The Dutch Empire comprised the overseas colonies, enclaves, and outposts controlled and administered by the Dutch chartered companies, mainly the Dutch West India and the Dutch East India Company, and subsequently by the Dutch Republic (1581-1795), and the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1830.
Dutch colonialism and the rise to colonial power began with the wars of independence against Spain. Initially interested in European commercial and financial transactions, the Netherlands had to engage globally in the early seventeenth century, when Spain and Portugal closed ports to Dutch ships. Unlike Spain and Portugal, Dutch colonization began with the introduction of commercial companies, the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company. The largest of these companies sought to open a thriving Asian market, through the sale and lease of land with local rulers. Slowly, the company brought huge areas under their ownership and built a spice monopoly.
Only later did the State intervene directly in colonization and in the direct administration of overseas territories.
With the rising Dutch naval power since the late 16th century, the Netherlands controlled the seas, dominating world trade routes in the second half of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age
Shortly after reaching its peak, the Dutch Empire began to decline following the numerous Anglo-Dutch wars in the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which it lost many of its colonial possessions and commercial monopolies in the Kingdom of England. However, parts of the empire survived until the advent of global decolonization following World War II. Three former colonial territories in the West Indies islands around the Caribbean Sea - Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten - were considered as constituent countries represented in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
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