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The Dutch Colonial Business Elite at the Turn of the Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Maarten Kuitenbrouwer  and
Huibert Schijf
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 61 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1998

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References

Notes

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