Search Results: Dutch colonialism

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was formed in 1602 by the Staten-Generaal (States General) of the then Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The company was granted a 21-year charter with rights to trade exclusively in Asia and to...

The National Museum Zurich recently opened a comprehensive and multi perspectival exhibition on Switzerland’s colonial past: Colonial – Switzerland’s Global Entanglements. Based on the latest, original research and drawing on biographies...

17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532...

The Eighty Years' War (1568-1648, also known as The Dutch Revolt and Dutch War of Independence) was a military conflict between the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands and Spain, which then governed them, beginning in the reign of King...

While there have been pirates and privateers of all nationalities, some Dutch mariners were particularly troublesome in the early modern period, targeting, in particular, the Spanish Main but also shipping in the eastern Atlantic and the...

In the early 17th century, the Dutch and English East India Companies turned their eyes towards India, as part of their grand schemes to develop extensive trade networks across the Indian and China Seas. They were faced with two significant...

The island of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) became a focus of European attention soon after the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in the late 15th century. Large swaths of the island would come first under Portuguese control...

Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands...

The Pequot War (1636-1638) was a conflict between the Native American Pequot tribe and the English immigrants who had established settlements in New England between 1620-1630. The immediate cause of the war was the murder of two English traders...

The Dutch Revolt (the Eighty Years' War) was the Dutch war of independence against Spain. For 80 years the Dutch waged war against the Spanish crown. How did the Dutch Revolt start? The Reformation early 1500s caused many people in the Low...