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Capitalism and Imperialism: Britain and the Netherlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Maarten Kuitenbrouwer
Maarten Kuitenbrouwer
Affiliation:
(University of Utrecht)
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Extract

In their impressive new study on British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins mention ‘the desultory negotiations sharing out the Dutch and Portuguese empires should they collapse’ between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century. In the corresponding note, however, they substantiate only the well known negotiations on the Portuguese empire and not those mysterious talks on the Dutch empire. It is one of only a few instances where Cain's and Hopkins’ 2,500 well-documented footnotes do not fully explain their 850 pages of thick description and analysis. Their suggestion of an Anglo-German understanding to divide the Dutch East Indies if necessary, however, does strike some raw nerves among Dutch contemporaries. In the official and unofficial minds of Dutch imperialism, there was a strong fear that die Netherlands could lose their large colonial empire to the great powers. In that case the Netherlands would be reduced to the ‘rank of Denmark’, to a ‘farm at the North Sea’. But this imperial fear was connected with the high hopes that the Netherlands could indeed become the ‘first among the nations of the second rank’, a real middle power, because of its vast colonial empire.

Type
Historiography of Modern Imperialism
Information
Itinerario , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 105 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1994

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References

Notes

1 Cain, P.J. and Hopkins, A.G., British Imperialism I. Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914; II. Crisis and Deconstruction 1914–1900 (London and New York 1993)Google Scholar. See for the Anglo-American talks about a division of the Dutch East Indies, volume one, 462.

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28 See for the Dutch colonial mind in particular, Fasseur, C., De geest van het gouvernement (Leiden 1977)Google Scholar and idem, De Indologen, Ambtenaren voor de Oost 1825–1950 (Amsterdam 1993).

29 See the private papers of C.H.A. van der Wijck (National Archives, The Hague).

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34 Kuitenbrouwer, Netherlands, 354–355. Cf. idem, ‘From Colonialism to Imperialism: Dutch Overseas Expansion, 1870–1914’ in: Groenveld, S. and Wintle, M. (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands X. Government and Economy in Britain and the Netherlands since the Middle Ages (Zutphen 1992) 118–119.Google Scholar

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39 Handelingen Tweede Kamer, 22 maart 1886, 1254.

40 Verslag van de Kamer van Koophandel Amsterdam 1890, 8.

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