Credit to the Nation. Dutch Business in the Qing Empire, 1863--1903

Abstract

After the opening of relations in 1863, Dutch commercial activity in the Qing Empire remained small until the century's end, with the establishment of the Holland-China-Handelscompagnie, NHM Shanghai agency, and Java-China-Japanlijn in 1903 as clear signs of acceleration. Scholars have long assumed this sudden development of interest was the result of business conditions. However, government involvement in the latter two businesses and popular allusions to private enterprise in the Qing Empire as a national interest give reason to reassess this claim with attention for the international political conditions of growing mercantilism and commercial competition in the context of informal empire.

The global rise of mercantilism between 1870 and 1900 is generally considered to have had a negligible impact in Dutch politics. However, trends connected to mercantilism through the Methodenstreit in economic science like social liberalism, imperialism, and nationalism have become widely recognised as defining features of Dutch politics and society in this period, though not always without considerable and long-standing historiographical controversy. Taking a "visions of empire" approach developed to address such anomalies in Dutch imperial history and the national historical self-image with a broader definition of and longue durée approach to intellectual history, this project studies the interaction of public and private interests in Dutch commercial expansion as expressed in the personal writings of involved consuls and professionals. Important trends include the rise of nationalism and imperialism in Liberal and Calvinist politics, Dutch economic and territorial expansion in Asia, and the state's relationship to private enterprise, addressed in works on Dutch political, economic, and cultural history in this period by Van Dongen, Kuitenbrouwer, Bossenbroek, and Van Zanden and Van Riel.

It shows the growing Dutch interest in the Chinese market, organisation of the national business sector, and government's shift to financial and consular support emerged in response to the Empire's changing position in global imperial politics. The most important participants in the commercial expansion include shipping, trade, colonial agriculture, marine construction, and petroleum, each responding to more and less concrete threats of foreign competition. Broad interest from these sectors first emerged in the late 1880s, earlier than is commonly assumed. Its appeal built on a Liberal nationalist sentiment of commercial competitiveness overseas, particularly in sectors with a perceived national heritage, which responded to growing European industrial activity and imperialist competition in the Qing Empire. Driving the subsequent commercial expansion in the 1890s and early 1900s was a small group of entrepreneurs in colonial shipping and agriculture who applied the same narrative to present their businesses as serving a political interest, a method they had used successfully in the East Indies. As Liberal nationalism made way for a broader narrative of ethical imperialism, so these businesses, as credit to the nation, were incorporated in the idea of the small state's moral guidance in global politics. The combined pressure of nationalist opinion and business' political influence helped bring about government's shift to subsidies and consular support in the Qing Empire, which was of considerable influence on the growth of the Dutch business presence there.