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rfmcdonaldParts 1, 2, 3, and 4 in this occasional series are also on-line.
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The Dutch Republic of the 17th century probably qualifies as the first truly bourgeois state in Western history. By modern standards, to be sure, the Dutch Republic was extraordinarily narrow, oligarchic, and fundamentally unequal. To the Dutch Republic's contemporaries, though, the Republic was inclusive, pluralistic, and fundamentally egalitarian, to say nothing of being quite rich.
At the Dutch Republic's height in the mid-17th century, Dutch trading companies possessed two colonies which could be defined as colonies of European immigration, namely the New Netherlands (modern New York) and the Cape Province (at the time, southwestern South Africa). Neither colony thrived under Dutch rule, however: New Netherlands passed to England following its 1666 conquest and quickly became assimilated into the British North Atlantic colonial empire, while what settlement did occur in the Cape Province was incidental, a byproduct of the Dutch East India Company's concern with being able to restock its ships on the long sea route to Indonesia.
In the United States, only some 3.5 million people claim Dutch ancestry, and most of these people are descended from immigrants who arrived after the conquest of the New Netherlands. In South Africa, figures are sketchier because of that country's contested history, but one can judge the measure of Dutch immigration by noticing that 5.5 million people out of a national population in excess of 40 million speak Afrikaans, South Africa's post-Dutch language.
Further, many of the people who did immigrate to New Netherlands and Cape Province under Dutch rule were not Dutch at all. In the New Netherlands, for instance, German, Walloon, English, and Jewish settlers formed just a few of Manhattan's immigrant subpopulations; there might never have been a natively Dutch-speaking majority at all in the New Netherlands. The proto-Afrikaner population was somewhat more homogeneously Dutch, but Huguenots and Germans formed quite prominent communities--it's thanks to the Huguenots that South Africa has a thriving wine industry, for instance. And we should not forget the Cape Coloureds, who form a majority of South Africa's Afrikaans-speakers and who (almost as much as the Afrikaners) are descended in part from Europeans and in part from native Khoi and imported African and Malagasy slaves.
Even including smaller Dutch colonial populations like Indonesia's Eurasians, barely more than 10 million people now alive, living in every territory once part of the Dutch colonial empire over three centuries, can claim Dutch ancestry, even after substantial intermarriage with non-Dutch. Scotland is a neighbouring country with a similar Germanic/Calvinist cultural background and long involvement in colonial affairs, and until the beginning of the 20th century Scotland and the Netherlands had populations of the same size; Scotland, however, had a quarter-million emigrants to the United States in the half-century before the War of American Independence
alone. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Dutch colonial empire, as a venue for Dutch settlement abroad, was a failure.
Why? Historians tend to be divided about the specific causes for the Dutch Republic's failure to settlers for overseas colonies, pointing in the New Netherlands' case to the patroonship system of land ownership which discouraged settlement, and in the Cape Province's case to the near-complete neglect of the territory by a Dutch East India Company more concerned with its East Indian trade than with colonizing a minor land en route. These explanations suffice inasmuch as they explain why the New Netherlands and the Cape Province did not attract many Dutch immigrants; they do not explain, however, why the Dutch Republic's demographic trends were marked not by emigration but by immigration. The Dutch Republic of the 17th century was a very rich country, likely the richest in Europe. There simply was no real need for Dutch to emigrate in large numbers from a homeland that kept them in relative comfort, certainly not to a marginal frontier far from their pleasant homeland.
The Dutch experience has two lessons for proponents of space travel.
***
The Dutch Republic of the 17th century probably qualifies as the first truly bourgeois state in Western history. By modern standards, to be sure, the Dutch Republic was extraordinarily narrow, oligarchic, and fundamentally unequal. To the Dutch Republic's contemporaries, though, the Republic was inclusive, pluralistic, and fundamentally egalitarian, to say nothing of being quite rich.
At the Dutch Republic's height in the mid-17th century, Dutch trading companies possessed two colonies which could be defined as colonies of European immigration, namely the New Netherlands (modern New York) and the Cape Province (at the time, southwestern South Africa). Neither colony thrived under Dutch rule, however: New Netherlands passed to England following its 1666 conquest and quickly became assimilated into the British North Atlantic colonial empire, while what settlement did occur in the Cape Province was incidental, a byproduct of the Dutch East India Company's concern with being able to restock its ships on the long sea route to Indonesia.
In the United States, only some 3.5 million people claim Dutch ancestry, and most of these people are descended from immigrants who arrived after the conquest of the New Netherlands. In South Africa, figures are sketchier because of that country's contested history, but one can judge the measure of Dutch immigration by noticing that 5.5 million people out of a national population in excess of 40 million speak Afrikaans, South Africa's post-Dutch language.
Further, many of the people who did immigrate to New Netherlands and Cape Province under Dutch rule were not Dutch at all. In the New Netherlands, for instance, German, Walloon, English, and Jewish settlers formed just a few of Manhattan's immigrant subpopulations; there might never have been a natively Dutch-speaking majority at all in the New Netherlands. The proto-Afrikaner population was somewhat more homogeneously Dutch, but Huguenots and Germans formed quite prominent communities--it's thanks to the Huguenots that South Africa has a thriving wine industry, for instance. And we should not forget the Cape Coloureds, who form a majority of South Africa's Afrikaans-speakers and who (almost as much as the Afrikaners) are descended in part from Europeans and in part from native Khoi and imported African and Malagasy slaves.
Even including smaller Dutch colonial populations like Indonesia's Eurasians, barely more than 10 million people now alive, living in every territory once part of the Dutch colonial empire over three centuries, can claim Dutch ancestry, even after substantial intermarriage with non-Dutch. Scotland is a neighbouring country with a similar Germanic/Calvinist cultural background and long involvement in colonial affairs, and until the beginning of the 20th century Scotland and the Netherlands had populations of the same size; Scotland, however, had a quarter-million emigrants to the United States in the half-century before the War of American Independence
alone. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Dutch colonial empire, as a venue for Dutch settlement abroad, was a failure.
Why? Historians tend to be divided about the specific causes for the Dutch Republic's failure to settlers for overseas colonies, pointing in the New Netherlands' case to the patroonship system of land ownership which discouraged settlement, and in the Cape Province's case to the near-complete neglect of the territory by a Dutch East India Company more concerned with its East Indian trade than with colonizing a minor land en route. These explanations suffice inasmuch as they explain why the New Netherlands and the Cape Province did not attract many Dutch immigrants; they do not explain, however, why the Dutch Republic's demographic trends were marked not by emigration but by immigration. The Dutch Republic of the 17th century was a very rich country, likely the richest in Europe. There simply was no real need for Dutch to emigrate in large numbers from a homeland that kept them in relative comfort, certainly not to a marginal frontier far from their pleasant homeland.
The Dutch experience has two lessons for proponents of space travel.
- Firstly, that the countries best able to finance large colonial expeditions on the farthest frontiers of civilization will not necessarily be able to people the territories acquired by this herculean efforts. The historical experience shows that people are reluctant to go live on marginal frontiers, even when they are quite hospitable (as in the case of the New Netherlands and the Cape Province). Populations can grow over time, but there is no guarantee that they will grow quickly.
- Secondly, that countries unable to adequately people their frontier colonial holdings will turn to immigrants from other countries. For the Dutch in both the cases studied here, these immigrants came from their European neighbours: the Austrian Netherlands and Germany, France and England. In French Acadia, Basques, English, Irish, and even Croatians joined a basically Poitevin settler population. In British Pennsylvania, this role was played by the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, misnamed German immigrants.
Elsewhere in this series, I've mentioned the European Union's foundation of Ceres City at some point in the distant future, forcing the relatively marginal first-generation space colonists to reintegrate themselves with Terrestrial society. Who's to say that Ceres City's settler population will necessarily be drawn entirely (or even mostly) from the European Union, but that it might be (say) mainly Russian, or North African, or Congolese? Or that in the corridors of the United States' Chryse Planitia habitat, Spanish or Chinese might be the language most commonly heard?
