Sander said:
We didn't do bad with our colonial wars, welsh, in fact, we didn't actually lose any. We gave up INdonesia because of outside pressure, and the other countries were released willingly. Before that, we had no problems(to my knowledge) with colonies. .
Hey Sander-
Well the folks in Southeast Asia often talk about the military defeat suffered by the Netherlands in Indo. But if you are going to talk colonies, I think you have to also talk about the Dutch East India Company.
As such, I dug up this old Economist article on the East India Companies and thought you might find this interesting. Its a brutal but very interesting history
The East India companies
Dec 23rd 1999
From The Economist print edition
TO JAN COEN, writing home in 1614 to his bosses in the Dutch East India Company, it was simple commercial fact:
"Trade in Asia must be maintained under the protection of our own weapons; and they have to be paid for from the profits of trade. We can’t trade without war, nor make war without trade."
Within five years, “war” had become “land”. Coen seized a small port called Jakarta, renamed it Batavia and fortified it. The idea was not new. Throughout the east, Asian traders had long, de facto, run the districts of foreign ports where they lived and did business. To self-government the Portuguese, whose “factories” by 1600 had stretched to Nagasaki, added guns. And then territory. Coen did the same, claiming 12,000 square kilometres which he (untruthfully) said went with the former Jakarta. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, two years before the Dutch one, would later do much the same in India.
To Asians, this is a simple, nasty tale of European imperialism. Yet it is also one of commerce. Coen, like the English company’s Robert Clive 150 years on, was building a giant multinational. The Dutch in the early 1600s led the world in commerce. Amsterdam, trading to the Indies, through the Baltic and with the Americas, was a giant entrepôt for spices and sugar, tobacco, timber, cloth and other manufactures from across the globe; and, not by coincidence, a big financial centre too. The jewel in this crown was the Dutch East India Company. It soon forcibly evicted its English rival, and later the Portuguese, from South-East Asia, and was for a time the world’s biggest trading enterprise, with ships plying not only to and from the East but (no less) throughout it.
The London company was to take its place, becoming on the way the biggest single business in Britain. In their practices, the two were much alike. Both proclaimed free trade, and practised monopoly wherever they could. These were the robber barons of their time, and, unlike Standard Oil, encouraged to be so by their governments. The Dutch had found that competition among their merchant-venturers to buy spices in the East was raising the price: so, hey presto, form a unified company, and grant it a monopoly east of the Cape of Good Hope. On the spot, it arm-twisted local rulers to grant it exclusive trading rights, though in practice it had a true monopoly in only one or two products, such as cloves and nutmegs.
Few questioned this policy, though one Dutch director in 1618 pointed out its result in the spice-growing Molucca islands: imported food cost so much that the locals were busy farming instead of picking cloves. Nor would they buy the overpriced textiles that the Dutch brought in from India.
The English company was a monopoly twice over: its members were mostly London merchants, to the rage of other English ports, which called for its charter to be revoked. Small at first, it grew as Europe’s interest extended from spices to eastern textiles (so much so that the trade-rigging biter was bit: the English woollen industry in 1720 won a law forcing the company to re-export all its Bengal calicoes). From 1750 on, its (very) big earner was the monopoly of tea, from China. For this it paid in silver—the Chinese did not want manufactures—until, around 1775, it adopted a cheap, deadly substitute: opium, specially grown on its Indian estates.
To uphold their position in the East, both companies used force, against rivals and native peoples, when that paid; as it did—more easily for the Dutch, among the East Indian islands, than for the British in India. The odd qualm at home was brushed aside. Coen in 1621 massacred the inhabitants of one group of islands; he got a slap on the wrist. Was all this costly conquest really worth it? asked the company’s Delft shareholders in 1644. Yes, Coen’s successor told them firmly.
Dutch or British, the men on the spot were no less ready to pocket their employers’ money, making up for low pay with embezzlement and trading on their own account.
Yet, for all their dubious economics and management, both companies were pioneering the skills and networks of modern global commerce. And the technology: just as the Dutch Baltic traders had pioneered the fluyt, the bulk carrier of 1600, the English East Indiaman set the standard for ocean-going vessels two centuries later.
Both companies were remarkably long-lived. The Dutch one declined, as the country’s industry did, in 1750-1800, to be wound up on the last day of the 18th century. The English one lost its monopoly of British trade with India in 1813 and then with China. Yet it survived until after the Indian mutiny of 1857; indeed, on paper, until 1873.
No two companies (except maybe those of Henry Ford and Bill Gates?) have ever, on the way, had such socio-political effects, many of them bad. The Dutch one left behind a wide, often ill-run empire, and South African apartheid. The English one gave Britain its Indian empire, deindustrialised in the early 1800s by a flood of British textiles, but well-run later; the 1840-42 opium war with China; the English tea party—and, arguably (the company had just got a monopoly there), the one of 1773 in Boston too
