Dutch Empire: Did you mean...?

The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a hundred years earlier. Gone was the solid boundary...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629), an officer of the Dutch East India Company and twice the company's Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies, oil on wood portrait after Jacob Waben, 1629. Westfries Museum, Hoorn, The Netherlands.

Chart of the Malay Archipelago and the Dutch discoveries in Australia by Dutch cartographer Hessel Gerritsz (1581–1632).

From a humble beginning as a sweet treat grown in gardens, sugar cane cultivation became an economic powerhouse, and the growing demand for sugar stimulated the colonization of the New World by European powers, brought slavery to the forefront...

With a wealth of natural resources, Brazil was by far the most important colony in the Portuguese empire and was, at one time or another, the world’s leading producer of sugar, diamonds, and tobacco. Colonised from the 1530s, most settlements...

The Mauryan Empire (322 BCE - 185 BCE) supplanted the earlier Magadha Kingdom to assume power over large tracts of eastern and northern India. At its height, the empire stretched over parts of modern Iran and almost the entire Indian subcontinent...

William the Silent (l. 1533-1584, also known as William of Orange) was the leader of the Dutch Revolt (the Eighty Years' War) in the Netherlands; first politically (between 1559-1568) then militarily (between 1568-1584). He is among the most...

An empire is a political construct in which one state dominates over another state, or a series of states. At its heart, an empire is ruled by an emperor, even though many states in history without an emperor at their head are called "empires"...

A 17th-century painting by Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom showing English and Dutch galleons in combat in 1605. Both ships are typical of the Spanish galleon type. (National Maritime Museum, Amsterdam)

Dutch whalers off Spitsbergen, oil on canvas by Abraham Storck, c. 1690. Collectie Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.