Anglo-Dutch Imperial Experiments

Abstract This article investigates the nature of Dutch and English empire in the early modern period through the variety of joint Anglo-Dutch imperial ventures Dutch and English people founded. The article uses seven case studies of sets of imperial projects that included different elements of Anglo-Dutch cooperation to show that Dutch and English people pursued these collaborations largely because they sought profit and wanted to frame their efforts around the Protestant cause, rather than national glory. The article contributes to scholarship on early modern transimperial cooperation, proposing that the Anglo-Dutch case deserves particular attention due to the large number of ventures involved and the range of formality and legality they spanned. The article also argues that Anglo-Dutch imperial collaboration was of particular importance to the growing English empire. It finds that almost every English imperial project in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century contained Anglo-Dutch elements. It therefore suggests that the early English empire was, in many ways, an Anglo-Dutch empire.