by Andre Sanchez

Due to the phenomenal success of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Netherlands State General chartered the Dutch West India Company on June 3rd, 1621.  The company was formed by a group of Dutch merchants, and the charter incorporated the United New Netherland Company that had been trading mainly in the area of North America around the Hudson River.

The charter granted a series of monopolies to the company in trading in all parts of the western hemisphere, including the West Indies, North and South America and Australia, and also parts of Africa.  The company started several settlement colonies, including that of New Netherland on Manhattan Island in 1625.  Its eventual capital, New Amsterdam, was the forerunner of what became known as New York. The company was given responsibility for colonization of the whole of the Americas and the Caribbean, in which it was initially very successful. Others of its colonies included the Netherlands Antilles, Tobago and other Caribbean islands, Surinam, parts of Chile and Guyana.

The company was given ultimate authority in territories under its control, but unlike the VOC was not given authority to wage war. Otherwise, however, it was organized on the highly successful design of the Dutch East India Company.  No Dutch citizen was allowed to trade anywhere between Newfoundland and the Magellan Straits at the southern tip of Chile without permission from the Dutch West India Company, nor with any place on the African continent between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

One of the WIC’s activities was piracy, and this was supported by the Dutch government.  One of its main targets was the Spanish treasure fleet that regularly carried gold and silver treasures from the Americas to Spain.  It had several successes in this enterprise, including the capture by former galley slave Pieter Heyn of a Spanish silver fleet in 1628.  Although declared a pirate, Heyn, otherwise known as Piet Hein, was in effect a privateer.

The major trading goods were fur in North America and sugar in South America. The WIC was also given responsibility for the African slave trade, ivory and gold.

During its first thirty years, the Company had constructed the settlements at New Netherland, Fort Orange (Albany N.Y.), Fort Good Hope (Hartford) and Fort Nassau on the Delaware.  Due to their wars with the French and Spanish, the British were unable to stop the Dutch claiming previous British colonies as their own.  However, English revenge was sweet when it took New Netherland in 1664 and it eventually became New York State.

The company were also mandated to colonize Brazil, and fought against the Portuguese for 30 years to achieve this, but ultimately failed. The Dutch colonies came under pressure world wide with the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and British companies clashed with the Dutch settlements on the west coast of Africa. The English took New Amsterdam from Director General Peter Stuyvesant in 1664, with Fort Orange being lost shortly after.

This was the beginning of the end for the Dutch West India Company, and gradually its colonies world wide were defeated by the English, Spanish and French.  The company was eventually disbanded and reorganized under a new charter in 1674.  Its main trade was now African slaves, and the great days of the early seventeenth century were over, although it still had territories in Surinam and the Netherland Antilles.

When the British occupied Surinam for a while in the 1780, the DWIC was unable to survive and it was disbanded in 1791, all of its stocks were purchased by the Netherlands government and any remaining territories also passed to the government.

Although the Dutch West India Company was not tarred with the same brush as the VOC regarding the latter’s horrendous activities in the colonies in which it built, it was involved in piracy and other illegal actions.  It was never as successful as the VOC due to intense competition in the areas of its activity.  The Portuguese, French, Spanish and English were all competitors and the DWIC were unable to compete for long without the military and naval help that the Dutch government was unable to provide.

It succeeded in leaving a legacy of Dutch colonization that exists today in the current Caribbean Dutch territory of the Netherland Antilles and Aruba in the Lesser Antilles. Al other Dutch colonies were lost, other than Surinam which became independent in 1975.

A Profile of The Dutch West India Company was originally published at http://www.globallifenow.com