Unlike the Republic of Venice, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic for short, had very few local sources of timber, and no large, high quality trees with which to build its fleets. Nevertheless, the Dutch Republic became a major European empire in the seventeenth century, with a healthy navy and merchant marine, and dozens of overseas colonies. Indeed, the Dutch built many of Venice's merchant ships, after Venice exhausted its territorial forests of timber, and their busy shipyards earned them the reputation of being "the Arsenal of Europe." (Perlin, 160)
Growth of the Dutch Republic
In 1634 the Dutch Republic and its citizenry owned 14,850 merchant ships and upwards of 20,000 fishing boats. Francis J. Bowman writes of the Republic that:
"They furnished two-thirds of the vessels that navigated the Baltic, and Dutch skippers made 6,000 voyages a year to that sea. Eight of every nine ships visiting Scotland, eleven of every twelve entering Norwegian harbors, were Dutch. Their trade was estimated at eighty-three per cent of the total foreign trade of northern Europe, and was reckoned at 35,000,000 gulden yearly. They collected £600,000, over 3,000,000 gulden a year, as recompense for freighting activities alone. The fisheries and carrying trade of the North Sea; the hemp, lumber and naval stores of the Baltic; the sugar and spices of the Indies; the luxuries of the Levant contributed to the prosperity of Amsterdam, Hoorn, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen and Alkmar." (Bowman, 173)
The Republic’s naval burden was partly assumed by their East India Company and West India Company, both of which had large military and naval forces. The West India Company alone, in 1625-1626, had four fleets at sea and "owned seventy-two warships armed with 1,200 guns and manned by 9,000 soldiers and sailors." (Bowman, 178) The 1628 naval census showed that the Dutch Republic itself "counted 184 ships of from 32 to 500 tons burden, manned by 12,184 men." (Bowman, 178) Through the seventeenth century, the Republic only continued to grow in wealth and in power.
One question worth asking is why is it that the Dutch Republic experienced a golden age of maritime empire without any real forests to speak of in its own territories?
Looking for Forests in all the Right Places
Part of the answer to the question of the Dutch Republic's maritime growth is related to the location of the Dutch Republic itself: With a number of navigable rivers emptying into Holland, and their nearness to the great Scandinavian timberlands, the Dutch had easy access to almost an entire continent of woods. Their solution to their own lack of forest was thus "to pay for logs and to keep a sufficient number of suppliers active so that no single foreign power could deny Dutch sawmills and shipyards the necessary quantities of timber" that they needed. (McNeill, 397)
For a hundred years, up until around 1680, the Dutch Republic relied chiefly on Norway for timber, "but [afterwards] increasingly turned to German timber floated in great rafts down the Rhine, and to the vast forests of the Baltic region." (McNeill, 397) To get the wood to their metropoles, the Dutch had five or six hundred ships at any given time dedicated to transporting timber from the Baltic and inner Europe to the Republic. "The ability to transport great amounts of woods to its ports at amazingly low costs led to a paradox," writes John Perlin in A Forest Journey, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh, who noted, "the exceeding groves of wood are in the East kingdoms [Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Latvia, and Poland] but the huge piles of ... masts and timber is in the low countries where none groweth." (Perlin, 160)
The Dutch also relied on their colonial holdings to provide for their timber needs. J. R. McNeill noted in "Woods and Warfare in World History" that "[the] Dutch East India Company, a quasi-statal entity that routinely engaged in war as well as trade, [...] built ships using teak in what is now Indonesia." (McNeill, 397) Nancy Lee Peluso in "The History of State Forest Management in Colonial Java" echoed McNeill in recognizing the priorities of Dutch colonists, writing that "[the] first Dutch mercantilists arriving on Java in the mid-seventeenth century were attracted by hundreds of square kilometers of teak." (Peluso, 65)
Peter Boomgaard in "Forest Management and Exploitation in Colonial Java, 1677-1897," concurs with Peluso in noting the importance of Java's teak forests to the Dutch empire’s needs, and, in particular, the needs of the Dutch East India Company. (Boomgaard, 4-14) The value the Dutch placed on island and mainland timber resources continued to be high from colony to colony, but the Republic’s treatment of their colonial holdings's forest reserves varied widely. On the Cape and on Java, for instance, the Dutch managed their forests with the same caution and attention to detail that they exercised back in the Netherlands, sustaining near constant supplies of timber in these colonies, but they "treated [Dutch Mauritius] merely as a source of high-value timber, [with the island being] abandoned once the forests easily reached near the coast were depleted." (Grove, 330)
The Decline of the Dutch Republic
So successful were the Dutch in acquiring their timber that they experienced few shortages. The decline of the Dutch empire had less to do with timber, and more to do with the major wars that the Dutch fought against England and France, and the fierce competition for trade and colonies it faced from these powers. The Dutch Republic was gradually replaced by England as the financial capital of Europe, especially after the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694.
After 1794, the Dutch Republic was disestablished, and its former provinces faced numerous governmental and institutional changes that limited their ability to maintain empire. Because they became a vassal state of France, they eventually ended up losing most of their colonial possessions to England.
Sources
Boomgaard, Peter. "Forest Management and Exploitation in Colonial Java, 1677-1897." Forest & Conservation History: 36, 1 (Jan., 1992), 4-14.
Bowman, Francis J. "The European Naval Situation during the Early Years of the Thirty Years’ War." The Pacific Historical Review: 2, 2 (Jun., 1933), 170-179.
Grove, Richard. "Conserving Eden: The (European) East India Companies and Their Environmental Policies on St. Helena, Mauritius and in Western India, 1660 to 1854." Comparative Studies in Society and History: 35, 2 (Apr., 1993), 318-351.
McNeill, J. R. "Woods and Warfare in World History." Environmental History: 9, 3 (Jul., 2004), 388-410.
Peluso, Nancy Lee. "The History of State Forest Management in Colonial Java." Forest & Conservation History: 35, 2 (Apr., 1991), 65-75.
Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.
Robert Marcell - Robert Marcell received a B.A. in History in 2007 and an M.A. in the Social Sciences in 2008.
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