Why were the Dutch at one time so successful in trade and commerce? Was it possible to speak of Dutch primacy in world trade, and for how long did it last? Israel tackles these questions in this book, and any student of colonial North and South America, the Caribbean, and “prepenetration” West Africa is well advised to turn to him for the answers.
There is little new information on the Dutch expansion in the Atlantic, and unfortunately the author tries to stretch his evidence in order to have the trade developments in this part of the globe fit his general grid. It is likely that the period between 1590 and 1609 in Europe (and perhaps in Asia) saw the Dutch “breakthrough to world primacy,” but this was not the case in the Atlantic. Except for some inroads into the trade to Portuguese Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean the Dutch legal and illegal trade before 1609 remained well below the volume and the scope of the Portuguese and the Spanish commerce in the Atlantic as a whole.
During the truce with Spain (1609-21) the Dutch continued to make inroads into the Iberian trade in the Atlantic, and in the period 1621-47 they obtained first rank in the gold trade with West Africa. They also carried most of the slaves to the Caribbean and acquired a large chunk of the return trade in tobacco, hides, and cocoa. Still, it seems doubtful that the Dutch ever achieved primacy in the Atlantic. In this period the Portuguese continued to carry many more slaves than the Dutch did and thus—probably—more sugar.
The same holds true for the period 1647-72, which Israel boldly labels as the “zenith” of Dutch commercial developments in general. In the Atlantic his periodization is wrong again. Between 1650 and 1675 the Portuguese carried more slaves to Brazil than all the other carriers combined, notwithstanding the growing Dutch participation in the slave trade to Spanish America. In addition, the Dutch sugar trade declined after the loss of Brazil. It even seems too easy to follow the trodden path and to assume that the Dutch more or less dominated the slave trade to Spanish America in addition to their virtual monopoly in the slave trade to the British and French Caribbean islands before 1670. The sudden upsurge of the British trade after 1672 must have had its roots in the previous period. After 1670 the Dutch were very much in relative decline in the Atlantic, in spite of a growth in volume. Israel acknowledges this.
Jonathan Israel has written a masterful book and has provided us with the best summary of seventeenth-century Dutch trade to date. The book is full of illustrations and tables on particular branches of the trade. Yet some important questions remain unanswered. There is no indication as to how much of the Dutch G.N.P. was actually generated by maritime commerce. Was it more than 10 percent? And how important was the Dutch share of Atlantic trade in comparison to Dutch trade in Europe and Asia? Was it more than 5 percent? The book fails to point out that there is reason to assume that before 1800 the Dutch were the only European trading nation that carried on more business in Asia than in the Atlantic. That would explain why the rise and decline of the Dutch in the Atlantic are hard to mold into the general structure of this excellent study.
