Dutch Republic Influence on Danish Colonialism
Denmark-Norway's mercantilist development à la Dutch model
Jun 6, 2009
The seventeenth century drew a closure to Danish ascendancy in European political affairs, but Denmark-Norway attempted to regain a measure of economic clout through their overseas colonial ventures. The impending influence of these gestures, it is nonetheless argued, was the dynamic commercial success of the Dutch Republic in East India. Between 1590 and 1700, the Dutch experienced what is reputedly called their Golden Age, which by the great strength of finance, trade, and industry, Amsterdam, in the province of Holland, became the mega-capital of the new, wealthy and Protestant Europe.
The Golden Age and the Dutch East Indies
In 1602 the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or United East Indies Company formed, and by the end of seventeenth century it had become the most powerful and wealthy private company in the world, shipping primarily rare and exotic spices from the lands of India and Indonesia to the marketplaces of Europe. King Christian IV gleamed the advantage of the Dutch company’s fortune, and when in 1615 he was presented with a proposal to establish a Danish East Indian trade by, coincidentally, two Dutch merchants, Jan de Willem and Herman Rosenkrantz, the king agreed to grant a charter, nonetheless “from a desire to mark the role of Denmark-Norway as a major player in contemporary European trade and politics.” The document charter was almost directly modeled and translated from the existing Dutch East India Company. This Dutch company model, which had also been imitated by the English, continued to be followed with the Danish colonial exploits in West Africa and, again, with the formation of the Danish West India Company in 1672.
Christian II and his mistress Dyveke
Dutch influence on commerce in Denmark, although, had been thoroughfare for centuries. King Christian II’s rule in the sixteenth century (1513-1523) was quite unpopular to the existing nobility and clergy, whom he attempted to limit in scope, thereby reducing the power of the nobility to interfere directly in the economic affairs of the citizens and loyal subjects –an ideal situation which may have mirrored the lack of an existing nobility in the Netherlands. Christian II pledged to develop his cities through the creation of a burgher class not unlike the evolving merchant class in the northern Netherlands provinces. Early in his career Christian II met Dyveke Willumsdatter, a young Dutch girl and commoner, and she was to become his unabashed mistress from his beginning reign to her mysterious death in 1517.
Alongside Dyveke, Christian II accompanied her mother Sigbritt , known in Danish history as “Mother Sigbritt,” a Dutch widow of a middle-class merchant from Amsterdam. Mother Sigbritt became Christian II’s economic advisor, a “chancellor of the exchequer,” and chief administrator of the Sound Dues—the revenue tolls for passing Baltic trade which was of primary importance to Denmark’s economy for the next two centuries. While king, Christian II visited Holland by horseback, taking route across lower Jutland and through southern Holstein, which is some 400 miles from Copenhagen. There he met a number of Dutch politicians, patricians and artists, including Albrecht Dürer and Erasmus of Rotterdam. His intentions were to survey the ensuing “commercial empire” of the Netherlands in order to better model his own kingdom. Paulle Lauring suggests the relationship of Christian II to Dyveke as a pretext to his ambitions in Denmark, and that "it is possibly through her that Christian II became interested in conditions in the Netherlands. He was full of plans for the future of his kingdoms and he looked upon Holland as the model of perfection." (Lauring 126)
Mercantilism and Colonial Expansion
This pattern of Dutch reverence and influence carried over into the seventeenth century, where the intervening Thirty Years’ War and Denmark’s semi-neutrality allowed the Danish to experiment with overseas commercial ventures, albeit on a much smaller scale. The governance of the two countries which both allowed and curtailed the expansion of these ventures, however, was markedly different. The Dutch Republic, according to historian J.H. Huizinga, operated out of a type of “pre-mercantilism and medieval ‘liberty’,” as opposed to Denmark’s absolute monarchy, and thus never carried the banner under one absolute king: power was vested towards a merchant class in the hands of the States-General and the Provincial. The condition which premeditated the Dutch success in trade and commerce was a competing “freedom” of trade-restrictions, an “antiquated economic system” dictated by the landscape of bisecting canals, channels and waterways that made up the provinces of the Dutch Republic. Therefore, the success of the Dutch Republic, economically, was its unrestricted maritime access to free-trade.
Denmark followed the precepts of mercantilism under an absolute monarch—creating a backlog of tariffs and taxes designed to contribute substantial profit for the bursary of the mother country and its king. The lack of significant success in Denmark’s ventures was, proverbially, a matter of politics. The Scandinavian countries were the last to promote overseas colonial ventures in the East Indies, Africa and the Caribbean, but they were certainly not the least capable, in terms of naval and military might, for as Huizinga notes, “Amsterdam, whose commercial heart was the grain trade, could never have reached the heights it did had Poland, Sweden and Denmark ruled the Baltic with all the power and means at their disposal.”
Sources:
Derry, T.K. A History of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1979, pp. 110-164
Friedrich, Carl J. The Rise of Modern Europe: The Age of Baroque 1610-1660. Harper & Row: New York. 1952
Huizinga J.H. Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century and other essays. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co: New York. 1968 pp. 9-101
Kirby, David. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World 1492–1772. Longman Publishers: London. 1990
Lauring, Paulle. A History of the Kingdom of Denmark. Translated by David Hohnen. Høst & Søn: Copenhagen. 1960
Nørregård, Georg. Danish Settlements in West Africa 1658–1850. Translated by Sigurd Mammen. Boston University Press: Boston. 1962
Rasmussen, Peter Ravn. “Tranquebar: The Danish East India Company 1616–1669” University of Copenhagen term paper. 1996. www.scholiast.org/history/tra-narr.html
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