Introduction

Abstract

In the history of the Netherlands, trade, shipping, colonisation and contact with the world beyond the seas have been factors of extreme importance, especially since the sixteenth century. These factors have always been subjects of special interest to Dutch historians, with the result that the number of books on these subjects is large and the number of articles enormous. However, the vast majority of these studies have been written in Dutch, a language which is not understood, even in the world of scholarship, outside the area of its native speakers (the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Europe, America and Australia with 11 million souls, Belgium with S million inhabitants who speak Dutch, and the Union of South Africa, where more than 1,6 million speak Afrikaans, a closely related language). The number of studies on the subject in French is extremely small, in German very small and in English small. As a result, the importance of Dutch colonial history has never become sufficiently clear to the outside world and it is symptomatic that even detailed histories of the world only devote a few pages to the most important period.¹