Introduction

Summary

On 30 November 1813 William, Prince of Orange, landed on the beach at Scheveningen, just outside The Hague. A few days later he assumed the title of Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands. And with that, the Dutch Republic became a thing of the past. During the Batavian-French era (1795–1813), which marks the transition from the Republic to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the country lost practically all of its colonies to Great Britain. On 13 August 1814 the British and Dutch signed the Convention of London, by whose terms the British would hand back certain of those overseas territories to King William I. That part of the agreement was eventually honoured in 1816. Thenceforth, the Netherlands once again possessed an empire that would reach its greatest territorial extent in Asia in the early twentieth century. The Dutch East Indies comprised the core of that overseas empire, with Suriname and the islands in the Caribbean as the periphery. The focus of Wars Overseas is not the modern but the early-modern empire that formed the basis for the colonies in East and West.

At first glance, Dutch colonial expansion might seem to have been a continuous process, interrupted only briefly by the Batavian-French period. In reality, however, while there are indeed similarities between the early-modern and modern phases of that expansion, such as the sustained administrative and military domination of indigenous and enslaved peoples, there are also significant differences. To highlight the divergent nature of early-modern expansion as compared to ‘modern’ colonialism and imperialism, which is the subject of Part 6 of the Military History of the Netherlands, this introduction focuses mainly on the distinctions between them. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the colonies came under the direct authority of the Dutch government, which was responsible for policy and military action overseas. In the early-modern period, on the other hand, the Netherlands, in common with most other European states, had a weak financial and organisational basis. Consequently it was not always possible to build a colonial empire or trade network or to wage large-scale wars overseas by relying purely on its own resources. Many countries left such enterprises either partly or entirely to privately financed chartered companies. The Netherlands was at the forefront in that respect. In the highly decentralized Dutch Republic with its limited state apparatus, overseas policy and military operations were outsourced to private companies and associations. Private and public interests merged almost seamlessly right up to the end of the eighteenth century. Only after the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784) did state involvement in the overseas possessions in the East and West increase and those colonies ultimately come into the hands of the State.