[2] Following the de facto independence of the Dutch Republic from the Spanish Empire in the late 16th century, various trading companies known as voorcompagnie led maritime expeditions overseas in search of commercial opportunities.

While searching for new trade passages between Asia and Europe, Dutch navigators explored and charted distant regions such as Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, and parts of eastern North America.

[5] The Dutch also secured favorable trading relations with several Asian states, such as the Mughal Empire in India, from which they received half of all textiles and 80% of silks,[6][7][8][9] and exclusive access to the Japanese market.

With the VOC and GWC controlling vital sea lanes and maintaining the largest merchant fleets in the world, the Dutch dominated global trade and commerce for much of the 17th century, experiencing a golden age of economic, scientific, and cultural achievement and progress.

[citation needed] The port of Lisbon in Portugal had since 1517 been the main European market for products from India, drawing merchants from across Europe to purchase exotic commodities.

[21] This brought the Dutch into direct competition with Portugal, which had dominated these trade routes for several decades, and had established colonial outposts on the coasts of Brazil, Africa and the Indian Ocean to facilitate them.

The charter awarded to the company by the States-General granted it sole rights, for an initial period of 21 years, to Dutch trade and navigation east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.

The directors of the company, the "Heeren XVII", were given the legal authority to establish "fortresses and strongholds", to sign treaties, to enlist both an army and a navy, and to wage defensive war.

[23] When Heemskerck returned to Amsterdam in 1604 with the enormous booty from the Santa Catarina, this caused a major controversy in the Dutch Republic about the legality, utility, and moral permissibility of this act.

[23] As a result, in September 1604 jurist Hugo Grotius wrote a treatise titled De Jure Praedae Commentarius ("Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty"), later published in 1609 as Mare Liberum, sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio ("The Freedom of the Seas, Or, The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade"), in which the act of aggression was justified.

Although weakened by the Iberian Union with Spain, whose attention was focused elsewhere, the Portuguese were able to fight off the initial assault before the Battle of Matanzas Bay provided the WIC with the funds needed for a successful operation.

[26] Amboina was captured from the Portuguese in 1605, but an attack on Malacca the following year narrowly failed in its objective to provide a more strategically located base in the East Indies with favourable monsoon winds.

Whilst the Dutch were unable in four attempts to capture Macau,[34] from where Portugal monopolized the lucrative China-Japan trade, the Tokugawa shogunate's increasing suspicion of the intentions of the Catholic Portuguese led to their expulsion in 1639.

In the Atlantic, the West India Company concentrated on wresting from Portugal its grip on the sugar and slave trade, and on opportunistic attacks on the Spanish treasure fleets on their homeward bound voyage.

[47] To protect its precarious position at Albany from the nearby English and French, the Company founded the fortified town of New Amsterdam in 1625, at the mouth of the Hudson, encouraging settlement of the surrounding areas of Long Island and New Jersey.

The purpose of the expedition was to gain a foothold on the west coast of the Americas, an area that was almost entirely under the control of Spain (the Pacific Ocean, at least most of it to the east of the Philippines, being at the time almost a "Spanish lake"),[52] and to extract gold from nearby mines.

[53][54] By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company had overtaken Portugal as the dominant player in the spice and silk trade, and in 1652 founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern African coast, as a victualing station for its ships on the route between Europe and Asia.

[55] Dutch immigration in the Cape rapidly swelled as prospective colonists were offered generous grants of land and tax exempt status in exchange for producing the food needed to resupply passing ships.

[56][57] The Cape authorities also imported a number of Europeans of other nationalities, namely Germans and French Huguenots, as well as thousands of slaves from the East Indies, to bolster the local Dutch workforce.

[56][58] Nevertheless, there was a degree of cultural assimilation between the various ethnic groups due to intermarriage and the universal adoption of the Dutch language, and cleavages were likelier to occur along social and racial lines.

[60] Hoping to avoid being drawn into a protracted dispute, the Dutch government and the Xhosa chieftains agreed to formally demarcate their respective areas of control and refrain from trespassing on each other's borders.

The attack, named after the commander of the landing force, Rear-Admiral Robert Holmes, was successful in destroying by fire a large Dutch merchant fleet of 140 ships.

[citation needed] Under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens signed by Britain and France in 1802, the Cape Colony and the islands of the Dutch West Indies that the British had seized were returned to the Republic.

[75] In the decades before the war, the Dutch had been overwhelmingly successful in suppressing the small nationalist movement in Indonesia such that the Japanese occupation proved fundamental for Indonesian independence.

Many of the towns and cities along the Hudson in upstate New York have placenames with Dutch origins (for example Yonkers, Hoboken, Haverstraw, Claverack, Staatsburg, Catskill, Kinderhook, Coeymans, Rensselaer, Watervliet).

[citation needed] Although the Dutch already started erecting buildings shortly after they arrived on the shores of Batavia, most Dutch-built constructions still standing today in Indonesia stem from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The largest number of surviving Dutch buildings can be found on Java and Sumatra, particularly in cities such as Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Cirebon, Pasuruan, Bukittinggi, Sawahlunto, Medan, Padang, and Malang.

There are also significant examples of 17–19th century Dutch architecture around Banda Neira, Nusa Laut, and Saparua, the former main spices islands, which due to limited economic development have retained many of its colonial elements.

And as a result the Dutch officials begun to adapt to the tropical condition by applying native elements such as wide-open veranda, ventilation and indigenous high pitch roofing into their villas.

[citation needed] Suriname discourages dual citizenship and Surinamese-Dutch players who have picked up a Netherlands passport – which, crucially, offers legal work status in almost any European league – are barred from selection to the national team.