The wooden shoes?
(kidding…kidding…)
The disapproval of Nigel Powers?
A good friend of ours worked in Indonesia for many years with the UN, and made this simple observation:
“Nobody in Indonesia speaks Dutch.”
The point he was making, of course, was that French is still the official (and widely-spoken) language in pretty much everywhere the French had colonies (notable exception: Vietnam & Cambodia), All the former English colonies still speak English, as do the former Spanish colonies. Yet no-one in Indonesia still speaks Dutch. Says a lot, really.
We still speak (a version of) Dutch here in the Cape, and we were an English colony for as long as we were Dutch, and more recently, too. They also speak it in the Dutch New World colonies, I believe. I don’t think too much should be read into Indonesia not being Dutch-speaking. Some colonies get over things better than others.
The Dutch in the Medway
1664-72
If wars were won by feasting,
0r victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so.
They’re only got by sword and shot,
And this the Dutchmen know!
The moneys that should feed us
You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow -
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
No oakum can be found;
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Mere powder, guns, and bullets,
We scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends -
And this the Dutchmen know!
No King will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims -
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter’s topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
-Kipling
What does it say?
I was conceived in Indonesia in 1949.
I guess I was mistaken in my understanding of the success of English privateering.
But even if they didn’t seize that much gold, didn’t early English efforts in N. America and the Caribbean at least reflect a desire/intention to do so?
Well, certainly. It was partly the threat of English and Dutch piracy that forced the creation of the convoy system in the first place. Nor should it be said that English privateeering was unsuccessful, per se. There were numerous small successes - for the most they engaged in smuggling, trade ( sometimes at gunpoint ) with small communities, and the raiding of small vessels and coastal communities. They had the occasional big success.
One ( and only one ) “Spanish treasure fleet” was captured substantially intact ( minus three vessels ) in 1628, by the Dutch commander Piet Heyn. Robert Blake destroyed another. Henry Morgan took three galleons carrying silver in 1669 that had been diverted from Cartagena to Maracaibo to intercept his buccaneers. A few Manila galleons were lost to pirates as well. Etc. Not to mention more than a few ships lost as wrecks.
But by and large the Spanish convoy system was remarkably effective and the great bulk of the mineral wealth extracted from the Americas wasn’t lost to raiders. Skimmed by corrupt agents, smuggled by the same, illegaly used to buy foreign goods - the system constantly leaked silver. But big pirate scores were rare.
It was more reflective of a general desire to, for want of another phrase, “fuck up other people’s shit” than anything else.
Don’t forget that at the time those kinds of raids were being performed, England was far from being the worlds foremost naval power.
Spain was the big global power at the time, England was the arrogant and annoying upstart power that pretty much everyone else in Europe wanted to put down (not least because they had opted to go Protestant).
No one genuinely believed that England could take on Spain in a straight fight, including the English Navy, who decided to get creative. “Assymetrical Warfare” may only have existed as a named theory since the Cold War, but the underlying concept has always been true. You win wars - or at least don’t lose them - by playing to your strengths and nullifying those of your opponents. If you’re strengths can be used to amplify their weaknesses then so much the better.
Broadly speaking, the strengths/weaknesses of both sides were:
Spain
They had…
- Huge fleet
- Experienced army (many of which were, at various points, sitting in the Netherlands making googly eyes at England)
- The Gold required to support those fleets/keep the Spanish economy pumping
- The rest of Europe is pretty much Spain’s bitch.
but…
- They had colonies to protect
- Those colonies were the source of the Gold
England
They had…
- An incredibly talented and brave bunch of Sea Captains and Commanders.
- Fast, modern, well designed ships
but…
- Broke as a joke
- Vastly outnumbered by the Spanish Fleet
- Vastly inexperienced and outnumbered against the Spanish Armies.
- Philip is pretty convinced that the crown of England is his by right, and has pointed this out very clearly to the rest of Europe who are in no mood to argue.
What happened next?
Spain took one look at those strengths/weaknesses and said:
“In a traditional war England is fucked! Lets go to War!”
And started building more ships and making plans to get the army into England.
Unfortunately for the Spanish, England also took one look at those strenghs/weaknesses and said:
"In a traditional war we’re fucked! Lets go to War!
And promptly set about waging war on their own terms.
They knew their strengths were in the skill of their commanders and their individual ships/fleets and, rather handily, those strengths turned out to be rather good at attacking Spain’s biggest weakness - its reliance on gold from (and it’s need to protect) its colonies.
Attack the colonies with the quick, well commanded ships and you tie down whole swathes of Spain’s forces so they can’t move in strength against the Motherland.
Even better - attack the Gold (and trade) fleets, and even if you don’t sink or capture them, they get delayed and Spain has to commit even more forces to defending them.
No Gold means no wealth, no wealth means no ships, no ships means… well you get the idea. 
Keep that all going for a couple of years and eventually you get the Armada(s) and the sweeping English victories against them. Which i won’t go into here because this is a thread about Holland and i’ve already hijacked it enough.
Basically if the whole thing was taking place now, England would be using road-side bombs set off by mobile phones and driving trucks full of explosives into oil depots. Further proof, if it was required, that one man’s terrorist (or pirate) is another mans freedom-fighter and that, as Obi Wan told us:
“…Many things in life rely on a certain point of view.” 
DISCLAIMER: this post is full of sweeping statements, generalisations, and the odd bit of failed comedy. It should be used only to make you look clever in pub arguments and not for serious academic study. Please remember that the value of your opinion of this post may go down as well as up, depending on any additional reading that you do, and which i highly encourage you to undertake.
It says the Indonesians hated the Dutch so much that the first thing they did after booting them out was to ditch their language as well. Even India- who were rather glad to the see the British go, to put it mildy- still retained English as an Official Language (and are now very glad they did, no doubt!). Yet almost none of the Indonesians speak Dutch; despite the fact the country was a Dutch colony for 450 years or so.
I agree with MrDibble that you’re reading too much into that.
It’s too simplistic to state that the reason no Dutch is spoken is because we were so hated.
A. One other factor is that just because the Dutch were not as oppressively colonising as the British. Dutch was never spoken to such an extent as English in British colonies.
B. Quite a few (Dutch speaking) Indonesians moved to Holland after independance.
C. You can still find older people in Indonesia that do still understand Dutch.
D. You may be overestimating how many Indians speak english.
E. That the more educated do speak english has more to do with the fact that english is the World Language, not that the British were more loved.
Allmost all Dutch speak english, to some extent. ‘What does that say?’
No small number of Dutch speak german. ‘Does that say we loved being occupied in WWII?’
My father and mother, (both who’ve passed away) worked in Indonesia after the war up till 1950. They told me that a difference between the English and the Dutch wrt to their colonies was that the Dutch learned the native language while the English imposed theirs. How much truth there is to that, I can’t say.
When I was in Holland in 1975, I noticed a lot of Indonesian restaurants. When I worked in England that same year, I never saw any ethnic restaurants. My take on that observation is that the Dutch were more respectful of indigenous culture.
I’d love to know where you went, that you didn’t see any Chinese or Indian restaurants - we’ve had those for many years. They’re extremely prevalent now, but they were far from unknown thirty years ago.
All cuisine was pretty uninventive/limited in England at that time - especially outside the big cities. It’s more representative of that than anything else.
These days, it’s pretty much completely accepted that the humble Curry (specifically the Chicken Tikka Massala) is England’s national dish.
Continuing the Dutch/Indonesian hijack slightly:
A first hand acount of a (dutch) girl growing up in the Dutch East Indies
I don’t want to come over as an apologist for our colonial period but yes, from what I gathered, Dutch were quite willing to learn to speak malay.
Household staff was usually adressed in malay f.i.
Wrt english food, it wasn’t until well into the eighties that one could surive in England for more than a couple of days without absolutely craving for a decent meal. Something that tasted of something.
The only thing that was palatable was fish and chips. Rolled up in a dirty newspaper. At least the fries were all right, if you were quick enough to stop
them from being ruined with vinaigre.
Spoken by a man from a country of whom the Belgians say “What’s ten metres long and smells of shellfish?” 
(A coachload of Dutchmen. To which the Dutch retort “What’s ten metres long and smells of chips?”)
Anecdotally, Englishmen in India took pride in their ability to speak the local language, though it may have been ill-justified (there are many examples in Kipling’s Indian poems and stories of this), and we picked up the odd word of Malay and Chinese while I was in Singapore, though it’s atrophied with forty years of non-use… as well as a taste for Chinese food that hasn’t.
I find it interesting that Holland (the Netherlands) went through a period of empire building, world-power status, and then eclipse so quickly. As was pointed out, the Dutch were not big on clonization-why they neglected New York/New Amsterdam is a mystery-a permanent colony in N. America would have been very valuable to them. Of course, the Dutch had a large merchant marine, which allowed them to stay on top by trading. I wonder what would have happened if the Dutch had beaten the British?
At least this permitted Dutch anatomist and physician Eugene DuBois to discover the original Pithecanthropus. 
William of Orange didn’t in real terms invade Britain,he was actually invited in to replace James the third as I recall who was displaying extreme Catholic tendencies at the time.
Before we get all the present day Catholics beating their breasts in indignation at this religous intolerance in those days religion was more about politics then any deistic beliefs.
The Popes weilded political power and were elected on power bases rather then ideological grounds.
It was very similar to the cold war of recent times except that it was quite hot in many parts of the world.
Having the ruler of one of the major Protestant nations in the struggle being a Catholic in all but name was similar to the POTUS being a communist during the recent cold war.
We may well have a Monarch as head of state but if we believe that they dont represent the interests of our country then we can get rid of them and have done so.
Several times.
The British didn’t in real terms lose Manhatten,some Brits became independant of other Brits.
The War of Independance was fought by Brits against Brits.
As to colonising other countries it is true that Britain made a determined effort to colonise N.America.
But incredibly much of the British Empire became so by accident.
Usually it was a case of trade and the locals for what ever reason stirred up trouble that disrupted the trade,heaven forfend that being non Europeans they had any venal motives in mind,and most certainly were not trying to get the local rulers more squeeze out of the British.
But the Brits being Fascist bastards put down the bad guys for stability and then ended up running the places.
BUT and its a big but I believe that some of the conflicts were deliberately engineered by British Christians in their desire to bring Christianity to the poor unfortunate “Heathens”
General Gordon at Khartoum springs to mind.