4 - Expanding the Empire (1685–1780)

Summary

In the seventeenth century the voc became the strongest European imperial power in Asia. The war against the Iberians in Asia, one of the main reasons for its existence, had been emphatically won. The English and French hardly posed a threat. The Company had expanded its empire and now embraced a miscellany of holdings ranging from simple bases to entire regions and islands under direct or indirect rule. It owed that position firstly to its superiority at sea, a mastery that was still essential for holding all its varied possessions together, and secondly to the capture or construction of a large number of mostly coastal forts with which it supported its maritime infrastructure and bolstered its political and economic claims. A third reason for the Company's success was its use of local indigenous allies, mostly vassal states but also subjects and auxiliaries.

Around 1685, however, the period of feverish expansion came to an end. With the exception of East Asia the voc had, for now, achieved its goals. More priority was given to trading and profit-making in the areas it dominated. Non-intervention was now the watchword, preserving the status quo. But maintaining such a temperate policy consistently proved easier said than done. There were several arenas where the status quo regularly came under pressure — Java, for instance, where a number of wars had to be fought. On balance, especially after 1740, the voc strengthened its grip on Java, secured its hegemony in Ceylon and augmented its position in Southeast Asia — on Timor, for example, and along the edge of the Malacca Strait. Only on the coasts of India, where the Company was gradually confronted with increasing British competition and new indigenous rulers, was it necessary to curb its ambitions.

Why was it, then, that despite its sober, non-interventionist policy the voc was so often involved in armed conflicts? Why, except for in India, did continuous small-scale expansion still occur? Was the Company facing a different type of adversary? And to what extent did the Dutch change their mode of action?

Consolidation versus Intervention

In 1684 Governor-General Cornelis Speelman, one of the champions of voc expansionism, died in Batavia. His successors were less bellicose. ‘Mercantile considerations seemed to supplant soldiering’, concluded the military historian Norman MacLeod over a century ago.