Question

Compare and contrast Dutch, British l, and Portuguese expanison in the 1600’s.

Please write a paragraph for each.

Answer 1

Dutch Expansion in 16th Century:

In the beginning, Portugal and Spain (in1580–1640) were primarily interested in overseas trade to Brazil and the Philippines and inspired by Christian missionary zeal. With few exceptions, they managed to avoid colonial overlap. By contrast, competition heated up in the 17th century, when the English, French and Dutch pressed forward, initially not in the territories of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, but in neighbouring regions. This is demonstrated in exemplary manner by the North American Atlantic coast between the French possessions in modern Canada and the Spanish claims in the South.

Dutch expansion is mostly associated with East India Company, Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company flourished and survived for two centuries. The company, a combination of commercial organisations in various cities of Holland and Zealand, traded both in Asia and between Asia and Europe. It was the first public company to issue negotiable shares and it developed into one of the biggest and most powerful trading and shipping concerns. The VOC ran its own shipyards, the largest being in Amsterdam. This spectacular trade with Asia made the Dutch Republic the world’s key commercial hub.

British Expansion in 16 the Century:

In 1606 a commercial company was formed, which procured a charter for the colonisation of Virginia; for, after a vague fashion, England had asserted a claim to the territories which lay north of the Spanish possessions. The company was granted what were practically sovereign rights over a vast and undefined region (subject to the English crown). The company's settlement at Jamestown formed the nucleus of the colony of Virginia. Here there was no native empire to be subdued, such as the Spaniards had found in Mexico and Peru, or such as that which dominated India. The native tribes were elevated only a degree above barbarism; they knew no cities, were still half nomadic, and had no political organisation higher than that of the tribe. But such an experiment as this of the English had no precedent in the world's history.
The British arrive in North America
The Greeks had planted city states on the Mediterranean shores among peoples for the most part akin to themselves or already possessing an elaborate civilisation. The Romans had not colonised but had planted garrisons. The Spaniard treated his conquests in America as estates of the Crown occupied by garrisons who exploited the mineral wealth of the land for the benefit of the Crown. But the Englishman went out to make for himself a new home in a new land, to acquire competence or wealth by the methods with which he was familiar in the old home; and he carried with him his traditional ideas of liberty and self-government.
The first settlers narrowly escaped the fate of Raleigh's colonists. But for the vigour and abilities of one of their leaders, Captain John Smith, they would have been wiped out in their collisions with the native Red Indians, so named because it was still believed that the New World was a portion of the Indies. Experience was needed to teach the practical principle that the colony would best serve the commercial objects of its founders if the colonists were left in the main to manage their own affairs with the minimum of interference from home. In 1623 the colonists were granted a constitution which vested the government in the hands of a nominated Governor and Council and an elected Assembly of "burgesses."

Portuguese Expansion in 16th Century:

The Portuguese discovery of Brazil in 1500 and the eventual establishment there of sugar plantations expanded the need for slave labor. The slave trade soon became transatlantic and, by the mid-1500s, West African slaves replaced indigenous peoples on Brazil's sugar plantations. At the same time, the Portuguese extended their slave-trading operations to Africa's East Coast, in the areas of Mozambique, Ethiopia and Madagascar. By the later 1500s, however, African resistance to the Portuguese was brewing. Portuguese settlements on the East Coast came under attack and war erupted in Angola. The Swahili revolted against the Portuguese on the East Coast in 1585. By the early 1600s, African rebellions and competition from other European traders caused a dramatic decline in the Portuguese slave trade.