Comments by "Lynott Parris" (@DenUitvreter) on "Knowledgia" channel.

The trick was actually not to colonize but just control the trade and don't try to rule the people themselves. They just didn't have the numbers of Dutch for an empire, especially with life in the Dutch Republic beeing so nice and wealthy. They didn't care anyway, this was not a kingdom with a power hungry king, but a republic that was all about trade, money and the fight for independence and against catholic rule. The actual colonization of Indonesia only took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, partly because Africa was divided by other European powers, partly because their was outrage about the cruelty of local rulers the Dutch profited from.
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"The Europeans" didn't consider themselves the superior race. That is an American projection after they embraced the English attitude that developped over the colonial era to justify what they were doing in light of other values. They were all different and felt superior because they believed they had god on their side and were doing god's work initially. Later they found their culture and technology superior. Especially in the early 1700s they were peasants who for example in Asia had to pay in silver and gold because the sophisticated silk wearing natives weren't interest in European goods at all. They had to up their manners and bring presents to open negatiations, they often had to leave gun ships in the open seas before allowed on shore. Their sailing skills were far more impressive than their hand guns, which took minutes to reload and couldn't shoot straight for more than 5 yards.
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British chauvinism is fragile. Better not mention the reasons for the Armada to be there, the role of the Dutch Republic in it's defeat, the Dutch Republic bringing the Spanish Empire to it's knees, and certainly not the Dutch Republic invading England and giving them their parliamentary monarch, bill of rights, religious tolerance, the Bank of England and the sandwich.
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@darrinwebber4077 Very unlikely, the WIC (Dutch West-Indian Company) didn't get permission to get involved in the slavetrade until 1638 and before that slaves from captured Spanish and Portugese ships had to be set free. There were free, land owning, blacks in New Amsterdam when the British took it, there are records of that. That doesn not exclude the possibility that some Dutch captain or a captain of a Dutch ship sold slaves somehwere, especially before the WIC got the monopoly on the Atlantic. But not the Dutch, and the Dutch settlements in North-America weren't plantations anyway. The Dutch and the early French were there for the beaver pelt trade with the Indians, and that was just a mutually beneficial trade. The Dutch had very good relations with the natives, but that also caused them eventually to get mixed up in a tribal war between natives. They were the only ones to actually buy land from the naives and pay for it though, because they had a very different attitude in the beginning compared to the feudal monarchies in Europe. They did discriminate against the natives though, at one point in New Amsterdam it was forbidden to serve natives alcohol after 8, while others could drink until 10.
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Michel Martinez No, not really. The Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade for a short while but in the end only did 5%, while during most of the 17th century they shipped more than half of Europe's goods and had a huge chunck of the inter-Asian trade.
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I don't believe the WIC's Grand Design was aimed at the slavetrade though. The WIC was still dominated by calvinists who believed slavetrade was unchristian, it was another bad thing the catholics did. They were at the African West coast for the ivory and the gold and New Netherland was supposed to be an ordinary agricultural settlement with protestant settlers, not a plantation economy. Only with the conquest of Dutch Brazil from the Portuguese the WIC permitted the governor to conquer Portuguese slave trading posts in Africa, but under the condition that they would be freed after seven years and were educated in christianity in the mean time.
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@Man_0f_Trenches No, they created New York in the about 50 years after they purchased Manhattan. New York has remained very Dutch for very long. Dutch Brazil is still remembered in Brazil because they created the first mullticultural, multireligious, multiracial society there too. They also beat the Spanish Empire, which was quite essential and the reason for the Dutch Republic to get involved in this colonization thing in the first place. I don't believe the Dutch had any settlements in Australia/Oceania, they just discovered quite a bit there. In Africa I think only the Cape qualified as a proper colony.
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@miliba They stopped being part of Spain in 1581.
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@niedersacksen They bought Manhattan from the natives with whom they had a good equal trading relationship, so I guess it was very different from what the Spanish, English, Portuguese and French would consider a proper colony. The state supported company responsible, the WIC, didn't really know what it wanted. It's most important founder dreamt of huge agricultural settlements full of good protestants modelled after the garden of Eden the Dutch Republic was as the best way to beat Spain and catholicism. Others just wanted a network of trading posts and raid Spanish and Portuguese ships to stop the money flowing to the war against the Dutch Republic. Both didn't want have anything to do with slavery because that was unchristian, something catholics did. Because life was too good in the Dutch Republic there weren't enough settlers for the settlement plan, and after raiding the Spanish silverfleet the money was used for a serious blow to the Portuguese colonies, but that had the Dutch ending up with a slave plantation colony and that got them in the slavetrade. They lost most of those colonies and for a short while shipping slaves to foreign colonies was the WIC's main business, until the English took over. Still the WIC was a financial failure.
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