Introduction
By the mid-seventeenth century Dutch trading ships sailed on virtually all the oceans of the globe. According to contemporary sources the Dutch merchant fleet was as big as all of the merchant fleets of the other European nations combined.
In the coastal seas of the European continent, Dutch vessels traded from the Baltic regions to the Levant in the Mediterranean. They went whaling in arctic waters as far north as Spitzbergen. They ventured all over the Atlantic, establishing footholds in the New Netherlands (New York) in North America, and on the islands of the Caribbean. They carried slaves from Angola and Elmina on the Gold Coast of Africa to settlements at Recife in Brazil and the Wild Coast of Guyana in South America. Near the Cape of Good Hope, Kaapstad (“the tavern of the seas”) was established in 1652 to serve the long-distance shipping of the Dutch East India Company destined for Asia. Founded in 1619, Batavia, the Company's headquarters located on the island of Java, coordinated a wide-ranging intra-Asian commercial network which connected the Arabian Seas via the Indian Ocean with the Indonesian archipelago and the China Seas. Encircling the globe, Dutch seafarers had discovered the route around Cape Horn and had partially explored the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. All this was accomplished within a 50-year period.Overstretch was soon felt. In the Atlantic region, recently conquered territorial possessions in Brazil and Angola were lost again to the Portuguese. With the British, the New Netherlands (Manhattan and the settlements along the Hudson River as far as present-day Albany) were exchanged for Surinam on the Wild Coast and the isle of Run in the Moluccas. In Asia, Taiwan was surrendered in 1662 to the Chinese warlord Zheng Chenggong (alias Coxinga) after a long siege, but elsewhere the Dutch held on to their network of trading posts.
These Asian possessions were consolidated into the largest European seaborne empire east of the Good Hope, surpassed only by the English toward the end of the eighteenth century. But already by the 1730s, the port of Amsterdam had yielded its primacy in world trade to the City of London.As observed by L'abbe Raynal in his Histoirephilosophique des deux Indes (1770), the Dutch rise to primacy in world trade occurred “when a great change was
Leonard Blusse, The Dutch Seaborne Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0031. preparing in the minds of men in Europe. The revival of letters, the extension of commerce, the invention of printing, and the discovery of the compass, brought an era when human reason was to shake off the yoke of some of those prejudices which had gained ground in the barbarous ages.”[2096] Indeed the sudden great leap into Asian waters by Dutch vessels that began in 1595 enjoyed support from across the Netherlands, an influx of capital from the migrants from the southern provinces, scientific support in the shape of maps and navigational aids, and finally a large popular interest in overseas adventures owing to the spread of highly popular travel literature.
The Dutch were not unprepared when they dispatched their first merchant fleets around the Cape of Good Hope to Southeast Asia in search of spices and the riches of the Orient. Many Dutch sailors had worked on Portuguese ships and had visited various ports in Asia before being fired and sent home on the orders of King Philip II of Spain and Portugal. Some of these individuals had even served in official functions in Goa. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, former secretary to the bishop of Goa, took advantage of his time in the East to gather precious information on the Estado da India. After his return to Holland, he published all of this miscellaneous data in his famous Itinerario, a book full of precise descriptions of the various sea routes and the state of affairs of the Portuguese seaborne empire.[2097] Cornelis de Houtman, one of the commanders of the first voyage to the Indies (1595), used en route a manuscript copy of the Itinerario along with a set of sea charts, portolans, and rutters he had acquired at a spy mission to Lisbon. Literature on colonization by Spanish and Portuguese writers was eagerly read and consulted in the Low Countries. In short, the Dutch gathered information before they set sail and used this knowledge to their advantage in Asia.[2098]
More on the topic Introduction:
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- INTRODUCTION TO REASONING IN THE ΠFΓ EXAM
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction