The Dutch Colonial Business Elite at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Dutch economy experienced a fresh take-off. Up-to-date steamships plied the shipping routes to the Netherlands East Indies; in the Netherlands the network of railways and canals was greatly expanded; modern insurance companies, commercial banks and other financial institutions were founded. The resultant growing need for external capital led to a new legal form of financing, the joint-stock or limited liability company, and the 1870s and 1880s saw the establishment of a relatively large number of newly founded companies of this type. Generally speaking, these companies represented business activities with a long-standing tradition in Dutch economic life: trade, banking and transportation. The economic take-off was also reflected in the growing number of joint-stock companies pursuing economic activities in colonial Indonesia, often with their headquarters in the Indonesian Archipelago itself. According to J. à Campo the number of such newly founded corporations was more than hundred for each year after 1896, reaching its highest level in 1910, when no less than 326 were founded.