The Dutch diaspora consists of the Dutch and their descendants living outside the Netherlands.
Emigration from the Netherlands has been occurring for since at least the 17th century, and may be traced back to the international presence of the Dutch Empire and its monopoly on mercantile shipping in many parts of the world.
Dutch people settled permanently in a number of former Dutch colonies or trading enclaves abroad, namely the Dutch Caribbean, the Dutch Cape Colony, the Dutch East Indies, Surinam, and New Netherland. Since the end of the Second World War, the largest proportion of Dutch emigrants have moved to Anglophone countries, namely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, mainly seeking better employment opportunities and incentives from the Dutch government due to fear of overpopulation. In total, one third of Dutch citizens emigrated to other countries between 1948 and 1992. Postwar emigration from the Netherlands peaked between 1948 and 1963, with occasional spikes in the 1980s and the mid-2000s. Cross-border migration to Belgium and Germany has become more common since 2001, driven by the rising cost of housing in major Dutch cities.
History The first big wave of Dutch immigrants to leave the Low Countries were from present day Northern Belgium as they wanted to escape the heavily urbanised cities in West Flanders. They arrived in Brandenburg in 1157. Due to this, the area is known as "Fläming" (Fleming) in reference to the Duchy that these immigrants came from. Because of a number of devastating floods in the provinces of Zeeland and Holland in the 12th century, large numbers of farmers migrated to The Wash in England, the delta of the Gironde in France, around Bremen, Hamburg and western North Rhine-Westphalia.Dutch immigration to Germany. (Dutch) Until the late 16th century, many Dutchmen and women (invited by the German margrave) moved to the delta of the Elbe, around Berlin, where they dried swamps, canalized rivers and built numerous dikes. Today, the Berlin dialect still bears some Dutch features.Onbekende Buren, by Dik Linthout, page 102/103.
The town of Nymburk in the Kingdom of Bohemia was settled by Dutch colonists during the medieval eastward migration in the 13th century.
Overseas emigration of the Dutch started around the 16th century, beginning a Dutch colonial empire. The first Dutch settlers arrived in the New World in 1614 and built a number of settlements around the mouth of the Hudson River, establishing the colony of New Netherland, with its capital at New Amsterdam (the future world metropolis of New York City). Dutch explorers also discovered Australia and New Zealand in 1606, though they did not settle the new lands; and Dutch immigration to these countries did not begin until after the Second World War. The Dutch were also one of the few Europeans to successfully settle Africa prior to the late 19th century.
List of countries by population of Dutch heritage
Region of the world Population % of country Citation Dutch in North America 4,195,000 Dutch Canadians 3.23% Dutch Americans Partial and full: Full: 0.93% Dutch in the Caribbean 19,316 Dutch Curaçaoans 14,000 9% Dutch Arubans 4,300 (full) 4.3% Dutch Sint Maarteners 1,016 2.2% Dutch in South America 1,600,000 Dutch Argentines 400,000 1% Dutch Chileans 150,000 1% Dutch in Europe 1,627,000 Dutch British 0.06% Dutch people in Finland 2,000 0.04% Dutch people in France Dutch ancestry: 1,000,000Born in the Netherlands: 60,000 1.5% Dutch people in Germany 350,000 0.4% Dutch people in Belgium 1% Dutch people in Spain <1% Dutch people in Scandinavia 53,000 Dutch people in Portugal 12,066 0.12% Dutch in Asia 95,000 Dutch Indonesians 55,000 0.06% Dutch Burghers 40,000 0.3% Dutch in Oceania 482,000 Dutch Australians 1.5% Dutch New Zealanders 100,000 2% Dutch in Africa 7,300,000 Baster 50,000 2.5% Coloured Coloured population. Afrikaners 5.4% Afrikaner population. Total in Diaspora ~14,717,000 Dutch people % Total Worldwide ~33,000,000
Modern emigration statistics +Main destination countries of Dutch-born emigrants in 2020Ethnically DutchSecond generation immigrant DutchBelgium3,4032,071Germany3,2441,225Spain2,187571United Kingdom1,5311,093United States1,657541France1,203359Australia1,256226Curaçao805308Turkey -1,031Poland -937Sweden683 -Portugal631 -
Distribution
Africa
South Africa
The Cape of Good Hope was first settled by Europeans under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials VOC), which established a victualing station there in 1652 to provide its outward bound fleets with fresh provisions and a harbour of refuge during the long sea journey from Europe to Asia. Since the primary purpose of the Cape settlement at the time was to stock provisions for passing Dutch ships, the VOC offered grants of farmland to its employees under the condition they would cultivate grain for company warehouses, and released them from their contracts to save on their wages. Prospective employees had to be married Dutch citizens, considered "of good character" by the company, and had to commit to spending at least twenty years on the African continent. They were issued with a letter of freedom, known as a "vrijbrief", which released them from company service, and received farms of thirteen and a half morgen each. However, the new farmers were also subject to heavy restrictions: they were ordered to focus on cultivating grain, and each year their harvest was to be sold exclusively to Dutch officials at fixed prices. They were forbidden from growing tobacco, producing vegetables for any purpose other than personal consumption, or purchasing cattle from the native tribes at rates which differed from those set by the company. With time, these restrictions and other attempts by the colonial authorities to control the European population resulted in successive generations of settlers and their descendants becoming increasingly localised in their loyalties and national identity and hostile towards the colonial government.
Relatively few Dutch women accompanied the first Dutch settlers to the Cape of Good Hope, and one natural consequence of the unbalanced gender ratio was that between 1652 and 1672 some 75% of children born to slaves in the colony had Dutch fathers. The majority of slaves had been imported from the East Indies (Indonesia), India, Madagascar, and parts of eastern Africa. This resulted in the formation of a new ethnic group, the Cape Coloureds, most of whom adopted the Dutch language and were instrumental in shaping it into a new regional dialect, Afrikaans.
In 1691, there were at least 660 Dutch people living at the Cape of Good Hope.Entry: Cape Colony. Encyclopædia Britannica Volume 4 Part 2: Brain to Casting. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1933. James Louis Garvin, editor. This had increased to about 13,000 by the end of Dutch rule, or one half of the Cape's European population.Colenbrander, Herman. De Afkomst Der Boeren (1902). Kessinger Publishing 2010. . The remaining Europeans settled during the Dutch colonial era were Germans or French Huguenots, reflecting the multi-national nature of the VOC workforce and its settlements. Thereafter the number of people of Dutch ancestry at the Cape became difficult to estimate, due in part to the almost universal adoption of the Dutch language and the Dutch Reformed Church by those of German or French origin, as well as a significant degree of intermarriage. Since the late nineteenth century, the term Afrikaner has been evoked to describe white South Africans descended from the Cape's original Dutch-speaking settlers, regardless of ethnic heritage.S. W. Martin, Faith Negotiating Loyalties: An Exploration of South African Christianity Through a Reading of the Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr (University Press of America, 2008), , pp. 53-54.
The colony was captured by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, as the Dutch Republic was transformed by France into the Batavian Republic which subsequently declared war on Britain. Following the end of the conflict, the Cape was formally ceded to Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1815.
Many of the Afrikaner community soon grew disillusioned with British rule, in particular the imposition of an Anglophone common law system and the abolition of slavery in the Cape, which was a major source of income for many Afrikaners. One such Afrikaner was Christoffel Brand, son of a former senior VOC official, who became the first Speaker of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope. Brand claimed that "England has taken from the old colonists of the Cape everything that was dear to them: their country, their laws, their customs, their slaves, their money, yes even their mother tongue...[the Afrikaners] had done everything to prove that they wanted to be British, while their conquerors had continually worked to remind them they were Hollanders." In 1830, De Zuid-Afrikaan was founded as a Dutch-language newspaper by Brand to provide a mouthpiece for the Cape Dutch upper-class. It was followed shortly afterwards by the establishment of a university where Dutch was the official language and several Afrikaner societies for the arts. This was seen as the beginning of an Afrikaner ethnic consciousness: in 1835 one local Dutch-language newspaper noted the rise of a newfound sentiment that "a colonist of Dutch descent cannot become an Englishman, nor should he strive to be a Hollander".
The most rural section of the Afrikaner community, known as Boers, undertook the Great Trek deep into South Africa's interior and founding their own autonomous Boer republics, the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State. The Boer republics encouraged immigration from the Netherlands, as Dutch migrants were valued for their education and technical skills.
Another wave of Dutch immigration to South Africa occurred in the wake of World War II, when many Dutch citizens were moving abroad to escape housing shortages and depressed economic opportunities at home. South Africa registered a net gain of 45,000 Dutch immigrants between 1950 and 2001.
Asia
Indonesia
In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Dutch heavily interacted with the indigenous population, and as European women were almost non-existent, many Dutchmen married native women. This created a new group of people, the Dutch-Eurasians (Dutch: Indische Nederlanders) also known as 'Indos' or 'Indo-Europeans'. By 1930, there were more than 240,000 Europeans and 'Indo-Europeans' in the colony.Beck, Sanderson, South Asia, 1800–1950 – World Peace Communications (2008) By 1930 more European women had arrived in the colony, and they made up 113,000 out of the 240,000 Europeans. After the Indonesian National Revolution many chose or were forced to leave the country and today about half a million Eurasians live in the Netherlands.
Although there are some who decided to take side with Indonesian, such as Poncke Princen, or joining Indonesian army after full sovereignty handover in 1950 such as Rokus Bernardus Visser.
With the booming of Indonesian economy in the 1970s and 1980s, some Dutch people decided to move to Indonesia, either as an expatriate who work on a temporary basis, or even staying permanently. One of them is Erik Meijer who have distinguished career with Indosat and Garuda Indonesia.
Kazakhstan According to the 1989 census, 126 Dutch people lived in Kazakhstan.
Turkey About 20,000 Dutch live in Turkey, mostly pensioners. The Dutch populated areas are mainly in the Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterranean regions of Turkey.
Turkmenistan According to the 1995 census, 10 Dutch people lived in Turkmenistan.
Caribbean
Most Dutch settlement in the Caribbean occurred on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius.