The Dutch and French Colonial Empires

The Dutch and the French were the two great late entrants to the European colonial system, and their fates illustrate the two failure modes of early modern empire. The Dutch built the world’s most sophisticated commercial empire in the seventeenth century and lost most of it by the end of the eighteenth. The French built a territorial empire in North America and the Caribbean that was, in the late eighteenth century, the most productive colonial economy in the world, and then lost it in three dramatic episodes between 1759 and 1804. The Dutch failure was one of relative decline — the empire shrank in the face of British commercial and naval superiority. The French failure was absolute: by 1814, the first French colonial empire in the Americas had effectively ceased to exist, and the second would be built only in the nineteenth century, on a different geographical base.

The two cases also illustrate, more clearly than the Spanish and British, the difference between commercial and territorial models of empire. The Dutch East India Company, which Jonathan Israel’s The Dutch Republic (1995) and Femme S. Gaastra’s The Dutch East India Company (2003) treat in detail, was the most highly capitalized joint-stock enterprise in the seventeenth-century world. It was a maritime commercial network, dependent on a small white population, a few fortified cities, and the systematic projection of naval power. The French colonial model, by contrast, was state-directed and territorially ambitious, dependent on royal direction, missionary work, and a small white population’s integration with indigenous and African labor. The two models were not, in principle, incompatible — the British Empire in India combined both — but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the distinction was sharp.

The Dutch Republic and the Origins of Empire

The Dutch Republic emerged from the Eighty Years’ War against Spain (1568–1648) as the first independent Protestant state in early modern Europe, and it brought to global competition a set of institutional and commercial advantages that no other state of the era could match. The Republic was densely populated, urbanized, and dominated by a mercantile bourgeoisie with deep capital reserves. Its location at the mouth of the Rhine and the Meuse gave it access to the great rivers of the European interior. Its merchant marine, the largest in the world in the seventeenth century, carried European goods to every corner of the globe. And its financial system — the Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the long-term government bond, the maritime insurance contract — was the model for the modern capitalist economy.

The technological basis of the Dutch commercial empire was the fluyt, a cargo ship designed for efficient bulk transport. The fluyt was less glamorous than the Spanish and Portuguese galleons, but it was cheaper to operate, required a smaller crew, and could carry more goods per ton of shipping. A single fluyt could carry as much cargo as a Portuguese carrack at a fraction of the cost. The Dutch merchant marine, built in the shipyards of the Zaanstreek and of Rotterdam, gave the Republic the ability to dominate the carrying trade of Europe and to project naval power across the oceans.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC)

The Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), was founded in 1602 by the merger of several smaller Dutch trading companies. It was given a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and, in a series of acts of the States General, quasi-sovereign powers: the right to wage war, conclude treaties with Asian rulers, coin money, and administer justice in the territories it controlled. The Company’s initial capital was around 6.4 million guilders, dwarfing the capitalization of the English East India Company and making the VOC the largest joint-stock enterprise in the world.

The VOC’s principal aim was to break the Portuguese monopoly on the Asian spice trade. Within a few years of its founding, the Company had captured the Portuguese fort at Ambon in the Moluccas (the original Spice Islands), and it had begun to project naval power across the Indonesian archipelago. The capture of Malacca in 1641, of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in 1658, and of a chain of posts on the Indian coast gave the VOC a network of fortified bases across the Indian Ocean basin. The administrative capital was Batavia, founded in 1619 on the site of the Javanese city of Jakarta, which would later become the capital of independent Indonesia.

The Dutch system in Asia was distinctive. It was based on a small number of fortified trading posts, on treaties with local rulers, and on the systematic projection of naval power. The Company was willing to use extreme violence, including the deliberate destruction of spice-producing trees in the Moluccas to maintain high prices, but it was not generally interested in territorial conquest for its own sake. The result was an Asian empire that, at its height, included modern Indonesia, parts of Sri Lanka and southern India, parts of Taiwan, the Cape Colony, and a small presence in Japan (the island of Dejima, the only European point of contact with Japan from 1641 to 1853).

The VOC’s profitability declined steadily through the eighteenth century, as corruption, the high cost of military operations, and competition from the English and the intra-Asiatic trade eroded the Company’s margins. The VOC was formally dissolved in 1799, and the Dutch government assumed direct administration of the East Indies. The Dutch East Indies remained part of the Netherlands until Indonesian independence in 1945, and the colonial presence left a deep imprint on the languages, laws, and political institutions of modern Indonesia.

The Dutch Atlantic

The Dutch West India Company, the Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie (WIC), was founded in 1621 as the Atlantic counterpart of the VOC, and it was charged with breaking the Iberian monopoly on Atlantic trade. The WIC’s early years were spectacularly successful. Piet Heyn’s capture of the Spanish silver fleet in the Bay of Matanzas in 1628 was the largest naval prize in history up to that point. The WIC seized Salvador in 1624 and Recife in 1630, and it established the colony of New Netherland in present-day New York.

The Atlantic empire was, however, less durable than the Asian one. The Brazilian conquests were gradually lost to the Portuguese in the 1650s. New Netherland, an underpopulated and badly administered colony, was seized by the English in 1664 and renamed New York. The Dutch retained a handful of Caribbean islands — Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius — which became important centers of the Atlantic slave trade, and several trading posts on the West African coast, including Elmina on the Gold Coast (taken from the Portuguese in 1637). The Cape Colony in southern Africa, founded as a refreshment station in 1652, gradually developed into a substantial settler colony, and it was the only Dutch overseas possession of lasting demographic significance. Taken by the British in 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars and formally ceded in 1814, the Cape became the foundation of British South Africa.

The WIC’s role in the Atlantic slave trade has been the subject of intense historical scrutiny in recent years, especially in the Netherlands itself. The Dutch share of the transatlantic trade was modest in volume — probably around 5 to 6 percent of the total — but the WIC built the basic infrastructure of the trade, including the kraal system on the Gold Coast and the entrepôt at Curaçao. The Dutch Caribbean colonies — Curaçao, Suriname — became important slave economies, and Suriname in particular remained under Dutch control as a planter society well into the twentieth century.

New France: The French Model in North America

The French colonial project in North America, called Nouvelle-France, was begun in the early seventeenth century and reached its territorial high point in the early eighteenth century. The first serious French settlement, at Port Royal in Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia), was established in 1605. The founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 anchored a French presence in the St. Lawrence valley that would last more than 250 years. By 1713, the French claim stretched from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Acadia to the Rocky Mountains — a territorial claim far larger than the actual settled population could support.

The French colonial system in North America developed along very different lines from the Spanish or English systems. France was a thinly populated country in the early seventeenth century, and it never produced the massive settler populations that gave the English colonies their demographic weight. The French Crown and its chartered companies, especially the Company of One Hundred Associates (Compagnie des Cent-Associés), attempted to compensate for this weakness through a state-directed colonization program that emphasized the fur trade, alliances with indigenous nations such as the Huron and Algonquin, and the use of Catholic missions as instruments of both religious conversion and political influence.

The French were among the most successful European colonizers in the interior of North America. The fur trade, which brought beaver pelts from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, was conducted through a network of forts, trading posts, and alliances with indigenous trappers. French explorers — Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet, Robert Cavelier de La Salle — opened up the Mississippi River system to French claim. In 1682, La Salle claimed the entire Mississippi basin for Louis XIV, naming it Louisiana in honor of the king. The French settlement of New Orleans in 1718 and the establishment of plantations in the lower Mississippi valley extended French control to the Gulf of Mexico.

The French relationship with the indigenous nations of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi valley was, as the work of Richard White (The Middle Ground, 1991) and Brett Rushforth (Bonds of Alliance, 2012) has shown, more complex and more reciprocal than the English relationship with Native Americans. The French lived among, traded with, and often intermarried with indigenous peoples, producing a métis culture that was, in the Great Lakes region, a genuine middle ground between European and indigenous ways of life. The French did not, in most cases, displace indigenous populations by settlement; they allied with them against the English, the Spanish, and rival indigenous nations.

The French Caribbean and Saint-Domingue

The French Caribbean colonies were, like the British, organized around the sugar plantation. France established permanent settlements on Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, on Saint Barthélemy in 1648, and on the western third of Hispaniola in 1697 (renamed Saint-Domingue). Saint-Domingue was, by the late eighteenth century, the wealthiest European colony in the Caribbean and the world’s leading producer of sugar and coffee. The colony’s economy generated enormous profits for French merchants and, indirectly, for the French state, which derived a substantial share of metropolitan revenue from the colonial trade.

The economy of Saint-Domingue was, however, dependent on the brutal system of African slavery. By the late eighteenth century, the colony had roughly 500,000 enslaved Africans, 40,000 free people of mixed race, and only about 30,000 European whites — an extreme demographic imbalance that made the system of slavery especially volatile. The French Revolution of 1789, with its rhetoric of liberty, equality, and universal rights, sharpened the contradictions of the colony’s social order. The Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 with a massive slave uprising and culminated in 1804 with the declaration of Haitian independence, was the first successful large-scale slave revolt in modern history. It produced an unprecedented abolition of slavery within a successful anti-colonial revolution, and it sent shock waves through every slave society in the Atlantic world.

The Haitian Revolution, as analyzed by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins (1938) and by Laurent Dubois in Avengers of the New World (2004), was the defining event in the destruction of the first French colonial empire. Napoleon’s attempt to reconquer Saint-Domingue, to restore slavery, and to use the colony as a base for reasserting French power in North America ended in catastrophic military failure. The loss of Saint-Domingue, combined with the successful sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803 for $15 million, ended French ambitions in mainland North America.

The End of the French Colonial Empire in the Americas

The first French colonial empire was destroyed in three dramatic episodes between 1759 and 1803. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was the first. Fought on five continents and three oceans, the war produced a decisive British victory in North America: the capture of Quebec in 1759, the fall of Montreal in 1760, and the Treaty of Paris in 1763, in which France ceded Canada, all French territory east of the Mississippi, and most of its Caribbean possessions. The loss of New France was, in retrospect, the end of French ambitions in mainland North America.

The second was the Haitian Revolution, which destroyed the French hold on Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804. The third was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which Napoleon sold the vast French territory of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million, eliminating the French presence in mainland North America. The loss of the American colonies marked the end of the first French colonial empire.

A second French colonial empire, focused on Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, was built up during the nineteenth century. Algeria was annexed in 1830; Indochina was conquered in the 1850s and 1860s; a vast West and Central African empire was assembled in the 1880s and 1890s; Madagascar and the Comoros were added in 1896. The second empire was, by 1914, the second-largest in the world after the British. It was dismantled after the Second World War, especially after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and Algerian independence in 1962. The francophone world that survives today — Quebec, the French Antilles, Haiti, the former African colonies, the overseas departments and territories — is the legacy of both empires.

The Two Models in Comparative Perspective

The Dutch and French colonial empires illustrate two distinct European approaches to overseas expansion. The Dutch model was corporate, capital-heavy, and commercially focused. The VOC, as Jonathan Israel has emphasized, was the most highly capitalized joint-stock company in the world, and it was the institutional ancestor of the modern multinational corporation. The Dutch system was efficient, but it was also politically brittle: it depended on a small white population, a few fortified cities, and a navy that, by the late eighteenth century, was no longer competitive with the British.

The French model was state-directed, demographically thin, and territorially expansive. The French state under Louis XIV, and the strong royal direction of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, attempted to build a centralized colonial administration modeled on the metropolitan bureaucracy. The system was more thorough in its cultural influence and political administration than the Dutch, but it was also more vulnerable to military defeat and demographic competition. The French Empire in the Americas was destroyed faster than the Dutch or the British, and the destruction was more complete.

The late-eighteenth-century collapse of the French colonial empire had two enormous historical consequences. First, it shaped the British Empire’s 19th-century global primacy; the British emerged from the Seven Years’ War as the leading European colonial power, and the Haitian Revolution eliminated the only serious French counterweight. Second, the Haitian Revolution was, in David Brion Davis’s phrase from The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), a defining event in the history of modern slavery. It inspired the abolitionist movement in Britain and the United States, it provoked the American South’s increasing commitment to slavery, and it became a powerful symbol of anti-colonial resistance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.