Dutch Brazil

For about a quarter of a century in the 1600s, the sugar coast of north-eastern Brazil was ruled not from Lisbon but by the Dutch West India Company. Known as New Holland, the colony was seized from Portugal in 1630, reached its height under Count John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen, and was lost again in 1654, a brief episode that nonetheless reshaped the Atlantic sugar trade.

The northern Netherlands had been fighting Habsburg Spain since 1568 in the Eighty Years' War, and from 1580 Portugal and its colonies shared a king with Spain. Dutch merchants had long traded with Brazil, and by 1622 the northern Netherlands had 29 sugar refineries. When a twelve-year truce ran out in 1621, the Dutch Republic chartered a West India Company to strike at Iberian possessions in the Americas. Its first target, Salvador in Bahia, was taken in 1624 but recovered the next year by a Spanish and Portuguese fleet. Funded by Piet Heyn's capture of a Spanish silver fleet in 1628, the company tried again further north.

Pernambuco was then the world's richest sugar-producing captaincy. A fleet of 65 ships took Olinda in February 1630 and Recife soon after, but Portuguese resistance under Matias de Albuquerque confined the invaders to the coast for several years. By 1634 the company held the shore from Rio Grande do Norte to Cabo de Santo Agostinho, and in 1635 it captured the main Portuguese strongholds inland. Many planters accepted Dutch rule in return for security of property and freedom of worship.

In 1637 the company sent John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen to govern its conquests. He extended Dutch control to Ceará and later Maranhão, so that the coast between the São Francisco and the Amazon was nominally Dutch, and he sent an expedition that took Elmina on the West African coast. He built the new capital of Mauritsstad beside Recife, set up municipal councils with both Dutch and Portuguese members, and allowed Catholics, Calvinists and Jews to worship openly. Painters such as Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, and the naturalists Georg Marcgrave and Willem Piso, worked under his patronage; their Historia Naturalis Brasiliae of 1648 became a standard European reference on the Americas.

Dutch rule sat on top of an existing society. Few Dutch settled for good: most were company soldiers, officials and ministers who went home when their service ended. The great majority of the population were Portuguese and Brazilian-born planters and farmers, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans, whose forced labour drove the sugar mills. The colony's dependence on slaves shipped from Angola was so great that its loss when Portugal recaptured Angola dealt it a crippling blow. Indigenous groups fought on both sides, most of them alongside the Dutch, while the Potiguara leader Antônio Filipe Camarão served Portugal. Both powers armed enslaved men, sometimes promising freedom; Henrique Dias, who fought on the Portuguese side, was later given noble status.

After Portugal broke away from Spain in 1640 the company cut costs and recalled John Maurice in 1644. In 1645 the Portuguese planters, many of them in debt to Dutch lenders, rose in revolt and soon confined the company to a handful of coastal footholds. A Dutch relief army was routed at the First Battle of Guararapes in April 1648 and again at the second battle in February 1649. Recife held out under siege until January 1654, when the Dutch capitulated. After the expulsion, the Portuguese took reprisals against Indigenous allies of the Dutch.

By the Treaty of The Hague of 1661 the Netherlands gave up its claim in exchange for a payment of 4 million réis spread over sixteen years. The war had wrecked much of Pernambuco's sugar economy, which never fully recovered, and Dutch capital and know-how moved on to the Caribbean, where new plantations undercut Brazilian sugar. The region returned to colonial Brazil within the Portuguese Empire, and the paintings of Post and Eckhout remain a rare visual record of seventeenth-century Brazil.

Our 1650 map shows Dutch Brazil on the north-east coast, next to the Portuguese-held rest of Brazil. The 1700 map also draws it, although the colony fell in 1654 and was formally ceded to Portugal in 1661.