Playing Both Sides in War and Empire

During the English Civil Wars, Dutch merchants loaned money and supplied weaponry to both parliamentary and royalist forces in Britain. This support enabled both sides in England to prosecute the war when their own supplies flagged. However, some merchants in the Netherlands provided support both to Parliament and to the king of England, sometimes at the same time. Why would they invest in two different sides of a war? This paper argues that the answer was privileges. The financial and imperial privileges the merchants could gain from the eventual winners outweighed the losses they would incur from their investment in the losers. Their choice to invest in the English wars built on their experience investing in projects with the Swedish and English crowns. These projects included fen drainage, copper mining, and trading ventures around the world. The same strategy helps explain why some merchants invested in multiple companies, sometimes affiliated with different governments, that competed for trading rights in the same locations. The prize was the privileges they gained, which could range from trade monopolies to titles of nobility in new lands.

Exploring the connections between economics, war, and empire in the Netherlands, England, and Sweden is part of an exciting trend in Dutch Atlantic history. Scholars are untangling the stories of figures who crossed boundaries between different states and empires. They are also looking at the porousness of these boundaries and rethinking how we define empires and colonial projects. Future research will integrate Dutch, English, Western European, and Scandinavian histories to bring us a new understanding of the early modern Atlantic world.