Preliminary Programme

Dutch conquest in Asia and the Americas often was accompanied by significant shifts in patterns of land-holding and land-use, connected to the export-oriented ambitions of the Dutch companies. Redistribution of agricultural land did include shifts in landholding from Indigenous elites and cultivators to Company officials and other Dutch colonists. However, such replacement of native by Dutch landholders was by no means the only, or even the dominant trend in seventeenth-century colonization attempts. Alternatives included:
- Trying to establish partnerships with previously established groups of European landholders;
- Working with some groups among the landholding classes of the colonized society, strengthening their position against other sections of the landholding classes viewed as hostile, or against non-landholding rural populations;
- Promoting the immigration of farmers or planters from diverse European backgrounds to tip the scales against the power of local landholders.
The multi-ethnic nature of landholding under Dutch colonization is often explained either from the disinterest in controlling the sphere of production of the trade-oriented Dutch East and West India Companies, or from the small numbers of Dutch migrants to the colonies. Both explanations are essentially negative. This paper will look for positive explanations by examining the commercial advantages that the companies drew from stimulating multi-ethnic landholding. In doing so, it will contribute to the panel’s search to strengthen the conceptual / typological apparatus for understanding the role of “foreign” (European and non-European) agents in early-modern Empire building. (Show less)

As early modern European states expanded and claimed sovereign rights over non-European territories, they were confronted with the need to levy taxes on newly acquired resources, which in some cases were already taxed by a preexisting tax system. To varying degrees, the levying of taxes played an important role in the financing of the empire and justified the transfer of European tax institutions and tax administration practices, which were moulded with non-European traditions into as coherent a whole as possible. While the tax systems of territories under European sovereignty differed greatly in structure (i.e., in terms of tax categories), tax administration was perhaps less diverse, largely due to the prevalence of decentralized tax collection and the frequent use of tax farming, as a means of overcoming structural constraints (distance and poor communications). Contractual tax collection arrangements in early modern European empires, which were also common in Europe for similar reasons, created the conditions for an alignment of interests between state finances and the private sector, allowing financiers (nationals and foreigners) and local elites to share in tax revenues. Depending on a number of variables, however, tax farming took different forms in early modern empires, affecting the level of profit that the tax farmer could earn from this activity.
Drawing on the ‘New Fiscal History’, this paper aims to address some of the conceptual challenges in examining the types of alliances that could be forged between the state and the private sector in the exploitation of colonial resources. First, it highlights that these alliances went beyond the farming out of the collection of direct and indirect taxes, as the state also placed non-fiscal revenues in the market. This was the case of monopolistic rents, such as the extraction of mineral or natural resources or the distribution of colonial goods. Although monopolistic rents such as those claimed over the extraction of Brazilian diamonds, the distribution of colonial goods (pepper, brazilwood), or the introduction of enslaved people in the Spanish American markets, were not taxes, they constituted a type of state revenue whose exploitation was routinely handed over to the private sector through short-term contracts. Second, it considers that different types of taxes and rents produced different contractual arrangements. Direct and indirect taxes posed different challenges, as did the exploitation of monopolistic rents, leading to significant differences, for example, in the type of private actors involved, the duration of the contracts, or even in the forms of awarding the contracts. Examples from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires in the New World and Asia will be used to illustrate these conceptual challenges and suggest possible ways to address them. (Show less)

Labour shortage was a constant problem in the European overseas ventures and in the process of empire building in the Atlantic as well as in Asia. European powers used various strategies to gather the necessary manpower, both skilled and unskilled. For this, States as well as settlers resorted to voluntary as well as coerced recruitment of workers, from free seamen on board commercial vessels, to convicts transported overseas, to orphan boys and girls that served in the military and the navy, as well as in domestic service. Indentured workers recruited among the poor whites were also part of these, so were enslaved people of different geographical origins.
The labour problem and the solutions put in place by various European Empires have been widely researched. Three key questions remain underexplored, though: i) who gain from the recruitment, transport, and allocation of labour (both free and unfree)? ii) how those involved in this business gain (directly or indirectly) and in which capacities? What did they gain and how much? To date, these questions have only been partially answered for the transatlantic slave trade in the debate surrounding the “numbers game” of the profits and profitability of this business, but from a rather national-, imperial- and Atlantic-centric perspective.
In this paper I argue for the development of a new transnational, trans-imperial and potentially global approach to the study of the winners and wins from the business of labour recruitment, transport and allocation, across various Europeans empires in the Atlantic and Asia, including both free and unfree labour. Departing from the currently available information on this business in various European empires, I will not only identify the main winners in the different nodal points of the labour supply chain, but also pinpoint what they gain? How and how much? But I will also present a concept for new theoretical framework of analysis to tackle these questions. (Show less)