Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

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       CHAPTER 5

       The Foundation of the Dutch East India Company 1602

      For a hundred and fifty years, from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, world trade was dominated by the Dutch Republic. This achievement was largely due to the creation of a unique institution, the Dutch East India Company.

      William the Silent is one of the great heroes of European history. His proper name was William of Orange, a Dutch nobleman who resented the injustice of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, rebelled against it and led the seven Dutch United Provinces to independence as a republic. He was called ‘the Silent’ because he was careful about what he said in public, sometimes avoiding saying what he thought. Under his leadership in 1581, the United Provinces signed the Oath of Abjuration in which they renounced Spanish rule. Although they were not formally granted independence until nearly seventy years later, in 1648, they operated from this moment on as a nation in their own right. The Spanish King, Philip II, proclaimed William an outlaw and he was assassinated three years after the Oath. ‘As long as he lived,’ wrote the American historian, J. L. Motley, ‘he was the guiding star of a whole great nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’

      At the time of his death the republic he had helped to create seemed an insignificant country compared to the magnificence of the Habsburg Empire from which it had seceded. Only the northern part of the Netherlands had secured its independence. The south was still firmly under Spanish control: its Catholic nobility did not want to be part of William’s little republic and remained allied to King Philip and his able commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma. From these inauspicious beginnings the Dutch Republic grew with astonishing speed. At home, the work of its artists turned it one of the finest centres of painting Europe has ever seen, and the seventeenth century became known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch art. Abroad it demonstrated rather more practical, and ruthless, skills as the commercial activities of the Dutch East India Company transformed it into a world power.

       The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world.

      The Dutch East India Company changed the commercial history of the world. It was created after a period when it seemed as though William the Silent’s dream of independence had died with him. Some of the Dutch provinces, disunited and unable to agree on a common ambition, were taken back into Spanish control by the Duke of Parma. But in 1590 he was despatched to France by Philip II to support Catholic opposition to the new French King, the Protestant Henry IV. With Parma out of the way, the Dutch rebels were at last able to consolidate their drive for independence and make the transition from a group of united provinces to a proper republic. But it was still a nation made up of separate entities. Although it was governed by a ‘States General’ that represented all the country’s different provinces, its constitution stated that this body ‘had no overlord but the deputies of the Provincial Estates themselves’.

      The Dutch East India Company, the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, generally known then as the VOC, was the creation of rival merchants with one common interest – the pursuit of wealth. In 1598 all Spanish and Portuguese ports were closed to Dutch shipping, forcing the United Provinces to look beyond the Mediterranean for new trading opportunities. The obvious markets were South America, which was opening up steadily following the voyages of exploration of the sixteenth century, and Asia. South America was a difficult destination for the Dutch because the Spanish and Portuguese had established firm control there. Asia seemed a better bet, but here the problem was that so many Dutch ships were chasing after the same things that the spoils were in danger of becoming dissipated. By 1599, nine different Dutch companies were in the business of trying to get their hands on spices, tea, cotton and other goods from the East Indies. Many voyages ended in disaster. About a tenth of the ships that set sail never returned and many Dutch crews were lost without trace. The man who came up with a rescue plan was Johan van Oldenbarneveldt.

       William the Silent

      William the Silent (1533–84) was a curious product of Habsburg Europe: a sixteenth-century German prince, he inherited the French princedom of Orange, spoke French and liberated the Dutch, who have called him ever since the ‘Father of our Nation’.

      William, whose full title was William I, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, was introduced as a boy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles grew to trust William, charging him with important negotiations and military engagements in the Netherlands. But William, an important member of the Dutch political elite (he held the title of ‘Stadtholder’), was far less enamoured with Charles’s son, Philip II, who became King of Spain in 1556. William disliked Philip’s religious intolerance towards Protestants and his encroachments on the Dutch nobility’s tradition of autonomy.

      William’s upbringing as a Lutheran and then a Catholic (he would finally settle on Calvinism in 1573) taught him the importance of freedom of religion. ‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people,’ he once said, ‘and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’ William’s nickname ‘Silent’ is thought to have developed in this context. According to one story, while out hunting, the French king, Henry III, revealed a secret agreement to eradicate Protestant heretics, believing William, who was present but kept silent, to be a party СКАЧАТЬ