During the seventeenth century, the Dutch and English emerged as the world's leading trading nations, building their prosperity largely upon their maritime successes. During this period both nations strongly contested for maritime supremacy and colonial dominance, yet by the nineteenth century, it was Britain who had undoubtedly come out on top of this struggle, with a navy that dominated the seas and an empire of unparalleled size. This volume examines the colonial development of these two nations at a crucial period in which the foundations for the modern nineteenth and twentieth century imperial state were laid. The volume consists of ten essays (five by British and five by Dutch scholars) based on papers originally delivered to the Fourteenth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, 2000. The essays are arranged into five themes which take a strongly comparative approach to explore the development of the British and Dutch colonial empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These themes examine the nature of Anglo-Dutch relations, the culture of imperialism and perceptions of the overseas world, the role of sea power in imperial expansion, the economics of colonial expansion and the extension of the metropolitan state to the colonies. Taken together, these essays form an important collection which will greatly add to the understanding of the British and Dutch colonial empires, and their relative successes and failures.

In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java were the sites of dramatically increased industrialization. Led by a group of “merchant kings” who exemplified gentlemanly capitalism, this ambitious trading project transformed the small, economically moribund Netherlands into a global power. Merchant Kings offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of this episode and reveals not only the distinctive nature of the Dutch state, but the surprising extent to which its nascent corporate innovations were rooted in early welfare initiatives. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, this book offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations.