History
Defying Mercantilism: Dutch interimperial trade in the Atlantic world
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the Dutch build a global empire. The East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC, founded in 1602) developed into a commercial giant in the Indian Ocean, overseeing a network of factories from Indonesia to Japan and from Siam to Ceylon, linked by a regular exchange of information and commodities. The company derived its strength in part from its commercial monopolies, including cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Its Atlantic counterpart, the West India Company (WIC, founded in 1621) started out on the same footing, conquering strategic places on either side of the Atlantic: Elmina, Luanda, northern Brazil, and Curaçao. Eventually, however, it was ousted from most of the lands it had occupied, and no new colonies were captured after Suriname was wrested from England in 1667. The Dutch contribution to the early modern Atlantic was, therefore, not primarily an imperial, but a commercial one. As this essay will show, the Dutch were actually the interimperial traders par excellence in the Atlantic world.
Publication Title
The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook
Publication Date
2017
First Page
303
Last Page
320
ISBN
9781317662143
DOI
10.4324/9781315767000
Keywords
17th century, Atlantic world, Dutch, East India Company, New World, empire, mercantilism
Repository Citation
Klooster, Willem, "Defying Mercantilism: Dutch interimperial trade in the Atlantic world" (2017). History. 40.
https://commons.clarku.edu/historyfac/40
