Dutch Entrepreneurs in the Early Scramble for Africa (1830s–1870s)

This chapter analyses the strategies of the Dutch entrepreneurs in West and West Central Africa between the 1830s and the late 1870s. While the Dutch state retained some fortifications on the Gold Coast until 1872, the Dutch proved uninterested in (West) Africa after the abolition of the slave trade in 1814. Various Dutch entrepreneurs, mainly from Amsterdam, tried to revive trade with Elmina on the Gold Coast to limited success. The chapter argues that, from the 1840s onwards, the Rotterdam entrepreneurs moved to Africa largely because they were shut out from the lucrative trade in the Dutch East Indies, which was dominated by the Amsterdam-based mercantile elite in the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM), which monopolised the Dutch East Indies production and trade. In 1846, the Rotterdam entrepreneur Huibert van Rijckevorsel set up a business on the Gold Coast as the first Rotterdammer, soon followed by his brother-in-law Hendrik Muller Szn., who set up business in Liberia. In 1857, the Rotterdam entrepreneurs Lodewijk Pincoffs and Henry Kerdijk moreover sent ships to the Congo basin. The chapter analyses the relative success as well as manifold challenges for these entrepreneurs, showing how they moved beyond the Dutch Gold Coast in search of better-quality palm oil and other commodities. The chapter chronicles the take-over of Van Rijckevorsel’s firm by Muller in the early 1860s into Muller & Co, and the troubles the Afrikaansche Handels-Vereeniging or AHV, led by Pincoffs and Kerdijk, had in the 1860s and 1870s before it went bankrupt in 1879.