small size it was, with an almost continuous immigration from Germany, one of the most densely populated nations in Europe. How should we explain this phenomenon?

Unlike the other European countries where large parts of the population lived in stark poverty, Dutch urban society seems to have taken care of its poor rela­tively well, with the result that, with the exception of sailors, few saw the necessity of moving abroad, not to speak of settling overseas. It is true that several hundred thousand Company servants and soldiers who traveled East during the Company's 200-year existence may have decided to settle down in Asia after their discharge from Company service, but it is clear that their survival rate in the tropics was alarmingly low.

After the loss of New Holland in North America, the Cape Colony remained as the only Dutch overseas settlement with favorable and moderate climatic conditions, but even there the number of immigrants remained very low.^[2127] Perhaps it is better to turn the question around and ask why, for instance, the British people migrated in such large numbers. First of all, a large emigration took place not from England it­self but from the more impoverished parts of Great Britain, such as Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. It is well known that insofar as people did not want freely to move to the newly acquired overseas territories, the British government gave migration a helping hand by sending convicts from the home country overseas. The same seems to have been the case in Spain. In addition to this, the right of primogeniture of the eldest son in English law may also have pushed younger brothers overseas to seek the fortune that was unavailable at home.

Neither convict forced labor migration nor primogeniture played a role in Dutch society, although from the Indonesian archipelago native criminals and rebels were occasionally banished to other Company settlements such as Cape Town and Ceylon. This explains the presence of Malay communities in South Africa and Sri Lanka today.

Although during the Napoleonic Wars all of the former overseas possessions of the VOC and the WIC came into in British hands on promise of restitution after the war ended, the establishments at the Cape of Good Hope, and in India, Malacca, and Ceylon in Asia, and British Guyana on the Wild Coast in South America were irretrievably lost. Yet, according to the Vienna Treaty of1815, Java and surrounding islands of the Indonesian archipelago were restored to the newly established Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the nineteenth century the Netherlands East Indies would become the centerpiece of the Dutch colonial empire.

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