VOC directors authorize Huguenot settlement at the Cape

The VOC launched an attack against Cochoqua communities, beginning a new phase of conflict in the Cape region. The campaign aimed to secure colonial access to land, cattle, and trade. Khoikhoi...

During the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Dutch forces retook New York and renamed it New Orange. The brief restoration of Dutch rule was another imperial transfer imposed over Indigenous homelands; it did...

The treaty ended the war and set the terms for the Dutch return of New Netherland to England. European powers formalized colonial possession through diplomacy, while Indigenous communities had no role...

Dutch authorities formally returned New Netherland to England under the postwar settlement. The transfer ended Dutch political rule in the colony but preserved European settler claims and systems of...

The charter dated 23 September 1682 formalized a company shared by the Dutch West India Company, Amsterdam, and the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family. It organized plantation expansion and rule in a...

About 180 Huguenots arrived aboard the Voorschoten. Their settlement added to the European population and agricultural footprint of the VOC colony. The Cape was not vacant: Khoikhoi and San...

French minister Pierre Simond accompanied Huguenot settlers to the Cape under VOC direction. The company promoted a Protestant settler population to develop farming and strengthen its provisioning...

A ship’s infected laundry brought smallpox to the Cape station. The epidemic devastated Khoikhoi communities, while also killing enslaved people and settlers. As communities fled and died, settler...

On 9 October, Dutch authorities and armed colonists began mass violence against Chinese residents of Batavia. The killings followed an escalating crisis shaped by VOC labor controls, deportation...

In a letter to the Society of Suriname, Governor Jan Jacob Mauricius Crommelin argued that colonial troops could not defeat Maroon communities and that peace might save the colony. Maroon...