West India Company, Dutch

The Dutch East India (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) and West India (West-Indische Compagnie, or WIC) Companies are usually considered to have been the most important instruments of the early Dutch expansion overseas. Both were founded during the first quarter of the Dutch "Golden Century" (the seventeenth) and both seemed to symbolize the strong Dutch mercantile and naval power at the time. In spite of the striking similarities in the companies' organizational structures at home, the WIC was never so much an all-embracing trading and shipping firm and a colonizer with a firm legal and actual monopoly, as was the VOC.

It took three years before the WIC had collected 6 million guilders, whereas a similar capital outlay for the VOC was raised within one month during the year 1602, when the Dutch Republic was far less affluent. Investors seemed to have realized that the WIC would not be as innovative as the VOC, as there already existed several local companies and merchant houses operating in the Atlantic and trading to the west coast of Africa, Guiana, Portuguese Brazil, and North America. Investors must have realized that the Dutch trade to all these Atlantic destinations flourished without the WIC, and that the foundation of the company was partly based on noncommercial considerations such as increasing the war effort against Spain.

Soon after the WIC had been founded, its policies became more and more fragmented. The Zeeland chamber began to administer the plantation settlements in Guiana exclusively, whereas the Amsterdam chamber concentrated on the Dutch settlement colony in North America, New Netherland, and the Dutch Antilles. In 1628 all chambers were allotted exclusive trading rights in separate areas along the coast of West Africa. This process of fragmentation was strengthened by the issuing of private freehold estates, called patroonships, in New Netherland and in the Caribbean. A consortium, in which the Dutch West India Company participated as only one of the shareholders, administered the largest Dutch plantation colony, Suriname, conquered in 1667. Private merchants who received land grants within the company's territory were usually connected to, or even directors of, one specific chamber.

The fear of competition with Amsterdam explains Zeeland's adherence to the renewal of the WIC charter in 1647. The board of directors allotted the right to trade in the Atlantic to the various chambers on the basis of an intricate yearly roster, and in case the WIC monopoly would be annulled and Dutch Brazil lost, the Zeelanders feared that their port cities would not be able to compete with Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In 1647 the charter of the WIC was renewed, and in 1648 a fleet was dispatched to save Dutch Brazil. Both concessions to Zeeland failed to live up to expectations. Interlopers eroded the company's monopoly, and in 1654 Recife, the last Brazilian city in the hands of the WIC, was surrendered to the Portuguese, leaving the company with a huge debt. Subsequent attempts at creating another sugar empire in the Caribbean failed. In North America, the only WIC settlement colony, New Netherland, was lost to the English in 1664.

THE SECOND DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY

In 1674 the West India Company was declared bankrupt. The capital outlay for its successor, the second WIC, was mostly an arrangement on paper: both shareholders and owners of bonds were given shares in the new company to the amount of 15 and 30 percent of the nominal value of the old shares and bonds. There was one snag: the new shareholders were required to pay 4 to 8 percent of the value of their old shares in cash to the company. Because of these payments, the second WIC started out with only 1.2 million guilders, about one-fifth of the original capital outlay for the first WIC.

The only alteration to the WIC infrastructure at home was the reduction in the number of directors from nineteen to ten. In addition, the company's monopoly was limited to the slave trade and the trade to the Dutch forts in Africa, but even that monopoly was lost in 1734. This time, Zeeland and Amsterdam had similar interests. Zeeland felt confident about retaining its position in the Dutch slave trade, and Amsterdam had invested heavily in the plantations in Suriname and expected free traders to carry more slaves to that colony once the WIC monopoly had been abolished.

After 1734 the WIC became a "body without a soul." The company was left with the administration of the Dutch possessions on the African coast, the Dutch Antilles, and two small plantation colonies on the South American mainland, Essequibo and Demerara. Its top-heavy apparatus at home did not change: the national and local directorships had become part of the job circuit within the Dutch oligarchy. In 1791 the second WIC was abolished, and the shareholders were partly compensated with government bonds. The Dutch Republic itself assumed the role of colonial power.

COMMERCIAL ACTIVITIES

In the beginning of its existence, the WIC played an important role in Dutch maritime trade. Around 1650, when the company still governed part of Brazil and New Netherland, the imports into the Dutch Republic amounted to about 60 million guilders, of which the trade to Brazil, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America generated nearly 18 million. The yearly number of ships involved in this trade amounted to 200 to 250. Of that number 15 ships on average sailed to North America, 20 to Spanish America, 35 to Brazil, 155 to the Caribbean, and 20 to West Africa, while 15 ships participated in the slave trade and 20 in privateering. During the second half of the seventeenth century the loss of Brazil and the application of the Navigation Acts in the British colonies and similar protectionist legislation in the French colonies, as well as the declining opportunities for privateers, reduced the volume of the Dutch trade in the Atlantic. Between 1650 and 1740 estimates put the yearly number of Dutch ships operating in the Atlantic at around 100 to 130. However, the decline in the number of ships was probably partly compensated for by an increase in the value of the cargoes as the percentage of slave ships increased. In addition to the triangular slave trade, the company ships traded in American and African produce such as brazilwood, hides, ivory, sugar, tobacco, and cacao.

COLONIZATION

The Dutch West India Company concentrated on trade, not colonization. The total number of Europeans in the colonies and trading establishments of the company never surpassed 20,000 at any one time. The population of Dutch Brazil consisted of 25,000 Portuguese and only 4,000 Dutch colonists in addition to the 4,000-strong army and an estimated 9,000 native Amerindians. In the Dutch Caribbean the European population numbered, at most, 10,000. The only Dutch settlement colony in the Atlantic, New Netherland, was home to a similar number of colonists when the British took the colony in 1664. The WIC forts on the African coast never were staffed by more than 400 Europeans. The number of Dutch was even smaller than these figures suggest, as almost half of the Europeans in the Dutch Atlantic did not originate in the Dutch Republic, but in neighboring countries. A quarter of the white populations of Dutch Brazil and Suriname were made up of Jewish immigrants from outside the Netherlands, and almost half the population of New Netherland consisted of English immigrants from the surrounding areas.

There exists no single explanation for the obvious Dutch aversion to settling overseas. In contrast to the British and French settlements in the New World, the Dutch colonies never attracted large numbers of indentured servants. Rather than sending men to the New World, the Dutch succeeded in attracting large numbers of young men to serve in the merchant marine. The Dutch East India Company alone needed 4,000 new sailors and soldiers per year. Between 1600 and 1800 the Dutch managed to send 1 million men to Asia, half of whom never returned. That suggests that the Dutch made more profits by sending people to the tropics than to North America. The WIC was interested in furthering neither the Dutch language nor the Dutch variety of Protestantism. The governors of the various Dutch colonies and trading forts were well aware of the fact that only religious and cultural tolerance could prevent internal strife among the multinational staff and colonists. There is no evidence to suggest that the company's attitude towards Africans and Amerindians deviated from that of other colonial powers in the Atlantic. The original doubts of the board of the WIC about the company's participation in the slave trade seemed to have disappeared soon after the conquest of Brazil, where the importation of slaves was vital to economic expansion of the company.

SEE ALSO Amsterdam; Angola; Brazil; East India Company, Dutch; Empire, Dutch; Empire, Portuguese; Empire, Spanish; Ethnic Groups, Africans; Gold and Silver;Gold Coast; Imperialism; Jamaica; Kongo;Laborers, Coerced;Laborers, Contract;Mercantilism;Monopoly and Oligopoly;New York;Piracy;Privateering;Senegambia;Slavery and the African Slave Trade;Sugar, Molasses, and Rum;Tobacco;Venezuela.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emmer, P. C. The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation. Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1998.

Postma, Johannes, and Enthoven, Victor, eds. Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003.

Pieter Emmer