Preindustrial Europe: Science, the Economy, and Political Reorganization 299by 1598, but ships and skill were not enough. They
needed bases from which to conduct their operations.
Between 1621 and 1640 the newly formed Dutch West
India Company seized Curaçao, St. Eustatius, St.
Maarten, and Saba in the Caribbean and established a
colony called New Amsterdam on the present site of
New York. From 1624 to 1654 the Dutch controlled
much of the Brazilian coast, and in 1637 they captured
the African fortress and slave-trading station of Elmina
from the Portuguese. Brazil and New Amsterdam were
expensive ventures. The Dutch, like the Portuguese,
lacked the manpower to impose their rule on large geo-
graphic areas, and when the English seized New Am-
sterdam in 1664 the West India Company settled down
to a more modest, and in the end more profitable, ca-
reer as a trading company based on Curaçao and St.
Eustatius.
Only in the East did the Dutch manage to establish
something like regional hegemony. Dutch traders first
appeared in East Indian waters in 1595. Bypassing India,
they sailed directly to the Spice Islands (Indonesia),
rounding the Cape of Good Hope and running due east
in the so-called roaring forties before turning north to
Java or Sumatra. The fast but dangerous trip brought
them directly to the sources of the Portuguese and In-
dian spice trade. To improve efficiency and minimize
competition, the Dutch traders organized in 1602 into
the East India Company.
Under the governor-generalship of Jan Pieterszoon
Coen (1587–1629), the company’s forces destroyed the
Javan town of Djakarta and rebuilt it as Batavia, center
of Dutch enterprise in the East. Local rulers were forced
to restrict their trading activities to rice and other local
necessities while European competition was violently
discouraged. English traders especially had been active
in Asian waters since 1591. They formed their own East
India Company on Christmas Day in 1600 but lacked
the ships and capital to match the Dutch. Coen ex-
pelled most of them from the region by 1620. His suc-
cessors attacked the Portuguese colonies, seizing
Malacca in 1641 and the Indian bases shortly there-
after, but Goa survived a Dutch blockade and remained
in Portuguese hands until 1961. The Japanese trade fell
into Dutch hands when the Portuguese were expelled
in 1637, and for two centuries a Dutch trading station
in Nagasaki harbor provided that country’s only contact
with the West.
By 1650 the Dutch had become the dominant force
in Europe’s Asian trade. More than one hundred Dutch
ships sailed regularly to the East, exchanging German
arms, armor, linens, and glass for spices and finished
silks. Even the surviving Portuguese colonies were
forced to deal largely through Dutch intermediaries.
The major exception was Macao, which continued to
export Chinese silks to Spain via Manila. This monop-
oly was successfully challenged in the eighteenth cen-
tury by the revived British East India Company and to a
lesser degree by the French, but the Dutch remained in
control of Indonesia until the outbreak of World War II.The Golden Age in the Netherlands
Long-distance trade made the Netherlands an island of
wealth and culture amidst the turmoil of the early sev-
enteenth century (see illustration 16.4). A century be-
fore, the economy of the region had been dominated
by Antwerp. Its merchants traded in wool from Spain
and England, finished cloth from the towns of Brabant
and Flanders, wine from the Iberian Peninsula, and a va-
riety of products exported from Germany to England
and Scandinavia. The city’s prosperity, however, did not
survive the Revolt of the Netherlands. Antwerp is lo-
cated at the head of navigation on the Scheldt, a broad
estuary whose western approaches are controlled by
the Zeeland towns of Vlissingen (Flushing) and Mid-
delburg. When the Zeelanders joined the Dutch revolt,
they cut off Antwerp from the sea and destroyed its
prosperity.
Amsterdam took its place. Set in the marshes where
the Amstel River meets the IJ, an inlet of the Zuider
Zee, the city was virtually impregnable to attack by sea
or land. Already the center of the Baltic trade, it grew
enormously after 1585 when southern refugees poured
in, bringing their capital with them. When Maurits of
Nassau took the lands east of the Ijssel from Spain be-
tween 1591 and 1597, contact with Germany improved
and Amsterdam replaced Antwerp as the conduit
through which goods flowed from the German interior
to the Atlantic and North Sea. The repeated failure of
Spanish and Sicilian harvests in the same years made
Amsterdam a dominant force in the Mediterranean
trade as well. Dutch merchants had established them-
selves in the Baltic ports of Riga and Gdansk (Danzig)
at an early date. The Amsterdam exchange determined
the price of wheat, and vast quantities were shipped
southward in Dutch ships, together with timber,
Swedish iron, and other northern products.
Shipbuilding, always a major industry in the ports
of Holland and Zeeland, expanded with the growth of
the carrying trade. Economies of scale, better access
to Baltic naval stores, and the presence of a skilled
maritime population enabled the Dutch to charge